It’s the 30th anniversary of the humanitarian tragedy in Rwanda, where genocide took lives of an estimated 800,000 people.
According to French media, in a video message to be published on social media on Sunday, on its 30th anniversary President Emmanuel Macron will apologize for France’s failure to stop the Rwanda genocide. President of France will justify that “France, which could have stopped the genocide with its Western and African allies, did not have the will to do so.”
Sunday marks three decades since the start of the Rwandan genocide, in which Hutu fighters killed about 800,000 people, mostly members of the Tutsi ethnic minority, between April and July 1994.
Macron has been invited to a ceremony in the Rwandan capital Kigali to mark the anniversary of the genocide but will not attend. Instead, France will be represented by Foreign Minister Stephane Sejournet and Secretary of State for Maritime Affairs Hervé Berville, a Rwandan-born genocide survivor.
The genocide has long been a source of tension between France and Rwanda. A report commissioned by the Rwandan government and published in 2021 said France played a “significant” role in “enabling” the bloodshed by supporting the Rwandan regime.
A month after the report was published, Macron visited a genocide memorial in Kigali and gave a speech in which he acknowledged France’s “responsibility” but did not formally apologize, insisting that his country “was not an accomplice” in the violence.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who invited Macron to Sunday’s ceremony, did not seem concerned about his French counterpart’s planned absence, telling a pan-African French-language publication last month that Paris could “send whoever they want.”
