In January 1993, before the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi began, Jean Carbonare, a French national, asked France to stop the genocide in Rwanda, but his voice was not heard.
Jean Carbonare came from a mission of the International Federation for Human Rights in Rwanda. In a commission of eight people of different nationalities, he was the only Frenchman, and the most embarrassed.
He gave a moving testimony on France 2, Antenne 2 at the time. The mission was already talking about genocide, a year before the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
“What struck us in Rwanda was the scale of the human rights violations, the systematization, the very organization of these massacres, because people talked about ethnic clashes. But in reality it is much more than ethnic clashes. It’s an organized policy that we’ve been able to verify, because incidents are breaking out in every corner of the country and it’s not random, it’s not gratuitous, there’s a mechanism that’s being set in motion. We spoke of ethnic cleansing, genocide, crimes against humanity in the preliminary report that our commission drew up and we insist on these words.” Jean Carbonare said on public television.
He gives facts to illustrate his point. “What we have also discovered, and it is like Yugoslavia, all the women of the Tutsi minority see their husbands, their brothers, their fathers killed, they are then like animals, abandoned, raped, mistreated,” he revealed, in the middle of the television news, that Rwanda was on the way to genocide against the Tutsi.
In his speech, Jean Carbonare mentioned for the first time the responsibility of the Rwandan and French authorities. “We are convinced, all the members of the mission were convinced, that up to a high level of power there are very great responsibilities. What I would also like to add is that our country, which supports this system militarily and financially, has a responsibility,” he accused the François Mitterrand regime.
And he launched a distress call to encourage his country, France, to stop the worst. “We were several nationalities, eight nationalities represented in our mission, I was the most uncomfortable representative, because I measured that our country, if it wants to, can make a difference in this situation,”: he said.
“And I insist, we are responsible, you too, Mr Masure, can do something, you must do something to change this situation because it can be changed if we want to…. In Yugoslavia, in Somalia it is a little different, it is a situation that escapes us, but there we can do a lot, ourselves and also by involving our partners of the European Commission and the Western world.”
The French responsibility, which unfortunately is still being debated in France 27 years later, was mentioned by Jean Carbonare on Bruno Masure’s microphone in January 1993.
The voice of this man will be like a cry in the desert. The genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi will be carried out in full view of everyone, for one hundred days. And then the genocidaires were exfiltrated to Zaire (now the DRC) by the French army after heroic work by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA).
Gérard Rugambwa
