This article is a translated version of a series of chronicles written by David Gakunzi, a French national, on France’s role in the Genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwanda, published in La Règle du jeu: 

Rwanda. France-Rwanda. France-Rwanda 1994. Let’s not talk about it … shall we? That was yesterday, the past, the distant past; so let’s get over it and move on. We know that there’s no way to get over it because even as the years pass, the truth will always return to haunt our collective memories with an insistent voice that demands to be listened to and heard.

So why not dare to say what needs to be said: about Rwanda and dig out all the history from our memory? Say it out and not remain silent. Say it to disturb the silent, even if it means unsettling them, moving them out of their comfort zones, provoking their bursts of animosity, anger and fury. Say it because silence is always an accomplice of crime; say it because silence erodes, damages, wrecks, demolishes, shatters... Say it loud by looking Rwanda’s past in the face again and again so that we can invent a future different from our past. Say it.

Rwanda; France-Rwanda, nineteen hundred and ninety-four. 1994, that annus horribilis when the unspeakable was wrought or came to pass. What, if anything, will remain of our presence there that year but the ominously dark shadow we cast? Beneath all the expert reports carried by the newspapers of that time, reading between the lines of diplomatic dispatches, intelligence briefings…lie lots and lots of things. Things unavowed and shameful. At their core, the archives show truths that some of us would rather not hear, at all, of that year in that far country of a thousand hills where the seeds of organised and orchestrated hate shrieked, howled and massacred as demonised humans spilt the blood of fellow humans and we, our values trampled in the dust, watched those days of slaughter, skirting the line of fire, in troubled disavowal of ourselves, on the side of the machete-wielding throng. 

The archives. The archives will show that not ever since then have we possessed our souls like before then there: already in 1990, came Operation Noroît, followed by those military assistance and training detachments (DAMI panda, DAMI gendarmerie, DAMI presidential guard and all those shadowy forms of training for civilian self-defence, military intelligence gathering, phone tapping, raids, weapon deliveries, strategic consultations, tactical support, combat missions)…our lame excuse being to send a measured, then distinct and deterring signal, as the jargon went, in lamentable propaganda to justify the unthinkable, the inconceivable. Did we, in our spurious, obstinate and heartless ambition lose our noble minds?

The archives will show that neither facts nor memory can be silenced. Nor can history be distorted or twisted and whitewashed, because that year when it all happened, we were far from the fighting and chose, under Operation Turquoise, to parade in the uniform of world opinion riding to the rescue of widows and orphans…

So to go on with pontificating in the name of our dear France will not emblazon for us, in the annals of history, any laurels of glory and greatness. Instead, it will drag our name down to the abyss of human memory where naught but shame will be our lot. 

The archives. The archives will show, wherever we go, Rwanda hanging on our shoulders with a leaden weight of weapons trafficking, mercenary incursions, and a myriad complicities and collusions sticking incontrovertibly in our craw. So we might as well contemplate the ruins of our moral and policy failures. No use looking the other way and stubbornly refusing to admit the obvious. The archives expose the inconvenient truth that our kith and kin, businessmen, wannabe experts whose miserable power play calculations reveal them for the undercover hatchet men they are and whose influence in high places as the powers in charge of our national destiny, took it upon themselves that year, in the build-up to the apocalyptic endgame, never mind being good kinsmen in every other respect, to etch out the very opposite of our oft universally trumpeted virtues of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Human Rights. 

Since then, seared as their moral conscience has become from awakening to their past misdeeds, retracting and yielding to the convicting voices of survivors, they have flipped over, desperately clutching on to the time-worn glacial fortress of France’s honour as an exit strategy. How bizarre and weird can a concept of national honour get if honour (and high honour at that) means to go the way of people who would, with equal zeal, hunt down and wipe off the face of the earth both young and old whose only crime is to have been born!

The archives. The archives proclaim to high heaven that what was wrought there in our name, the dear name of fair France was, far from honouring us, to our dishonour. Time now to take a hard look at our past and to own up again and again that Rwanda was our downfall.

The archives say it; witnesses say it. Let truth be told and repeated over and over. Lest we forget, lest we ever again repeat the past. Saying it like it was, is doing justice.