Emmanuel Macron recognized “the responsibilities” of …

From Paris. Accept responsibility without asking for forgiveness or apologies? The French President, Emmanuel Macron, played in these two shots in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, when, evoking the genocide of the Tutsis (1990-1994) which killed nearly a million people, admitted, on the part of France, “the crushing responsibility in a spiral that led to the worst” without extending this sense of “responsibility” to guilt or complicity with the genocidal regime which carried out the massacre. In a speech delivered on Thursday, May 27 at the Gisozi Memorial where are the remains of 250,000 people who were victims of the genocide, Macron spoke of a “debt to the victims” and expressed the hope of “coming out of this night and walking together again. Emanuel Macron later added that “only those who have been through the night can, perhaps, forgive, give us the gift, in this case, to forgive us”. Forgiveness can take time, and the night will be long as well. Truth – or its complexity – is subject to tons of interpretations, manipulations, ideological disputes, and memorable conveniences. In addition, both in France and Rwanda, various sectors have been calling for three decades for the truth to emerge once and for all, both on the role that Paris played in triggering the massacre and in the subsequent protection of the genocidal members of the Hutus. ethnicity. In France, the subject of Rwanda is like a fiery breaststroke that burns the hands and the memory of the socialists. The late socialist president François Mitterrand (1981-1995) was in power when all the mechanisms that led to the genocide were put into action. His role, and that of who was at the time his Prime Minister, the Conservative Edouard Balladur, it was never transparent.

Emmanuel Macron sought to provide another brushstroke of light on this bloody saga and commissioned the historian Vincent Duclert investigate the facts. Two years later, Duclert’s academic report was published in March 2021. The report contains the same ambivalence as the president’s speech in Kigali. He lists the overwhelming mistakes made when the regime that carried out the killings was supported militarily and politically, but sees no sign of complicity in that endorsement. The text “France, Rwanda and the genocide of the Tutsis” asks if France “was complicit in the genocide of the Tutsis? The answer is no: the report says: “If this is to be understood as a desire to join the genocidal operation, nothing in the files consulted proves it.” However, the investigation recognizes the links of Paris with a regime which “encouraged racist massacres”, denounces the fact that France “remained blind to the preparation of a genocide by the most radical elements of the regime” and ends up admitting that it was found “a whole of serious and overwhelming responsibilities. ”France of the Liberal Conservative President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974-1981) and that of the socialist Mitterrand (1981-1995) supported the Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana (1973-1994). Mitterrand was called to break with this double ethnic and colonialist vision, namely the good Hutus and allies and the rebel Tutsis, inherited from the terrible Belgian colonization. He does not have. His African policy and the confrontation with the United States in the Great Lakes region led him to preserve it and, with it, to continue to be the pillar of a racist and murderous regime. The very trigger for the last episode of the genocide, of course, the death of President Habyarimana after a missile struck his plane on April 6, 1994, is still shrouded in a heavy cloud of mystery. The Duclert report is 1,200 pages long and boils down to a portrait of a political, military, administrative and ethical shipwreck of Mitterrand and his advisers. There was, says the text, “a crisis of public action” and a “personal” bankruptcy of Mitterrand “.

The philosophy expounded by Emmanuel Macron in Kigali is similar to the report: “crushing responsibility” is admitted while excluding any responsibility for the genocide, as well as any principle of repentance or forgiveness. Emmanuel Macron has, however, taken an important step that follows in the footsteps of former President Nicolas Sarkozy. The president was the first French president to visit Rwanda after the genocide and at that time he also recognized “serious mistakes” and a “form of blindness of the French authorities”. Should Macron apologize or repent? La respuesta a esa pregunta, en este contexto preciso, merece reflexión porque, a su manera actual y potente, el perdón y el arrepentimiento suelen condenar los hechos al olvido, trazan una frontera como si con un par de palabras se pudiese borrar la historia y pain. The final truth about the Rwandan genocide is unwritten. This truth is still the subject of political disputes between the faithful of Mitterrand and the right and it will take much longer for history to emerge from the shadows where colonial culture and ideological morality have still locked it.