The Diplomat in Spain

Pedro González

Journalist

Paul Kagame, the man who has ruled Rwanda with an iron fist since he himself stopped the bloodbath that devastated his country in 1994, is not willing to be lectured by the international community and accused of being the main instigator and supporter of the March 23 Movement, the guerrilla movement that holds the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in check.

Kagame took advantage of the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the beginning of the genocide against the Tutsis to settle scores with the international community, especially France, which watched impassively as the Hutus hacked to death more than 800,000 Rwandans with machetes and left at least 200,000 others amputated.

The Rwandan president was not satisfied with the step taken by French President Emmanuel Macron, who a few days before the sad anniversary acknowledged that “France could have stopped the genocide with its Western and African allies, but lacked the will to do so”. Kagame would have wanted Macron to be the first incumbent French president to attend the commemoration of the massacre in thirty years, and not to send only his Foreign Minister, Stéphene Sejourné, to the ceremony to light the flame of the Gisozi Memorial, where the remains of a quarter of a million victims of the genocide lie.

In Paris, by contrast, Macron is seen as having gone far enough, and this year’s declaration complements the one he himself made in 2021, when he acknowledged “the incontestable responsibility [of France] in the machinery that led to the worst”.

The phrase served to bring Paris and Kigali to an end to their mutual diplomatic crisis, and for analysts and political scientists to compare Macron’s gesture to that of Jacques Chirac in 1995, when he acknowledged France’s responsibility for the capture and deportation of Jews in 1942, known as “la Rafle du Vel’d’Hiv”, a responsibility that François Mitterrand always denied during his fourteen years in office at the Elysée Palace.

On this anniversary, Paul Kagame has claimed responsibility not only as the leader who stopped the massacre, at the head of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), but also for the flight and persecution of those who masterminded and carried out the genocide.

Those who fled took refuge in the eastern part of the DRC, from where they continued to launch continuous attacks against Rwanda. This gigantic exodus led to destabilisation and a permanent challenge to the Kinshasa government, once again revived by the rebels of the March 23 Movement.

Without denying his aid to the Congolese insurgents, the Rwandan leader maintains that the perpetrators of the genocide still remain in the DRC, and that he will not allow them or those who support them to commit their crimes again. Kagame has not hesitated to point the finger at the international community, pre-emptively accusing it of “indifference” to Rwanda’s “right to defend itself”, assuming that the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), made up of old Hutu leaders and some of their young descendants, will not give up on invading the country. “The genocidal forces have carried out hundreds of attacks [against Rwanda] in the last five years, and the fact that they have not been dismantled is purely and simply because they serve unspeakable interests,” Kagame said.

The fighting between the Congolese army and the rebels is currently in one of its fiercest phases. Kigali brazenly supports the rebels under the pretext that the March 23 Movement enjoys the support of Rwandan “genocidaires”, who were able to escape international criminal justice and were even granted refugee status. It was precisely at the end of that tragic 1994 that the Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was created, but France, where some of the alleged genocidaires found a home, did not begin to try them until 2014. Since then, only twenty accused have sat in the dock, at a rate of two per year.

The geopolitical consequence is that much of the Great Lakes region has become the world’s largest refugee camp, and the media has stopped counting the dead and wounded caused by the fighting, as well as all kinds of abuses and human rights violations, in a conflict to which the international community pays scant attention despite its scale.

At the age of 66, Paul Kagame will run for a fourth term in office in the presidential elections next July. He has been in power in Rwanda for 30 years and has no candidates likely to unseat him. Visitors to the country note that Rwanda, and especially its capital, showcases the splendour of a buoyant economy in which many large projects flourish. A showcase that has dampened voices abroad accusing him of being a ruthless dictator.

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