Visiting Rwanda by Dervla Murphy

Author:Dervla Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Rwanda, travel writing, Tutsi, genocide, Ireland, Dervla Murphy
ISBN: 9781843515050
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2013-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

7. BAD TIMING

KIGALI, 25 JANUARY

Last evening I discovered that François is quite a kindred spirit. He has been familiar with this region all his life – as a child he lived in Bukavu – and his present quest is for ‘facts’ about the killing of those thirty-odd Tutsi near Kibuye. ‘Poor devils! “Survivors” no longer … The militia see the genocide as unfinished business. That’s the inevitable result of no one challenging the culture of impunity.’ François is also investigating the motive(s) for the recent beating-up near Ruhengeri of a team of ex-pat HRFOR monitors. And he is working on a series of articles about an aspect of the genocide which he believes should not be allowed to fade into indecent obscurity – French government support for the organizers. That topic – one of the bees in my own bonnet – monopolized our conversation.

François was a twenty-year-old, working in Kinshasa, when the elected Patrice Lumumba was assassinated and replaced by the unelected Mobutu. ‘A reliable chap,’ said Françoise, ‘happy to co-operate with the West in destabilizing his neighbours, especially Angola.’ then in 1991 several of Mobutu’s Cold War allies, including France, suddenly saw a need for ‘democracy’ in Zaire and ditched the dictator. France decided to back instead Habyarimana & Co. in the FAR versus RPA war. Quai d’Orsay denizens frequently expressed their concern for ‘the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty in the Great Lakes region’. Yet in 1992 and February 1993 700 soldiers of France’s élite Rapid Reaction Force intervened decisively to check RPA advances – advances which, if not impeded, could have stymied the genocide. And in 1993 alone FAR received US$10 million worth of French military aid. (For a minuscule country mainly populated by peasants living in dire poverty!) This ‘aid’ included training the ‘Zero Network’ death-squad led by – among others – Mme Habyarimana’s three brothers. Zero Network’s existence was exposed in October ’92 by two Belgians – Professor Filip Reyntjens and Senator Willy Kuypers – who recognized it as a harbinger of genocide and said so at the time.

When the killing started in Kigali the French Embassy’s Tutsi staff were locked out, left to their fate – certain death. However, the infamous Mme Habyarimana, her children, her equally infamous brother Seraphin Rwabukumba and some forty leaders of the MRND were cherished by the French government, who simultaneously refused political asylum to the five small children of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, one of the earliest victims of the genocide.

In Paris on 27 April 1994, while the killing was at its most frenzied, President Mitterrand, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur and Foreign Minister Alain Juppé officially received two of its organizers, the ‘Foreign Minister’ of the interim government, Jerome Bicamumpaka and the fanatical CDR leader Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza. Meanwhile France was still delivering arms to the genocidal army and continued to do so until June. Also, its Zairean stance was shifting again. On 9 May 1994 Mitterrand’s special counsellor for African affairs, Bruno Delaye, told Gérard Prunier

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