Kigali plays the blame game

2004-04-07 10:38

Kigali - As Rwanda prepared to mark the 10th anniversary of a genocide that claimed up to a million lives, accusations about responsibility for the slaughter abounded in Kigali on Tuesday.

France, Belgium, the United States, Britain the United Nations and the Roman Catholic church all came under fire for allegedly contributing to or failing to prevent the 100-day orgy of ethnic bloodshed.

Ten years later, there is no question that in the case of Rwanda in 1994 the outside world failed to honour its pledge of "never again" made after the Nazi Holocaust, and acrimony still surrounds the specific actions and inactions of individual members of the international community.

This was the central theme of a conference of Rwandan and foreign experts held this week in Kigali, which ended on Tuesday, the eve of the main commemorative events in the capital.

Delegates agreed that Rwanda should set up "an independent commission of enquiry" into the role of France, which was a close ally of the Hutu regime that planned and carried out the genocide.

Recent weeks have seen volleys of accusations about the genocide fly between Paris and Kigali.

Conference delegates also called on "the United Nations, responsible states actively complicit or complicit through silence... to pay reparations."

They also said the UN Security Council should adopt a resolution "that explicitly recognises and unequivocally condemns the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda".

Louis Michel, the foreign minister of Belgium, Rwanda's former colonial power, called on "countries that bear a responsibility for this odious crime" to apologise, as Belgium did in 2000.

Detestable indifference

"It is all too clear that the Belgian authorities of the time did not do enough to avoid the worst, and it will take forever for the international community to forget its detestable indifference," said Michel.

Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general who commanded UN peacekeeping troops deployed in Rwanda in 1994, denounced the "criminal responsibility" of the international community during the conference.

He singled out Security Council permanent members France, Britain and the United States for not giving the peacekeeping mission the means to halt the genocide.

Speaking to Belgian television, Michel lambasted Dallaire for his "insulting" words, those of one who "personifies cowardice in the light of the responsibilities he didn't assume."

Gerry Caplan, a Canadian academic, waded in with charges that the Catholic church, Belgium, the United States, Britain and above France all had a lot to answer for.

"The French government waited until 1995 before apologising for France's role in deporting Jews to Germany.

"Perhaps we'll have to wait another 50 years for the French to apologise for the genocide," Caplan told the conference.

Unlike France, the UN, the United States and Belgium have all made some kind of declaration of contrition with regard to the events of 1994 in Rwanda.

- AFP