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France's view towards the Rwandan genocide and the troops it had in 1994 first as advisers and then as peacekeepers has evolved under Emmanuel Macron. This Tuesday the consecration of a new memorial on the banks of the Seine in the heart of Paris, a memorial commemorating the hundreds of thousands killed during those 100 days. This is a live images you're seeing of Rwanda's president Paul Kagame speaking. The monument dubbed the archive designed by Berlin-based Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba. It also has a space in between a vacuum, an emptiness. It seems like a passage to the other side, but it also can look like an emptiness, like a space where
something is missing, where a million people are missing and not there. And this emptiness can also represent the silence of the international community. Well, for more, let's cross now to Brussels historic It's time for our spotlight segment. And we're in the company of historian Juliet Bou author of the forthcoming book in French like men women politicians who are genocidaires in Rwanda. Thank you for being with us here on France 24. Hello, thank you for receiving me. The this consecration of a monument in the heart of Paris by the banks of the Seine. It's It's quite the evolution when you think of a few years back France
denying any responsibility whatsoever for what happened in 1994. Now, the French state doesn't say it was complicit in the genocide, but the Duclair report by historians uh putting forth that there were responsibilities, a report ordered by the president, Emmanuel Macron, who you saw attending uh that ceremony. Let me begin with a kind of a personal question. How have you seen those attitudes evolve just in the time you've been researching the topic? Um I think so I do a lot of fieldwork in Rwanda and uh personally I never faced any um problem with the fact that I was French uh in um in the way of conducting my research. But uh it's uh sure that for us researcher it's uh
good thing that French recognized uh its role uh because um we were face facing a lot of denial, denial of the role of France, denial of the genocide in itself. And now after the Duclair commission, uh the opening of the archives in France, we have uh set a truth about what happened in Rwanda and the role of France. And so this ceremony today, it's kind of the consecration of uh of many years, but can that be rolled back because there are people uh in France who don't agree with what the commission put out and would and deny any responsibility on the part of the French? Yeah, there's there's still people that are denying the role of France, uh especially people who were in power in 1994. So we were allies uh of
uh the Habyarimana regime before the genocide. And uh people who are uh also nationalist that don't want uh the bad decision made by France to be uh put into light. And uh of course uh, some people that are themselves, uh, involved in the massacres and, uh, for some of them that are still living, uh, in France and, uh, scared also to face some trial. It, uh, it was a former Belgian colony, Rwanda, but, uh, it was, uh, the French who were present as military advisers when, uh, Paul Kagame's, uh, rebels, uh, took over it after those 100 days in 1994. The French had set up this, uh, this area that was, uh, that was, uh, supposed to be a humanitarian zone. It's been contested. We won't go into all the
details of it, but how do the French deal with that episode? How do you compare it? You're sitting in Brussels with the way the Belgians deal with it. So, here's the main difference between the attitude of, uh, Belgium and, uh, France is that, uh, Belgium asked, uh, for forgiveness, uh, in the early, uh, 2000s and so recognized, uh, its own role, especially in, uh, recognizing how, uh, during the colonial era, uh, Belgian, uh, administration did separate, uh, separate the, uh, Rwandan people into ethnic groups. Um, and, uh, so, this, uh, separation that led, uh, to the genocide in 1994. Um, in France, of course, the attitude was really different and, uh, even if the French France was not the colonizer of Rwanda, uh, the country was a close ally of the
Rwandan regime, uh, led by, uh, Juvenal Habyarimana. Uh, France provided not only military support, but also economic, diplomatic and, uh, supported, uh, the government, uh, even, uh, despite all of the alerts that, uh, were raised, uh, in the years before, uh, prior to the genocide, because France, uh, knows, and we know that thanks to the nuclear commission that there were massacres targeting the country and that some diplomatic staff, military staff did raise the alarm in addition to the NGO people or journalists that were asking France to stop its support to Rwanda um before 1994. Now uh evidence in 2026 is still coming to light over uh what happened. Case in point is a letter last month uh that was
a uh brought to light concern considering concerning the widow of uh the uh for president who died at the outset of that uh genocide, Juvenal Habyarimana that we just mentioned. Agathe Habyarimana who lives in France um crimes against humanity, there's no statute of limitation. What do you foresee when it comes to uh the case against her? So yeah, the only fact that Agathe Habyarimana is now living in France is also something that is um reproached to France during the genocide because France uh did refuse uh to exfiltrate uh the Tutsi people that were working from for the French embassy or the French cultural center but did ex- exfiltrate some people that were very close to the
Rwandan extremists and uh especially Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana that uh left Rwanda on the 9th of April. And uh since um after a few years in exile, she's now living in France and uh um like last year um Sorry, she has a file um raised against her a few years like in like 17 years ago, but last year the court uh in France did say that the case has to be dismissed and that she was also a victim because of the attack against her husband on the 7th on the 6th of April. But happily like a few weeks ago the court did uh say that the case won't be dismissed and because of this new archive that we found that you mentioned especially this letter between her uh Paul Barril and her. So just one quick final question. The whether it's
I got to ask other instrumental people in the genocide. They lived for years in France with total impunity. Uh they had impunity until they didn't. Is that just because of time passing? And that now people are looking with a clearer head at what happened? So I think it's was also a political question because in this denial the choice was also made to not found this special judicial unit that is um like investigating perpetrators yes investigating these perpetrators that are living in France. Uh and it's only since 2014 that they raised a special unit and since then there were eight trials in France and so people are now uh being put into trial and being condemned. And yeah so this slowness was also a political decision because the first
complaint about them were mostly raised just after the genocide like in 1995 1996. And for years for some of them went unpunished. Juliette Boulet so many thanks for joining us from Brussels. Thank you so much. Stay with us. There's more to come. More news plus the day's business. And in sports, we'll go over to French Open for the latest on the quarterfinals there.
