French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that France and its Western and African allies “could have stopped” Rwanda’s 1994 genocide but had no will to stop the massacre of some 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi.
In a video released on Sunday to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the genocide, Macron will stress that “when the phase of total extermination of the Tutsi begins, the international community has the means to understand and take action,” a French presidential official said, asking not to be identified .
The president believed that at that time, the international community had already had the historical experience of witnessing the massacres of World War II and the mass murder of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey during World War I.
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FILE – The bodies of a woman and her child lie beside a church in Nyarubuye, Rwanda, on May 31, 1994. The village was the site of the April 14 massacre, which was part of the Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 people were killed.
The official added that Macron would say that “France could have worked with its Western and African allies to stop the genocide but had no inclination” to do so.
The president will not join Rwandan President Paul Kagame at this Sunday’s genocide commemoration in Kigali. France will be represented by Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne.
During a visit to Rwanda in 2021, Macron acknowledged France’s “responsibility” in the genocide and said only survivors could give the “gift of forgiveness.”
But he stopped short of apologizing, and Kagame, who led the Tutsi rebellion that ended the genocide, has long insisted on the need for a stronger statement.
A historical commission established by Macron also concluded in 2021 that France under former leader François Mitterrand had “failed,” while adding that there was no evidence that Paris was complicit in the killings.
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