At the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) Political Bureau meeting on July 17, President Paul Kagame opened his remarks with a personal experience from Paris that illustrates the deeper complexities of international politics today.
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Kagame described an incident where French authorities detained him despite his having been officially invited to participate in peace talks with the Rwandan government of the time.
He recalled that upon his arrival, Paul Dijoud, a senior official at the French Foreign Ministry, and Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, son of then-President François Mitterrand and head of the Élysée&039;s Africa cell, welcomed him.
Instead of opening peace negotiations, Dijoud delivered a warning. He told Kagame to stop fighting and cautioned that if the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) reached Kigali, it would find no "Tutsi" left there. Hours later, before dawn, armed men entered Kagame's hotel room, detained him and two aides, and took them to a detention facility in Paris, where they remained until that evening.
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Dijoud and his colleagues underestimated the resolve of these RPA fighters and ultimately released them. They returned to Rwanda to continue the liberation struggle.
This episode demonstrates how far Paris was prepared to go to slow RPA's advance. Rather than pursuing genuine peace, these so-called negotiations revealed Paris' real objective: to stall the RPA and give the genocidal regime a free hand to eliminate the Tutsi.
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The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi was planned in Western capitals to exterminate the entire Tutsi population, first in Rwanda and later across the region, sparing no one, not even the unborn.
When President Juvenal Habyarimana saw the RPA advancing, he turned to his ally, President Mitterrand, for help. This led to a deceptive strategy: a staged peace process that served only as cover for issuing direct orders against the young RPA fighters.
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Despite constant orders, intimidation, and threats, RPA liberated Rwanda and ended a century-long plot to exterminate the Tutsi.
In my July 9 article, I argued that Richard Kandt's hostility toward the Tutsi – his belief that "destroying Watutsi power" was the only path to regional prosperity -continues to shape Western policy today. The names and methods have changed, but the underlying objective has not.
U.S. policy in DR Congo centers on controlling valuable mineral resources, which requires neutralizing the AFC/M23 rebellion. To disguise this agenda, the United States uses the UN Security Council to impose token sanctions on minor FDLR figures while shielding the Congolese state military, FARDC, from any meaningful consequences.
This explains why the Washington Accord, which initially promised a comprehensive approach to regional peace, gradually narrowed its focus to target only AFC/M23, viewed as Tutsi and therefore Rwandan – a strategy reminiscent of Jean de La Fontaine's The Wolf and the Lamb and Alphonse Daudet's Monsieur Seguin's Goat.
Even as the West's geopolitical bias becomes increasingly evident, Western actors tell Rwanda to remain silent while the Tutsi are exterminated in DR Congo. The mask has come off. For them, peace in eastern DR Congo means the destruction of the Tutsi, whom they regard as an obstacle to Congolese mineral wealth.
Do not be fooled. Portraying the Tutsi as a barrier to DR Congo's mining wealth is merely a cover for a deeper regional hostility.
Western powers should understand that the Tutsi will not accept the fate of Blanquette, Monsieur Seguin's seventh goat. The Tutsi possess an inalienable right to life and existence, and no agreement written in Washington or Paris can erase that right.
How can the descendants of those who fought the British Crown over unjust taxation fail to understand people fighting for their own survival? Have they forgotten George Washington's core principles?
The writer is a media specialist, historian, and playwright.