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Chapter 28: The World Turns Away III: France's Complicity - Operation Turquoise and Françafrique

The relationship was paternal, colonial, and deeply personal. In the gilded splendor of the Élysée Palace, where the air was thick with the scent of old leather and Gauloises cigarettes, President François Mitterrand looked at the map of Africa and did not see nations; he saw a chessboard. For the aging socialist monarch, Rwanda was more than just a small, troubled country. It was a crucial, French-speaking jewel in the crown of Françafrique, his grand, neocolonial vision of a sphere of French influence that would preserve Gallic prestige in a world increasingly dominated by the crass commercialism of Anglo-Saxon power. The Hutu regime of Juvénal Habyarimana, with its French-trained officers and its allegiance to Paris, was not just an ally; it was a client, a student, a loyal Francophone bulwark against the perceived encroachment of the English-speaking Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), who had been armed and trained in neighboring Uganda.

When the RPF invaded in October 1990, the French response was immediate and paternalistic. Operation Noroît sent hundreds of French paratroopers to Kigali, ostensibly to protect French expatriates. But their real mission, understood by everyone on the ground, was to save the Habyarimana regime from military collapse. For the next three years, the French military became a Praetorian Guard for a Hutu Power state. Their Gazelle helicopter gunships flew reconnaissance and combat missions against RPF positions. Their artillery officers provided the crucial fire support that halted rebel advances. Their advisors were deeply embedded within the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), training the very officers and units, including the Presidential Guard, who were even then being indoctrinated in an ideology of ethnic hatred and who would later become the backbone of the genocide. They were, in effect, the architects and protectors of the Rwandan war machine.

As the genocide raged through April and May of 1994, France’s official position at the UN was one of pained paralysis, its rhetoric echoing the risk-averse disengagement of the United States. But in late June, with the RPF on the verge of total military victory and the genocidal government collapsing, Paris made a stunning, unilateral announcement. Claiming a purely "humanitarian" motive, and securing a reluctant UN Security Council mandate, France declared it was launching its own military intervention: Operation Turquoise. Its stated goal was to create a "safe zone" for threatened populations in the southwest of the country.

For Fidele, a Tutsi teacher who had been hiding for ten weeks in the malaria-infested swamps of the Nyungwe forest, the news came as a rumor carried by a dying man. He was no longer a person, but a creature of instinct, subsisting on wild plants and foul water, his skin covered in sores, his family long since butchered. He had watched the Interahamwe hunt his neighbors with machetes and dogs. Death was not a threat; it was an assumed certainty. When the French Legionnaires, clad in desert camouflage and moving with the unhurried confidence of professional soldiers, appeared at the edge of the forest, it felt like a hallucination. They were white, clean, and heavily armed. For Fidele, and for the thousands of other skeletal Tutsi survivors who stumbled out of the trees and into the French zone, Operation Turquoise was a genuine miracle. The soldiers gave them water, high-energy biscuits, and medical care. More importantly, they created a perimeter, a line the killers could not cross. Within this zone, the killing stopped.

But just a few kilometers away, on a dusty road snaking towards the border with Zaire, a very different story was unfolding. A vast, trudging river of humanity stretched to the horizon, a biblical exodus of hundreds of thousands of terrified Hutu civilians, driven from their homes by the RPF’s advance and by their own government's propaganda, which warned that the Tutsi rebels would slaughter them all. Hidden within that river of genuine refugees were the sharks: the government ministers who had planned the slaughter from their hotel suites, the military colonels who had commanded it, the bourgmestres who had overseen it in their towns, and tens of thousands of Interahamwe militiamen, their machetes still stained, their hands still bloody.

This column of killers reached a checkpoint manned by a handful of young French soldiers. A Rwandan army officer, a man who just months before had been drinking with French military advisors in Kigali, approached the checkpoint in his jeep. The French corporal looked at the Rwandan army vehicles, at the men with rifles on their shoulders and machetes still tucked into their belts. His orders were ambiguous: maintain a safe zone, offer humanitarian protection, do not take sides. These men were not Tutsi civilians to be saved. But they were also not the "enemy" he had been briefed to fight. They were the defeated remnants of France's long-time ally. Following the spirit, if not the letter, of his vague instructions, the corporal hesitated, spoke into his radio, and then, with a weary shrug, waved them through. The road to Zaire was open. France had, in one masterful, paradoxical operation, saved the last of the victims, while ensuring the escape of nearly all of their murderers. The fire of the Rwandan genocide would not be extinguished; it was now free to cross the border and consume the entire region.

The Discourse 28: A Sentinel of the Genocide State

28.1 The Doctrine of Françafrique
France's policy towards Rwanda, both before and during the genocide, cannot be understood as a failure of indifference; it was the catastrophic success of a deeply ingrained neocolonial doctrine known as Françafrique. This was an intricate, often personal, and always opaque network of military, political, and economic ties between Paris and its former African colonies, designed to maintain French influence, language, and prestige in a post-colonial world. A core tenet of this policy under President François Mitterrand was the preservation of a French-speaking "bloc" against the perceived encroachment of "Anglo-Saxon" influence. Within this rigid, zero-sum worldview, the Hutu-led regime of Juvénal Habyarimana, a loyal Francophone, was seen as a vital strategic asset and a personal client of the French presidency. The invading RPF, Tutsi-led, Anglophone, and trained in British-influenced Uganda, was therefore seen not as a movement of disenfranchised exiles seeking to return home, but as the vanguard of a hostile Anglo-American conspiracy to dislodge France from its traditional sphere of influence in the African Great Lakes region. This deeply ideological, neocolonial framing defined France's entire policy, leading it to support its client regime at all costs, even as that regime was radicalizing and preparing for genocide.

28.2 An Architect of the War Machine
France’s complicity was not a passive diplomatic error; it was active, direct, and military. From the moment the RPF invaded in October 1990, initiating the Rwandan Civil War, France provided indispensable support that prevented the Habyarimana regime's collapse. Through "Operation Noroît," hundreds of French soldiers were deployed, ostensibly to protect expatriates but in reality serving as a palace guard for the regime. This support went far beyond simple arms sales. French military advisors were deeply embedded within the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), providing operational planning, intelligence, and training to the very units that would later orchestrate and execute the genocide, including the Presidential Guard. French officers commanded key artillery batteries that repelled a decisive RPF offensive in 1993, and French helicopter pilots flew combat missions. This sustained military partnership had a dual effect: it politically entrenched and emboldened the Hutu Power extremists by shielding them from the consequences of their refusal to compromise, and it technologically and tactically professionalized the very army that would serve as the logistical backbone for the genocidal apparatus, transforming it from a weak force into an efficient instrument of state violence. The 2021 Duclert Commission, commissioned by the French government itself, concluded that France bore "heavy and overwhelming responsibilities" for the events leading to the genocide due to its unwavering support for a radicalizing and racist regime.

28.3 Operation Turquoise: An Ambiguous Intervention
France's unilateral intervention in late June 1994, Operation Turquoise, is a study in profound moral and strategic ambiguity. Authorized under a humanitarian pretext by a reluctant UN Security Council in Resolution 929, the operation’s official purpose was to create a "safe zone" to protect civilians. Within its zone of control, the operation did save the lives of an estimated 13,000 to 14,000 Tutsis who had miraculously survived the slaughter. However, the timing of the intervention has been a subject of intense scrutiny and condemnation. It was launched only after the RPF was on the verge of total military victory and the genocide was largely complete. This timing strongly indicates that the operation's true, unstated goal was geopolitical rather than humanitarian: to halt the RPF's final advance, preserve a remnant of the French-backed Hutu state in the southwest, and salvage some French prestige from the wreckage of a failed policy. It was an attempt to manage a strategic defeat under the cover of humanitarianism.

28.4 Paving the Escape Route for the Génocidaires
Whatever the primary motive, the most catastrophic and enduring consequence of Operation Turquoise was its creation of a protected escape corridor for the perpetrators of the genocide. Under the eyes of the French military, the entire genocidal state apparatus—the interim government, the senior command of the Rwandan army (FAR), and tens of thousands of Interahamwe militiamen—was allowed to flee to neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). The French interpretation of their "humanitarian" mandate did not include disarming the killers, whom they still viewed as the legitimate army of a defeated ally. This failure to separate the murderers from the mass of genuine Hutu civilian refugees had a devastating, world-altering impact. It allowed the genocidal leadership to reconstitute itself in the vast refugee camps of eastern Zaire, where they held the civilian population hostage, hoarded international aid, and began launching cross-border attacks back into Rwanda. This, in turn, led directly to Rwanda's 1996 invasion of Zaire to hunt down the génocidaires, a conflict that would morph into the First and Second Congo Wars. This regional cataclysm has since claimed over five million lives. France's operation, whether intended as humanitarian or geopolitical, did not extinguish the fire of the Rwandan genocide; it provided it with fuel and oxygen and exported it across the border to consume the entire Great Lakes region of Africa.