At Kigali’s Amahoro Stadium during the official ceremony to commemorate the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in April, France was not represented. It should have been, as preparations to send a delegation had been made.

However, Paris decided at the last minute that its official representatives would not be travelling. France’s ambassador to Rwanda also stayed at home.

The trigger for all this was President Paul Kagame’s reference, just before the ceremony was due to be held, to the role France had played before and during the genocide.

The French political establishment reacted with predictable indignation accompanied in some cases by dismissive sneering. It was as if to suggest that whoever thinks that France or the French could have had a hand in the genocide must be out of his or her mind.

President Kagame is not the only person, let alone the first, to accuse France of wrongdoing or complicity in connection with the planning and execution of, and failure to stop, the genocide.

Books, numerous newspaper articles and investigative studies have been published and many testimonies made to that effect.

Where they have not been met with studied silence from Paris, they have elicited sanctimonious denials in which the accusers have sometimes been condemned for damaging France’s honour.

Some in France have made attempts of their own to accuse Rwanda’s ruling party, the Rwanda Patriotic Front and its former military wing, the Rwanda Patriotic Army, of triggering the genocide by shooting down the plane in which former president, Juvenal Habyarimana, died.

The accusations and counter-accusations and France’s seeming handling of resident genocide suspects with velvet gloves, have long dogged Franco-Rwanda relations.

While they have improved somewhat in recent years, large issues remain. Be that as it may, a small number of French citizens have worked hard and pressed their government to take seriously its responsibility to prosecute exiled Rwandans who are accused of participation in planning and executing the genocide.

Others have pushed and continue to push for openness with regard to France’s relationship with Rwanda’s former ruling elite. Progress has been snail-slow at best, elusive at worst.

And now new actors, whose members and collective efforts may not be so easy to dismiss, have joined the fight for openness and action in France. They are the European Grassroots Antiracist Movement (Egam).

Founded in 2010 by Frenchman Benjamin Abtan, Egam is an umbrella body for antiracist and human-rights organisations in over 30 European countries.

Their business is to fight racism, anti-Semitism, racial discrimination and genocide denial. Last week, a 20-member delegation of their activists, led by Abtan himself and including members of youth wings of French political parties and of student unions, descended on Rwanda.

They sought to link up with genocide survivors, visit genocide memorials, and generally deepen their understanding of what happened in Rwanda in 1994 and the role of the Mitterand-led French government.

Collaboration

Before heading to Rwanda, French activists denounced their government’s longstanding silence on the issue and appealed for recognition of its responsibility.

Based on information already in the public domain, they accused certain high-ranking French officials of “deep collaboration” with the Habyarimana government and its short-lived immediate successor that the RPF eventually defeated.

In “Tutsi Genocide: Now is time for the truth,” an assertive statement they issued ahead of their trip, Egam repeat accusations made by other observers, emphasising how “this crime is part of our country’s history.”

They then round on specific politicians: “For the past 20 years, these politicians, in an attempt to save their honour, have refused to answer for their actions and kept trying to obstruct the bursting [sic]of the truth by denying France’s involvement, which often tends to sound like denial speech.

Their despicable defence aims at dragging France down with them in order to hide their responsibility behind our country’s innocence. The search for truth is a requirement, lifting the veil is an imperative.

We demand that those who endorsed this criminal policy come forward and answer with facts and precision the questions that need to be answered about Paris’s involvement.

What is at stake is our relation to Africa. It is our capacity to confront history. It is our fundamental democratic values. What is at stake is the honour of our country.”

This development comes shortly before Rwanda marks the 20th liberation anniversary on July 4 the day Kigali fell to the Rwanda Patriotic Front, marking the beginning of the end of the genocide.

It remains to be seen whether France will be represented at the official event. But even more importantly, it remains to be seen what impact Egam will have on one very important aspect of this saga: Bringing to book French military and civilian officials, who have been named as having presided over and directed France’s highly contested role in Rwanda shortly before and during the organised campaign to eliminate an entire section of its population.

Rwandan genocidaires have been prosecuted and jailed and are still being pursued across the world. Will their alleged French accomplices ever be brought to book in or outside France?

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]