To be honest, it still isn't clear to me what happened in Rwanda
WAR OF WORDS AS RWANDA MARKS GENOCIDE
A bitter war of words has erupted between Rwanda and France just weeks before the central African nation marks the 10th anniversary of the genocide of 800,000 people. Western heads of state are due in the capital, Kigali, next month to commemorate the 100-day slaughter, which was sparked by the assassination of Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, on 6 April 1994. What should be a moment of sombre reflection is, however, being marred by a furious exchange of accusations, centred on a murder mystery that is as central to Rwanda's history as the Kennedy assassination is to that of the United States.Last week the French newspaper Le Monde reported that the current Rwandan leader, Paul Kagame, was responsible for the shooting down of the presidential jet as it approached Kigali airport in 1994. The allegation, based on an as-yet unpublished judicial investigation, contradicts the widely held belief that Hutu extremists carried out the attack to trigger a pre-meditated elimination plan against the Tutsi minority.
President Kagame launched a counter-attack in which he accused French troops of being "directly" involved in the massacres. "They [the French] knew about it. They supported it. They provided weapons, they gave orders and instructions to those who carried out the genocide," he told Radio France International on Tuesday. "They also took part in the operations directly: at checkpoints on roads to identify people according to their ethnic background, by punishing the Tutsis and showing favouritism to the Hutus."
The intrigue was heightened by the sudden "discovery" of a key piece of evidence in a filing cabinet in New York. After denying for years it had the presidential jet's flight recorder, United Nations officials said last week that they had found it. The fiasco is another embarrassment for the UN, which was accusing of standing by in 1994 as extremists butchered Tutsis and moderate Hutus in their homes.
