Calls for France to Rethink its Africa Role

Bonhomie: The report breaks a spell of warmer ties between Rwanda and France. In January, President Paul Kagame (r.) hosted French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner (l.) in Kigali. (Riccardo Gangale/APA)
Rwandan report this week charged Paris with complicity in the 1994 genocide.
Paris: Aug 8th (Christian Science Monitor) - A bombshell of a report by Rwanda this week implicating high-ranking French officials in the arming and training of Hutu forces that committed genocide in Rwanda – could have been issued last November. President Paul Kagame sat on the 500-page study, approved by the Rwandan Senate, for months.

It was a time of some bonhomie with France. President Nicolas Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, much liked in Kigali, were working on a new rapprochement policy – after Rwanda broke all ties with France in 2006 over a French judge's indictment of Mr. Kagame for allegedly ordering an assassination in 1994.

Kagame, a Tutsi, appears to have lost patience with France. He had hoped that the 2006 indictment would be renounced and that high-level Hutus still living in France would be deported to Rwanda to face genocide charges.

Still, what is likely the last major report on the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed more than 800,000, leaves France with an embarrassing problem – one cutting to the heart of its own political elite, to a network of French unofficial "parallel structures" of commerce and intelligence in Africa, and to how a major power will deal with thorny questions of justice about its behavior in the postcolonial world.

"The French know this report is dynamite and wanted to keep it from seeing the light of day," says Andrew Wallis, author of "Silent Accomplice," a recounting of alleged French backing of the Hutu government in Rwanda in the early 1990s. "This creates a new chapter and ends an old one. The question is, where do the two sides go now? The French tried in every way to unseat Kagame, but now recognize he is here to stay. But you aren't going to get an apology from the French.... The Hutus were armed and trained by a foreign power that walked away and said 'I never did it.' "

The details in the Rwandan document – its naming of French political and military officials, its recounting of French weapons sales, French training, incidents, times, dates, and places of specific crimes – have so far been treated with scorn, and a blanket denial in Paris.

French defense minister Hervé Morin told Radio France Internationale Thursday that French investigators in 1998 found French soldiers in Rwanda were "beyond reproach" and said they saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Whether Kagame, whose profile in Africa has been rising, will attempt to push a prosecution at a time when the West has been touting the arrest of Balkan leaders accused of war crimes, as well as an International Criminal Court indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, is unknown.

Tom Cargill, Africa expert with the London think tank Chatham House, told Reuters, "I think it all points to a profound disturbance in international relations caused by the emergence of an international legal system.... The very idea that there might be a legal process ... quite separate from politics is causing many people in many countries to rethink how they approach international relations."

Paris and Kigali have spent years disputing France's role in the 100-day killing spree that became the last full-scale genocide of the 20th century. Some diplomatic sources in Paris say the Kagame report, produced by the Munyo Commission, is an effort at distracting attention from Tutsi crimes that took place after 800,000 Hutu moderates and Tutsis were slaughtered.

Yet the respected French daily Le Monde this week said the evidence presented in the Rwandan study means the issue can no longer be ignored. It argued that passionate back-and-forth charges between France and Rwanda has hidden the truth for more than a decade, and that "France has to reply to the accusations."

Much of the French complicity cited by the Munyo Commission has been described or published for years by authors, nongovernmental organizations, journalists, and eyewitnesses. Survie, a French NGO, has spent decades following the Rwandan question, investigated the French role exhaustively, and brought out "L'horreur qui nous prende au visage," a 600-page work in French that came out in 2005.

"Until Rwanda in 1992, we tried to work with French political parties to improve French policies in Africa," says Sharon Courtoux, a cofounder of Survie. "But the genocide, which was clear to see even before it happened, changed everything. Rwanda proved to us that there was absolutely no limit to what people were capable of doing, in defending their interests."

The 1998 French parliamentary investigation into its mission in Rwanda found that "mistakes were made," but that France was not knowingly involved in or complicit in the crimes committed by military and paramilitary forces. Yet Survie's study, and the Munyo Commission, presented compelling evidence that France trained government and paramilitary forces.

"All roads to the truth were opened up in the 1998 investigation in France," argues Ms. Courtoux, "but they did not go to the end of the road."

Mr. Wallis, reporter Chris McGreal, and Survie accounts point particularly to the French role in instances like "Operation Turquoise" – an attempt to create a safe haven for the Hutu government and peoples, which took place in the mountains of the south, a place called Bisesero. French soldiers were instructed to go into the zone. When they did, hundreds of Tutsis who were hiding in the hills thought they were coming to save them, according to Wallis. The Tutsis came out of the hills, then the French soldiers were instructed to withdraw – exposing them to the Hutu Interahamwe militia squads (who had allegedly received training from the French). "The Interahamwe just clapped their hands at that point," says Wallis. "These Tutsis had been impossible to route out, and now they were attacked and killed."

Mr. McGreal, who was in Rwanda at the time, spoke to the French colonel who was giving the orders, who identified himself as Didier Thibault. He said that he was taking orders from the "legal organization," the Hutu government.

He was actually Col. Didier Tauzin – a man who had advised the Rwandan Army and, according to a 2007 report by McGreal, had "commanded the French operation that halted the RPF [Tutsi] advance on Kigali a year earlier." That advance had been an effort by the Kagame forces to end the killing in the Hutu-run capital.
BY Robert Marquand
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Solzhenitsyn Represented 'Freedom and Dignity', says Church

Russian Premier Vladimir Putin pays condolence to Natalya Solzhenitsyna, the widow of the famous Russian author, Soviet dissident and Nobel literature prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn during the farewell ceremony in the Russian Academy of Science building in Moscow, Russia 05 August 2008. Alexander Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure late Sunday at the age of 89 and will be burried on the cemetery of Donskoy Monastery in Moscow on Wednesday 06 August. (EPA/YURI KOCHETKOV)
Moscow: August 4th. (ENI) - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author who survived the Soviet gulag of labour camps under dictator Josef Stalin, will go down in history as a "model of inner freedom and human dignity," a top official of the Russian Orthodox Church has said. Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow of heart failure late on Sunday night. He was 89 years old. "He was able to speak boldly with the rulers of his country and of the West, [and] with the people, without fearing to speak the truth and without being a slave to fashion or public opinion," the Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy chairperson of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, was quoted as saying by the Interfax-religion news agency.

A report on patriarchia.ru, the official Web site of the Moscow Patriarchate, described Solzhenitsyn as "one of the spiritual leaders of patriotic Orthodox organizations". The Rev. Vladimir Vigilyansky, director of the Moscow Patriarchate's press service, told RIA Novosti, an official Russian news agency, that the Russian Orthodox Church would be holding memorial services for Solzhenitsyn. He described the writer as a believer who was in close contact with many clerics and religious thinkers. "Without a doubt he thought within a religious framework and his views on man and society were of a clearly religious character," Vigilyansky told the news agency.

Solzhenitsyn came to fame in 1962 with his book, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". Critics compared the short novel about prison camp life to works by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and the book came to epitomise the promise, and the beginning of the end of the period of thaw, under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR in 1974 after the publication in the West of "The Gulag Archipelago", his monumental history of the Soviet prison camp system. He soon settled in the United States, in Cavendish, Vermont but did not embrace the American way of life. He returned to Russia in 1994, and travelled across the country by train from Vladivostok to Moscow. The state of Russia depressed him and the initial triumphant response to his return soon faded. In 2001, Solzhenitsyn published "Two Hundred Years Together," a study of the relationship between Russians and Jews that fanned charges that he was anti-Semitic. David Remnick, writer and editor of the New Yorker, who has profiled Solzhenitsyn, defended Solzhenitsyn against such accusations. "Solzhenitsyn, in fact, is not anti-Semitic; his books are not anti-Semitic, and he is not in his personal relations anti-Jewish," Remnick wrote in 2001.

Solzhenitsyn did not approve of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and became disenchanted with Boris Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet president of Russia. Still, in 2007, he accepted a State prize from then-president Vladimir Putin, a former lieutenant colonel in the Soviet-era secret intelligence agency, the KGB. Solzhenitsyn told the German weekly Der Spiegel in an interview that Putin, "inherited a ransacked and bewildered country with a poor and demoralised people. And he started to do what was possible: a slow and gradual restoration."
by Sophia Kishkovsky
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Russia and Georgia Clash Over Separatist Region

A Georgian man mourned a dead relative in the town of Gori, which was hit by Russian bombs, according to residents. (David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)

GORI, Georgia: Aug 8th (NY Times) — Russia conducted airstrikes on Georgian targets on Friday evening, escalating the conflict in a separatist area of Georgia that is shaping into a test of the power and military reach of an emboldened Kremlin. Earlier in the day, Russian troops and armored vehicles had rolled into Sth Osseita, supporting the breakaway region in its bitter conflict with Georgia. The United States and other Western nations, joined by NATO, condemned the violence and demanded a cease-fire. Secretary of State Condoleezza went a step further, calling on Russia to withdraw its forces. But the Russian soldiers remained, and Georgian officials reported at least one airstrike, on the Black Sea port of Poti, late on Friday night. Russian military units — including tank, artillery and reconnaissance — arrived in Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, on Saturday to help Russian peacekeepers there, in response to overnight shelling by Georgian forces, state television in Russia reported, citing the Ministry of Defense. Ground assault aircraft were also mobilized, the Ministry said. Also on Saturday a senior Georgian official said by telephone that Russian bombers were flying over Georgia and that the presidential offices and residence in Tbilisi had been evacuated. The official added that Georgian forces still had control of Tskhinvali.

Neither side showed any indication of backing down. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia declared that “war has started,” and President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia accused Russia of a “well-planned invasion” and mobilized Georgia’s military reserves. There were signs as well of a cyberwarfare campaign, as Georgian government Web sites were crashing intermittently during the day. The escalation risked igniting a renewed and sustained conflict in the Caucasus region, an important conduit for the flow of oil from the Caspian Sea to world markets and an area where conflict has flared for years along Russia’s borders, most recently in Chechnya. The military incursion into Georgia marked a fresh sign of Kremlin confidence and resolve, and also provided a test of the capacities of the Russian military, which Mr. Putin had tried to modernize and re-equip during his two presidential terms. Frictions between Georgia and South Ossetia, which has declared de facto independence, have simmered for years, but intensified when Mr. Saakashvili came to power in Georgia and made national unification a centerpiece of his agenda. Mr. Saakashvili, a close American ally who has sought NATO membership for Georgia, is loathed at the Kremlin in part because he had positioned himself as a spokesman for democracy movements and alignment with the West. Earlier this year Russia announced that it was expanding support for the separatist regions. Georgia labeled the new support an act of annexation.

The conflict in Georgia also appeared to suggest the limits of the power of President Dmitri Medbedev, Mr. Putin’s hand-picked successor. During the day, it was Mr. Putin’s stern statements from China, where he was visiting the opening of the Olympic Games, that appeared to define Russia’s position. But Mr. Medvedev made a public statement as well, making it unclear who was directing Russia’s military operations. Officially, that authority rests with Mr. Medvedev, and foreign policy is outside Mr. Putin’s portfolio. “The war in Ossetia instantly showed the idiocy of our state management,” said a commentator on the liberal radio station, Ekho Moskvy. “Who is in charge — Putin or Medvedev?” The war between Georgia and South Ossetia, until recently labeled a “frozen conflict,” stretches back to the early 1990s, when South Ossetia and another separatist region, Abkhazia, gained de facto independence from Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The region settled into a tenuous peace monitored by Russian peacekeepers, but frictions with Georgia increased sharply in 2004, when Mr. Saakashvili was elected.

Reports conflicted throughout Friday about whether Georgian or Russian forces had won control of Tskhinvali, the capital of the mountainous rebel province. It was unclear late on Friday whether ground combat had taken place between Russian and Georgian soldiers, or had been limited to fighting between separatists and Georgian forces. Marat Kulakhmetov, commander of Russian peacekeeping forces in Tskhinvali, said early on Saturday that South Ossetian separatists still held most of the city and that Georgian forces were only present on its southern edge. That report aligned with a statement by Georgia’s ambassador to the UN, Irakli Alasania, who said that Georgian military units held eight villages at the capital’s edge. Georgian officials asserted that Russian warplanes had attacked Georgian forces and civilians in Tskhinvali, and that airports in four Georgian cities had been hit. Shota Utiashvili, an official at the Georgian Interior Ministry, said they included the Vaziany military base outside of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, a military base in Marneuli, and airports in the cities of Delisi and Kutaisi. “We are under massive attack,” he said.

Late in the night, George Arveladze, an adviser to Mr. Saakashvili, said that Russian planes had bombed the commercial seaport of Poti, where one worker was missing and several others were wounded. Poti is an export point for oil from the Caspian Sea; Mr. Arveladze said the initial reports indicated that the oil terminal had not been struck. Eduard Kokoity, the president of South Ossetia, said in a statement on a government Web site that hundreds of civilians had been killed in fighting in the capital. Russian peacekeepers stationed in South Ossetia said that 12 peacekeeping soldiers were killed Friday and that 50 were wounded. The claims of casualties by all sides could not be independently verified. Analysts said that either Georgia or Russia could be trying to seize an opportune moment — with world leaders focused on the start of the 2008 Olympics this week — to reclaim the territory, and to settle the dispute before a new American presidential administration comes to office. Richard C. Holbrooke, the former American ambassador to the United Nations, said that Russia’s aims were clear. “They have two goals,” he said. “To do a creeping annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and, secondly, to overthrow Saakashvili, who is a tremendous thorn in their side.” A spokesman for Mr. Medvedev declined to comment. The United States State Department issued a press release late Friday saying that John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, had summoned the Russian chargé d’affairs to press for a de-escalation of force. “We deplore today’s Russian attacks by strategic bombers and missiles, which are threatening civilian lives,” the statement said.

The United States also said Friday that it would send an envoy to the region to try to broker an end to the fighting. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany issued a statement calling on both sides “to halt the use of force immediately.” Germany has taken a leading role in trying to ease the tensions over Abkhazia. The trigger for the fresh escalation began last weekend, when South Ossetia accused Georgia of firing mortars into the enclave after six Georgian policemen were killed in the border area by a roadside bomb. As tensions grew, South Ossetia began sending women and children out of the enclave. The refugee crisis intensified Friday as relief groups said thousands of refugees, mostly women and children, were streaming across the border into the North Caucasus city of Vladikavkaz in Russia. Early on Friday, Russia’s Channel One television showed Russian tanks entering South Ossetia and reported that two battalions reinforced by tanks and armored personnel carriers were approaching its capital. There were unconfirmed reports that Georgian forces had shot down two Russian planes and that its aircraft had bombed a convoy of Russian tanks. Russian state television showed what it said was a destroyed Georgian tank in Tskhinvali, its turret smoldering. Women and children in Tskhinvali were hiding in basements while men had fled to the woods, said a woman reached by telephone in the neighboring Russian region of North Ossetia, who said she had been in phone contact with relatives there. She declined to give her name. In Gori, a city outside South Ossetia and about 12 miles from Tskhinvali, residents said there had been sporadic bombing all day. The city was shaken by numerous vibrations from the impact of bombs on Friday evening. One Russian bomb exploded in Gori near a textile factory and a cellphone tower, leaving a crater.

At the United Nations on Friday, diplomats continued to wrangle over the text of a statement after attempts to agree to compromise language collapsed Friday afternoon, after nearly three hours of consultations. The Russians, who had called the emergency session, proposed a short, three-paragraph statement that expressed concern about the escalating violence, and singled out Georgia and South Ossetia as needing to cease hostilities and return to the negotiating table. But one phrase calling on all parties to “renounce the use of force” met with opposition, particularly from the United States, France and Britain. The three countries argued that the statement was unbalanced, one European diplomat said, because that language would have undermined Georgia’s ability to defend itself. Belgium, which holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council this month, circulated a revised draft calling for an immediate cessation of hostility and for “all parties” to return to the negotiating table. By dropping the specific reference to Georgia and South Ossetia, the compromise statement would also encompass Russia. The Security Council was scheduled to meet Saturday to resume deliberations. China, in its statement during the early morning debate, had asked for a traditional cease-fire out of respect for the opening of the Olympics.

President Bush discussed the conflict by telephone with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, for about an hour after attending the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, the White House press secretary, Dana M. Perino said. Mr. Bush held another conference with Mr. Hadley and his deputy, James Jeffery, on Saturday morning before attending beach volleyball practice. There are over 2,000 American citizens in Georgia, Pentagon officials said. Among them are about 130 trainers — mostly American military personnel but with about 30 Defense Department civilians —assisting the Georgian military with preparations for deployments to Iraq. The American military was taking no actions regarding the outbreak of violence, according to Pentagon and military officials. While there has been some contact with the Georgian authorities, the Defense Department had received no requests for assistance, the officials said.
By Michael Schwirtz, Anne Barnard & C, J, Chivers
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Rwanda Accuses France Directly Over 1994 Genocide

KIGALI Aug. 5th. (Reuters) - Rwanda formally accused senior French officials on Tuesday of involvement in its 1994 genocide and called for them to be put on trial. Among those named in a report by a Rwandan investigation commission were former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and late President Francois Mitterrand. Kigali has previously accused Paris of covering up its role in training troops and militia who carried out massacres that killed some 800,000 people, and of propping up the ethnic Hutu leaders who orchestrated the slaughter. France denies that and says its forces helped protect people during a UN -sanctioned mission in Rwanda at the time.

The latest allegations from Kigali came on Tuesday with the publication of the report by an independent Rwandan commission set up to investigate France's role in the bloodshed. "The French support was of a political, military, diplomatic and logistic nature," the report said. "Considering the gravity of the alleged facts, the Rwandan government asks competent authorities to undertake all necessary actions to bring the accused French political and military leaders to answer for their acts before justice." An official at the French Foreign Ministry told Reuters that the French government had not yet received any official communication from Kigali and so could not comment. Attached to the report was a list of 33 accused French political and military officials. As well as Mitterrand and Villepin, others listed include then foreign minister Alain Juppe, a senior figure in current President Nicolas Sarkozy's party, then prime minister Edouard Balladur and Hubert Vedrine, both still senior politicians.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame cut ties with France in November 2006 in protest at a French judge's call for him to stand trial over the death of his predecessor in April 1994 -- an event widely seen as unleashing the genocide. That call prompted street protests in Kigali. Relations soured further after the Rwandan commission later heard accounts from victims who said they were raped by French soldiers after seeking refuge with them during the genocide. But ties between the two nations had improved in recent months after Kagame met Sarkozy at a EU-Africa summit in Lisbon in December 2007.
by Daniel Wallis
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