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RFI exclusivity – France 24. Despite the Duclert report on France’s responsibility for the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur does not want France to apologize.
In an exclusive interview with RFI and France 24, former French Prime Minister Édouard Balladur confirms that he “does not agree at all” with the conclusions of the March 26 report by historian Vincent Duclert on France’s role in the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda – a report according to which Paris bears “heavy and overwhelming responsibility”. He protests against the accusation of France, while no country or the UN has intervened to prevent the massacres.
If he admits that France “did not do everything well” and that he “would have been happy [l’opération humanitaire Turquoise] be made faster “, confirms Édouard Balladur, who was French Prime Minister from April 1993 to May 1995, not to share the” wounds “or” regrets “expressed by then-Foreign Minister Alain Juppé in a column published on April 7 in Le Monde. “Everyone reacts with their own character,” he adds with a touch of perfidy.
He says he does not know who shot down Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plan on April 6, 1994 – the trigger for the Tutsi genocide, while adding that some, in French circles at the time, quickly accused the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) by Paul Kagame to justify an intervention in favor of the Hutu regime.
Right-wing Prime Minister Édouard Balladur, cohabiting with left-wing President François Mitterrand at the time, insists that, despite pressure from Hawkish “pressure groups” around François Mitterrand, he has avoided France’s failure. Initiates a “colonial expedition” in favor of a “government responsible for the genocide”. He said in this regard that the French President was hesitant about the strategy to be followed and that it was he, Édouard Balladur, who finally convinced him that only a military intervention with humanitarian purposes, limited in time and space, was possible. “You were restrictive and you were right,” François Mitterrand would have told him then.
Édouard Balladur strongly defends the actions of the French soldiers in Operation Turquoise. He denies the information in the Duclert report, according to which in July 1994 he wanted to detain the French soldiers members of the genocide government who had taken refuge in the zone controlled by France in southwestern Rwanda. He specifies that France did not have a mandate to do so.
Asked that many Rwandans are now waiting for an apology from France, he replied: “Ask other countries, but not France, because France has done something, while the United States and Belgium did nothing.” And Édouard Balladur exclaimed: “Do not expect my my regrets! ”
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