An absolute bombshell from EUReferendum:
There has been a French parliamentary inquiry, which – predictably – cleared its own government. But now a former senior Rwandan diplomat has told a tribunal in his own country that France played an active role in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
Rwanda, where the victims begged the UN peacekeepers to kill them before the Hutus got to them. Oh, wait, this was the UN.
This was under the guise of a United Nations mandate known as Operation Turquoise, ostensibly to set up a protected zone. But French soldiers were actually deployed in to protect the genocide perpetrators, allowing Hutu extremists to enter Tutsi camps and continue the slaughter even in the protected zone.
From other reports, we learn that French soldiers are accused of training and arming some of the Hutus that carried out the massacre, and some 50,000 people are reported to have been killed after French forces brought Tutsis out of hiding under the false pretext that they had secured the peace.
From the complete Human Rights Watch report, Leave None to Tell the Story, this excerpt on French reasoning (emphasis, mine):
Mitterrand, like many French policy-makers, believed that France must continue to have strong links with African allies if it were to have any stature on the international scene. By definition, such allies were French-speaking. Among them, Rwanda had a special status because it was not a former French colony, but an ally that had been won away from Belgium, its old colonial master. Backing Rwanda offered the chance not just to outdo Belgium but also to humiliate the Anglo-Saxon forces thought to be behind the largely English-speaking RPF. According to former French minister Bernard Debré, Mitterrand believed that the U.S. had “hegemonic aims†in the region.63
…This reasoning, so redolent of nineteenth-century colonial passions, seems in fact to have motivated much of French policy about Rwanda.
So, like the Left with its ‘anyone but Bush’ mentality, France was prepared to do anything to thwart the United States, even to the point of genocide.
As EUreferendum sums up:
Given that the continuous and expanding threads of evidence point to France as a country that has, from Vietnam through Algeria and a succession of African colonies up to and including the Ivory Coast, exercised a wholly malign influence, we really do have to ask ourselves whether this is a country with which we can afford to be associated.
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Update:
The Times of London:
“…manned roadblocks to facilitate murderers in achieving their mission of exterminating Tutsis…”
It takes a peculiar, transcendent talent for the French to lower even my subterrainian opinion of their country and their policies. I must say that for a country that has such a stellar record in wartime over the last hundred years it isn’t that surprising that they would be collaborating with the evil, thoroughly vile winner.
Vichy France, only with massacres of defenseless men, women and children. Well done ya cheese eatin’ surrender monkeys!!
Of course, it’s America’s fault for not interfering to stop the outrage…
I question the timing® of this report. Who are the authors of this report, and why do they want to poop the UN’s birthday like this?
Ah, election season! When friends and neighbors gather to soak in the high pitched musical cries of, “I question the timing!” while they pass gallon jugs of generic whiskey….*sob*
Never will a hangover have so much meaning…
If you read the euro-blogs, in particular, the ever-fascinating French/Danish/American No-Pasaran, you can intuit an ugly malignancy in French society.
The amazing combination of cynicism and hatred for the US effected by the French elites is only matched by their pitiful self-loathing. And the rest of France just continues to go along to ensure the checks keep arriving.
Not that I’ve got anything against Rwanda, but I do wish that we had a government that would be more responsive to its citizens’ wishes regarding its hegemonic ambitions.
BTW, are the French managing to project their influence into France these days? Far be it from me to suggest policy to the French, but it might be a good place to start.
I think that one is supposed to be “affect,” as in “affectation.”
<ducks>
Actually, yeah.
I think you’re right.
PW: come for the posts, stay for the grammar lessons.
TW: yes, there will be a final
I.am.appalled.
You – a major shareholder and co-inventor of Frothing Insinuationsâ„¢ – suggesting drinking generic whiskey unaccompanied by the other carefully-formulated ingredients of the Frothing Insinuationsâ„¢ – well, this just may break up the firm.
Well, to effect is to cause to come into being, and that fits.
PW: come for the posts, stay for the grammar
lessonscontroversy.So France backed a government that supported secret death squads?
They set up a zone to protect that government?
And they trained some of those death squads?
And supplied those death squads with guns and ammo?
Hmmm.
Prefontal-lobe Insufficiency Simian Syndrome alert!
Geez, lighten up geezer! Have a tall one on me. The election season will soon be over and people will be flocking to us for cheer and numbing. I’m just setting them up now. After they binge on cheap whiskey our concoction will be like nectar of the gods. BWAAAAAAA HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
<gack>
PS: The fact that P&I is that ignorant and yet still remembers to feed himself everyday is a minor miracle. Perhaps we should call Guinness…
Oh, goody, monkyboy is here. Let the oh-so clever and sassy insinuations, backed up with misunderstood and incompletely read links, begin…
The contention is that France trained them and went out on raids with them .
I think I understand it all now. The French were humiliated about having to be saved by us during WWII and they’ve been harboring a grudge ever since. They really hate us. I would never have imaginaed such a thing. It’s blowing my mind.
The thought that politics is driven by groups that have suffered humiliating defeats is interesting, ahem…
Hell, reviewing ,recent French behavior such as the Vichy years and France’s quelling of the Algerian independence movement in the 50’s. I am shocked, shocked at these accusations.
However, looking at what’s going on in the Parisian suburbs, maybe France is about to get some ‘karmic retribution.’
Oh yeah, does this mean Kerry will drop stressing his fluency in all things French? Just askin…
Monky: It is, isn’t it?
Hitler took advantage of that national humiliation to inflame the Germans into the Nazism that precipitated WWII. It was based on the concept of the ‘stab in the back’. Ostensibly, the German army had been stabbed in the back and humiliated during the creation of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI.
They felt betrayed by the general who signed the treaty and humiliated because the French–again, the effing French–imposed onerous treaty conditions on the Germans as ‘punishment’ for starting the war. They really are a small and vindictive nation. William Shirer describes it in his “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
Churchill saw no need to further crush an already defeated foe; allow them to retreat with some dignity. He’s correct.
I just never thought resentment could could work this way. It explains a lot.
OK. All is forgotten; I over-reacted.
Note the acronym for Prefrontal-lobe Insufficiency Simian Syndrome includes both “P” and “I”, eh?
e.g., the Democrats.
I was gonna suggest that the proto-simian just broke my irony meter but Geezer beat me to it…
I just never thought resentment could could work this way. It explains a lot.
It also explains Serbia and some redoubts of my native South. Sheesh, not good company.
Of the Southerners that really care about the War of Northern Aggression, I cannot think of any who are ashamed of it. Slavery in this country was awful, but the institution was dying out at a rapid pace and the wait would not have been as bad as the war. For commentary on the status of slavery in the U.S. prior to the WoNA, see Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.”
I was born in the Heart of Dixie, but consider myself an honorary Yankee. Somewhere around 4th grade I began to figure out what the war had been about, and decided that I was on the other side.
Well, Ardsgaine, speaking as a man who had two great-grandfathers and four great-great uncles who fought for the ‘Heart of Dixie’ from that peculiarly poor section of Alabama around Coosa and Tallapoosa counties; I hope you enjoy being a Yankee.
My family [and many, many others who fought for the South] were not landed gentry fighting to protect the plantation and its slave labor workforce. They were subsistance farmers, coal miners and petty merchants fighting to preserve the freedom of their respective states to run themselves as they saw fit without interference from Washington, DC or anywhere else.
But they don’t teach any of that in fourth grade; and damn little of it in modern Universities, either.