Complicity in Genocide: Pascal Simbikangwa in Paris

BY SONYA SCHOENBERGER

In a 100-day period between April and mid-July 1994, members Rwanda’s Hutu ethnic majority slaughtered nearly a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu with clubs and machetes. Twenty years later, one of the alleged orchestrators of the genocide is on trial in Paris.

Pascal Simikangwa, former intelligence chief of the Rwandan National Forces, faces charges of “complicity in genocide” and “complicity in crimes against humanity” for his role in arming and directing Hutu extremists. Under principles of Universal Jurisdiction—the right of any state to prosecute crimes against humanity in their national courts—France will review Simikangwa’s case over a six-week trial. Simikangwa could face up to life in prison, and his sentence, which will be decided just before the bidecennial of the killings, will carry powerful symbolic value. But France’s role in prosecuting Rwandans carries a certain irony: Paris armed and supported the authoritarian Hutu regime in the days leading up to the genocide.

In October 1990, French President Francois Mitterrand responded to Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s request for assistance in repelling the insurgent activities of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) by sending in two companies tasked with arming and training the Hutu Rwandan Armed Forces. Acting under the rhetorical auspices of aiding an ally in self-defense, France thus began to fortify the monoethnic Hutu military against Tutsi exiles attempting to regain entry and influence by military force. Over the next four years, France remained actively involved in the civil conflict, stepping up support for the Hutu Rwandan Armed Forces (RAF) even amidst rising, and increasingly violent, ethnic tensions. France continued this support despite the issuance of mandatory identity cards with ethnic labels, which proved instrumental to the efficient implementation of Hutu extremists’ extermination agenda.

French troops were thus already on Rwandan soil when the killings commenced, as was a small UN peacekeeping force in place to enforce the Arusha peace accords between the Hutu RAF and Tutsi RPF. But when mass murder began to unfold as reprisal for the assassination of Hutu president Habyarimana—now believed to have been an act by Hutu extremists to catalyze the genocide—France and the international community did little to protect civilians. While French forces evacuated western citizens and gave asylum to dignitaries of the Habyarimana Hutu regime, they turned away Tutsi employees of the embassy and French cultural center—most of whom were subsequently murdered. In an emotional testimony before a 2008 Inquiry into France’s role in the genocide, General Christian Quesnot estimated that the French and UN troops in Rwanda in April 1994 could have stopped the killings if they had worked in concert. But while French and UN forces eventually provided a degree of protection to Tutsis desperate for refuge, neither attempted to counter or disarm Hutus bent on mass murder. In fact, on April 21, two weeks into the killings, the United Nations Security Council voted to reduce UN peacekeeping forces from 2,539 to 270 troops after the massacre of 12 Belgian soldiers.

When France finally sent humanitarian forces in late June, two weeks after the United Nations officially recognized “acts of genocide” and after hundreds of thousands had already been killed, Hutu crowds cheered what they perceived to be the arrival of an ally in the extermination of Tutsi civilians. And while these forces did take a more active role in protecting threatened civilians, they did not take a hardline stance against mobilized Hutu forces, and failed to systematically disarm those who entered the French zone of control.

France is not alone amongst Western powers implicated in the violence. Belgium, Rwanda’s former colonizer, institutionalized racial divisions by favoring Tutsis as the superior indigenous people, engendering the animosity that would manifest itself in waves of violent reprisals. While Belgian forces played an important role in post-Arusha peacekeeping, Brussels terminated its commitment after sustaining casualties. The United States, hesitant to deploy forces, reneged on agreements to lend material support to the UN mission, and actively supported the diminution of international peacekeeping forces during the genocide. Every member of the UN Security Council bears a degree of responsibility for approving the removal of UN peacekeeping forces when they were most critically needed.

It is important to bring the perpetrators of genocide to trial in order to assert that the international community will not let individuals who orchestrated the mass murder of hundreds of thousands live freely and unpunished in exile. But individuals do not perpetrate genocide—armed and mobilized groups of citizens do. And they do not do so in a geopolitical vacuum.

As the international community prepares to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, it is important to not only vilify those who played key political roles in genocide, but to reflect upon the complicity of western powers in codifying ethnic divisions, supervising the militarization of authoritarian regimes, and failing to recognize and respond to ensuing violence.