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 submitted to the Government of Rwanda on April 19 details, among many other things, France's prior knowledge of plans to exterminate the Tutsi and complicity despite the French government avoiding the truth and failing to acknowledge its role and responsibility.

"Our Report concludes that the Genocide was foreseeable. From its knowledge of massacres of civilians conducted by the government and its allies, to the daily dehumanization of the Tutsi, to the cables and other data arriving from Rwanda, the French government could see that a genocide was coming," reads the report.

"The French government was neither blind nor unconscious about the foreseeable genocide." The report details how, from 1991 to 1992, the French Government increased its support as the Habyarimana regime dehumanized and massacred the Tutsi.

It details how, between January and March 1993 and later, ignoring a devastating human rights report exposing the Rwandan Government, the French Government reached the pinnacle of its intervention in the war against the RPF which was fighting to prevent the Genocide.

As the RPF military came closer to ending the Genocide, it is noted, then French President Francois Mitterrand denied France’s responsibility for the Genocide and claimed that he could not have foreseen it.  "This was false. In the four years preceding the Genocide, no State worked more closely with the Habyarimana government than did France."

Beginning in October 1990, French officials in Rwanda informed Mitterrand and his top aides in Paris that the Rwandan government was massacring Tutsi as reprisals for RPF attacks, it is noted.  Soon after the arrival of French troops, French officials became aware of the dehumanization, vilification, and killing of Tutsi. As former French Ambassador to Rwanda Georges Martres would later reflect, “The genocide was foreseeable as early as then [October 1990], even if we couldn’t imagine its magnitude and atrociousness.”

On October 24, 1990, the defense attaché at the French embassy in Rwanda, Colonel René Galinié, warned of “the physical elimination of the Tutsi within the country, 500,000 to 700,000 people.”

In January 1993, it is noted, a consortium of international human rights groups reported to French officials in Rwanda and Paris on its fact-finding mission in Rwanda and detailed government-run death squads and anti-Tutsi massacres.  "The French Ministry of Defense disregarded an internal warning from April 1993 to leave Rwanda to avoid being further implicated in the anti-Tutsi massacres and systemic discrimination.

Beginning in October 1990, hundreds of French officials—military and civilian—deployed in Rwanda "were privy to the hate media outlets (printed and broadcast in French), the use of ethnic IDs, the use of roadblocks to harass Tutsi, the sexual assault of Tutsi women, the torture inflicted on Tutsi by the Gendarmerie", and the growing violence of the militias and the military.

It is noted thay the French government knew the CDR and other extremists had designs to murder the Tutsi. In January 1994, three months before the start of the Genocide, the French government received a warning from an informant, relayed through the United Nations that the Interahamwe planned to slaughter Tutsi en masse.  "Despite the information available to French officials that foreshadowed the Genocide, the French government did not alter its policy in Rwanda."

Cover-ups, false narratives after 1994

Since the Genocide, the French Government has covered up its role, distorted the truth, and protected génocidaires, the report reveals. French officials, starting with President Mitterrand, have disclaimed any responsibility for the Genocide. During a September 1994 interview, Mitterrand insisted that “our responsibility is nil.”

Most importantly, the new report, unlike most others before, address the quarter century after the Genocide. It details and examines the continued cover-up, obstruction and false narratives promulgated by the French government since 1994.

The Report is drawn from a range of both primary and secondary documentary sources, including transcripts; reports and studies by governments, non-government organizations and academics; diplomatic cables; documentaries and other videos; contemporaneous news articles; and other such resources. The authors met with hundreds of individuals and interviewed more than 250 witnesses including Rwandans who were in country during the Genocide, individual or private French officials, diplomats, UN officials and international organisations' staff during the 90s.

While the Rwandan government placed no restrictions on the researchers' efforts, there was no cooperation from French officials and government.

The French government, it is noted, though aware of this investigation, has not been cooperative, perpetuating what by now can only be characterized as an ongoing cover-up of omission, deflection, and distortion. "France’s cover-up is also a failure to accept responsibility and a miscarriage of justice. The Government of Rwanda has sent the Government of France multiple requests for documents to establish the facts."

As noted, the French government acknowledged receipt of the Government of Rwanda’s requests for documents on December 20, 2019, July 10, 2020, and January 27, 2021, "and has produced zero documents in response." "Until France opens all of its archives and authorizes all of its government and military officials from the 1990s (and not only those who approve of French actions in Rwanda) to speak publicly and without fear of reprisal about what transpired, the public will not know the full story. Only negative inferences can be drawn from the French government’s recalcitrance."

As noted, the 1998 French Parliamentary Mission of inquiry into French actions in Rwanda (“MIP”) had critical flaws. To this day, critical documents and testimony from key MIP witnesses remain secret.

"In an interview, the head of the MIP, Paul Quilès, cleared France of responsibility despite evidence to the contrary." "One of the MIP’s two rapporteurs would later acknowledge that many of the mission’s members were not interested in undertaking a good-faith effort to uncover the truth."

French officials have also attempted to shift blame for the start of the Genocide to the RPF. They have also promulgated a false narrative that the Genocide against the Tutsi occurred in parallel to a second genocide allegedly perpetrated against Hutu by the RPF (the “double genocide” theory).

Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana, the former first lady of Rwanda, has been allowed to remain in France despite the national court of asylum’s rejection of her asylum application and its finding that she was “at the heart of the regime” and was responsible for “planning of massacres of Tutsis from October 1990 onwards, and therefore among those responsible for planning the [Genocide Against the Tutsi].”

Despite the arrest of Félicien Kabuga - a top Genocide suspect believed to have been hiding in plain sight in France for more than a decade - in May 2020, a positive sign that French authorities may be more committed to devoting attention and resources to fighting impunity, French officials have made little effort to bring suspected génocidaires to justice.

So many Rwandan génocidaires continue to live freely in France. To date, just three génocidaires have been tried in France and convicted.