Rwandan president accuses France of having a hand in 1994 genocide which left 800,000 dead
France’s ambassador to Rwanda on Monday said that Rwandan authorities barred him from attending ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

French ambassador, Michel Flesch, said that the Rwandan foreign minister telephoned him and informed him that he was no longer accredited for the ceremonies.

The ambassador was supposed to attend the ceremony instead of French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira who cancelled her trip after Rwandan President Paul Kagame accused France of participating in the genocide.

Kagame told African Weekly “Jeune Afrique” that France had a hand in 1994 genocide which left 800,000 dead.

“Both France and Belgium had a direct role in the political preparation for the genocide,” said Kagame.

Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo also asked France to face up to the “difficult truth” over its actions two decades ago, in a statement released Sunday.

On Monday President Kagame and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon together lit a flame at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in memory of those killed.

The flame will burn for 100 days, the time the genocide lasted. Official mourning already began three months ago with the flame of remembrance touring more than 30 towns and villages across Rwanda.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the Rwandan genocide as “one of the most terrifying episodes of targeted ethnic violence in recent world history.”

Between April and July 1994, Hutu extremists in Rwanda carried out a genocide aimed at wiping out the Tutsi minority. Many Hutu who attempted to hide or defend Tutsi and those who opposed the genocide were also killed, according HRW.

The diplomatic row between the two countries started since 2006 when a French judge called to investigate the incumbent Rwandan president, Kagame, over the shooting down of the former Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane in 1994, which sparked the genocide.

France always denied any involvement in the genocide, yet former president Nicolas Sarkozy admitted in a visit to Kigali in 2010, that his country made “serious errors of judgment” at the time.

On Saturday, Alain Juppe, minister of foreign affairs at the time of genocide, writing in his blog, he urged President Francois Hollande to defend “the honor of France.”

“It would be intolerable today that we identified as the main culprits,” he said. “I call on the President of the Republic and the French government to unambiguously defend the honor of France, the honor of its army honor and of its diplomats.”

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