In 2017 the Government of Rwanda retained Robert F. Muse and the Washington DC law firm of Levy Firestone Muse LLP to investigate the role of the French government in connection with the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The final report of the Muse Investigation released yesterday explicitly states that France “did nothing to stop” the massacres, in April and May 1994, and in the years after the genocide tried to cover up its role and even offered protection to some perpetrators.
Although there was no evidence that French officials or personnel had directly participated in the killing of Tutsis, the Muse Investigation labeled France, a “collaborator” of the extremist Hutu regime that orchestrated the murders of about 800,000 people, mainly from the Tutsi minority. The killing of Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994, when his aircraft is shot down over Kigali unleashed a killing spree by Hutu forces and militia. At least 800,000 mainly Tutsi people were beaten, hacked, or shot to death in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, a roughly 100-day killing spree carried out mostly by Hutu forces.
The Rwandan report comes less than a month after a French report, commissioned by Macron, concluded that French authorities had been “blind” to the preparations for genocide and then reacted too slowly to appreciate the extent of the killings and to respond to them.
