PrintAugust 6, 2008
Rwanda to France: This Ain't Over
The BBC reports that "Rwanda has accused France of playing an active role in the genocide of 1994, in which about 800,000 people were killed." [Emphasis added.]
"An independent Rwandan commission said France was aware of preparations for the genocide and helped train the ethnic Hutu militia perpetrators. The report also accused French troops of direct involvement in the killings. It named 33 senior French military and political figures that it said should be prosecuted... Among those named in the report were the late former President, Francois Mitterrand, and the then Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. Two men who went on to become prime minster were also named - Alain Juppe, the foreign minister at the time, and his then chief aide, Dominique de Villepin." [Emphasis added.]
I summarized much of this three years ago .
When we could have used France's vote in the UN to help us with Iraq , its Defense Minister replied, "We think that political and diplomatic measures and methods are far from exhausted."
Saddam (1) initiated two wars with his neighbors and killed his own countrymen using chemical warfare and nerve gas, to the tune of well over a million dead and hundreds of mass graves; (2) harbored and trained terrorists and paid the families of suicide bombers who killed Israeli civilians; (3) attempted to assassinate former President Bush; (4) shot almost daily at US and British military aircraft on UN-sanctioned missions; (5) ignored and violated 16 or more UN resolutions, including the terms of his own surrender in 1991; and (6) never explained what he did with WMD he was known to have had, and evaded, avoided and kicked out the inspectors who tried to find out. After all that, France still considered the "political and diplomatic measures far from exhausted." [Emphasis added.]
With Rwanda, all it took was one downed airplane, with perpetrator unknown, and, well, I guess those political and diplomatic measures were finally exhausted. "Some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu militias in just 100 days in 1994." And France helped.
Will any of those French politicians suffer the fate of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic? I somehow doubt it.
