France's Belated Mea Culpa on Rwanda

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Time Magazine

France's Belated Mea Culpa on Rwanda
By Bruce Crumley / Paris Friday, Feb. 26, 2010

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda claimed over 800,000 lives, sparked years of violent unrest in central Africa and poisoned French-Rwandan relations so severely that Kigali suspended diplomatic ties with Paris in 2006 and replaced French with English in Rwandan schools. So when French President Nicolas Sarkozy came into power in 2007, he made repairing relations with Rwanda — and clearing up the lingering suspicions and accusations surrounding the genocide — a major foreign policy priority. During his visit to Rwanda this past week, he appeared to turn a page in the countries' relations by acknowledging that France had committed "grave errors of judgment" in responding to the Hutu slaughter of minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

"What happened here obliges the international community — including France — to reflect on the errors which prevented us from foreseeing, or stopping, this appalling crime," Sarkozy said Thursday in Kigali, marking a break with France's unwavering position that it had acted rapidly to halt the massacre. "Errors of appreciation, political errors were committed here which had absolutely tragic consequences. What happened here is a defeat for humanity."

Other Western leaders have previously admitted that their countries failed to adequately respond to the genocide, most notably former U.S. President Bill Clinton's solemn apology in 1998. So why was Sarkozy's relatively mild mea culpa so significant — especially when it stopped short of an actual act of contrition?

First, it showed just how far Sarkozy was prepared to go to "construct a new relation of confidence" with Rwanda by breaking with France's past position of irreproachability in the slaughter. Until now, the official French line has been that Paris reacted quickly to the crisis by leading a U.N.-sanctioned peacekeeping mission called "Operation Turquoise" to halt the killings. France has also flatly refuted claims by Tutsi militia leaders who took power in Rwanda after the genocide — and still form the basis of the current government — that French forces serving as advisers in the country in the early 1990s actually assisted the then-ruling Hutus in the massacre.

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[Blue_Tires]

1. Belgium probably owes an overdue mea culpa, too

[JustAnotherGen]

2. Amen to that

A very long over due one for setting up the racial classifications in the first place.