Investigating judges in Paris ordered a general dismissal of the investigation into the inaction of the French army during the Bisesero massacres at the end of June 1994, during the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, announced the Paris prosecutor’s office, Wednesday, September 7.
In this affair, the associations Survie, Ibuka, FIDH and six survivors of Bisesero, civil parties, accused the army and France of “complicity in genocide” for having, according to them, knowingly abandoned for three days the Tutsi civilians who had taken refuge in the hills of Bisesero, in the west of the country, allowing the massacre of hundreds of them to be perpetrated by the genocidaires, from June 27 to 30, 1994.
In their order dated September 1, the magistrates believe that the investigation, opened in 2005, did not establish “the direct participation of the French military forces in abuses committed in the refugee camps, nor any complicity by aid or assistance to the genocidal forces or complicity by abstention by the French soldiers on the hills of Bisesero in the absence of intention of the latter facilitate the commission of the crime of genocide and crimes against humanity”then said in a press release the Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau.
This decision was foreseeable since none of the five general officers involved had been indicted at the end of the investigation concluded in July 2018, a step however necessary before considering a possible trial.
Historical controversy
The prosecution had in fact requested in May 2021 a dismissal of this sensitive file, emblematic of the historical controversy over the objectives of the Turquoise military-humanitarian mission, deployed in Rwanda under a UN mandate to put an end to the genocide of the Tutsi. .
According to the UN, the massacres caused more than 800,000 deaths between April and July 1994, mainly within the Tutsi minority.