Sarkozy visit to Rwanda a milestone in relations

ANALYSIS: France will today try to revitalise relations with Rwanda, damaged by the genocide there 16 years ago

IT MAY be little more than a fleeting three-hour stopover pressed into a busy schedule, but when Nicolas Sarkozy steps off his plane in Kigali this afternoon, the occasion will be freighted with symbolic resonance. With his arrival in the Rwandan capital, where he is due to meet President Paul Kagame, Sarkozy will become the first French president to visit the country since the genocide of 1994, a significant step in the fragile and tortuous rapprochement between the two countries.

The visit, which follows the restoration of diplomatic ties between the two states last November and the reopening of Rwanda’s embassy in Paris earlier this week, would have been inconceivable just four years ago.

Relations between France and Rwanda, already badly strained by mutual mistrust since the genocide, turned poisonous in 2006, when a French judge issued arrest warrants for nine people close to Kagame on suspicion of involvement in the mysterious assassination of then president Juvénal Habyarimana in April 1994. The shooting down of Habyarimana’s aircraft near Kigali was the event that triggered the mass killing of 800,000 Rwandans – the great majority of them Tutsis – over just three months.

The French arrest warrants infuriated Kagame, the Tutsi leader who took power in 1994, and led him to break diplomatic ties with France. The Rwandan government believes Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed by Hutu extremists who then blamed the incident on Tutsi rebels to provide the pretext for the genocide, preparations for which were under way before the president’s death.

Kigali accuses France of being partly to blame for the events that followed Habyarimana’s death, and remains angry over France’s reluctance to follow the example set by former US president Bill Clinton and Guy Verhofstadt, the former prime minister of Rwanda’s old colonial power, Belgium, who travelled to Kigali to apologise for their countries’ failures.

The charge sheet against Paris is long and damning. France had provided military assistance to Habyarimana since the 1950s and, despite an agreement in 1975 that forbade the involvement of French troops in Rwandan combat and police operations, France helped the Hutu government repel Tutsi rebels in the early 1990s. Habyarimana enjoyed good relations with former French president François Mitterrand, and France continued to funnel huge shipments of arms to Rwanda throughout the early 1990s and through the killings of 1994.

A Rwandan commission concluded in 1998 that France was aware of preparations for the genocide and helped train the ethnic Hutu militias that orchestrated massacres. The report also accused French troops of direct involvement in the killings, and named 33 senior French military and political figures that it said should be prosecuted. France has denied responsibility, although Sarkozy has spoken of France’s “weaknesses and errors” in dealing with Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

Rwanda’s list of grievances is current as well as historical, however, with the question of genocide suspects who are living comfortably in France adding considerable strain to the relationship. Advocacy groups have identified more than a dozen allegedly involved in genocide who have taken up exile in France, and it was partly out of exasperation with the apparent sluggishness of the French judicial system’s pursuit of those suspects that Kagame decided to finally break diplomatic ties four years ago.

Behind all of this lurks the question of language. France long considered Rwanda part of la francophonie– the global French family – and had close links with the French-speaking Hutu elite. A great many Tutsi rebels who returned to Rwanda in 1994 had lived in exile in English-speaking Uganda, and Kagame believes France's linguistic affinity with the Hutu regime blinded it to the murderous intent of that regime. (Last year, Rwanda pointedly joined the Commonwealth, making it only the second country with no colonial or constitutional link to Britain to join the group.)

So what has changed in the past four years that allows a French president to visit Rwanda heralding the “turning of the page”?

First, Nicolas Sarkozy’s own arrival at the Élysée Palace in 2007 took some of the chill out of the atmosphere. He has spoken of breaking with France’s old clientelist relationship with African allies, and while many French politicians had been singled out for criticism by Rwanda over what happened in the 1990s, Sarkozy was not among them. The man he chose as minister for foreign affairs, Bernard Kouchner, had a good and long-standing relationship with Kagame and has been preparing the ground for today’s meeting for some time.

Kigali also appears to have been reassured about the arrest warrants issued for Kagame’s allies. The retirement of the judge who initially pursued the Rwandan dossier has taken the heat out of the case, while the Élysée appears to have convinced Kigali that the pursuit of Kagame’s associates never had its imprimatur.

Finally, more prosaic economic considerations may well be at play. With its economy resurgent, Rwanda sees France as a useful economic partner and an important voice at the EU and within the world’s powerful economic bodies. France, for its part, will be conscious of the value of having a better foothold in the mining region of the Great Lakes in central Africa.

It is expected that Sarkozy will suggest to his Rwandan counterpart the creation of a commission of historians to look at the tragic events of 1994 and the complex relationship between the two countries.

For now, however, the big question is whether historians will end up recording February 25th, 2010, as the day when a French president finally travelled to Kigali to utter the word his audience was listening out for above all others: sorry.

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic is Paris Correspondent