PREVIEW
Allegations may reopen bitter tit-for-tat dispute between Kigali and Paris
A lawsuit accusing the Banque de France of complicity in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda is set to reopen sores between Paris and President Paul Kagame’s government.
The complaint was filed on 4 December by attorneys Matilda Ferey and Joseph Breham on behalf of three civil parties – Dafroza and Alain Gauthier, along with the Collective of Civil Parties for Rwanda – with the senior investigating judge of a Paris court’s unit for crimes against humanity.
At the heart of the case is that the bank authorised seven transfers from the Bank of Rwanda’s account, totalling 3.17 million francs (€486,000). These included payments to French firm Alcatel, which is alleged to have paid for satellite phones.
It is not the first time a French bank has been indicted in relation to the genocide. In 2017, a legal complaint was filed against BNP Paribas over transfers worth US$1.3m to a South African arms dealer that facilitated the purchase of 80 tons of arms and ammunition from the Seychelles to Rwanda.
The role of then President François Mitterrand’s government in supplying weapons that were used during the three-month genocide in 1994, as well as breaches of a United Nations arms embargo that was imposed in May 1994, has been a thorn in relations between Paris and Kigali for decades.
In 2008, President Kagame published the report of a commission that implicated the French state in the genocide, a move widely seen as a response to a 2006 request by French magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière for international arrest warrants against Kagame and eight senior officials of his Front Patriotique Rwandais (FPR) (AC Vol 49 No 18, The dead bite back). The warrants were on charges for the 6 April 1994 murder of President Juvénal Habyarimana, whose death in a plane crash was the spark for the genocide.
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