It is April 7, 2020. Twenty-six years ago, men, women and children were massacred because they were Tutsi. 26 years ago, my parents, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts lived through the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, some died, the others are now survivors. It must also be said that 26 years ago France collaborated with the genocidal Hutu regime. The question that arises for me today, as a Franco-Rwandan, is that of memory, ibuka in Kinyarwanda. Remember, but how?
It is clear that this year the commemorations cannot take place like in previous years, that the confinement does not allow us to come together to commemorate those murdered because Tutsi. When I woke up, wanting to think of my dead, our dead, those exterminated, I listened to the Ibuka song (1), and hearing them sing a single question echoed in my head: How?
How can we manage to remember them, when we still have no access to the truth?! How to remember when we do not fully know why and how? How to remember then that the archives of the French State concerning the genocide of the Tutsi are still not accessible?! It is not for lack of having requested access to the archives, of having said that it was necessary for the truth to be established. We remember Annick Kayitesi-Jozan's column in Liberation (2), in which she wrote three years ago: "Twenty-three years Mr. President, that we beg for ours not to remain excluded from the community of humans, that which has the right, if not to justice, at least to truth."
I myself initiated a petition - of almost 4000 signatures - in 2017 addressed to the President of the Republic and to Dominique Bertinotti (representative of the archives of François Mitterrand) for full access to the archives of our country concerning the genocide of the Tutsi (3), and I recalled in an interview for Inrocks how essential the truth was: “It has been more than twenty years since this crime against humanity was committed. For more than twenty years the survivors have been trying to rebuild themselves, to commemorate their dead, but this will be an impossible task for them until they have access to the truth!".(4)
Yet the revelations follow one another. We can already quote the revelations of the journalist Patrick Saint-Exupéry on the collaboration of the French State (5), the latest to date published in the Revue XXI (6) on the rearmament of the Hutu genocidists by the French State, and the role played by Hubert Védrine, Secretary General of the Elysée at the time. Hubert Védrine who would have indicated in a handwritten note in the margin of the document evoking the confusion of the soldiers following the order to rearm the genocidaires to "stick to the fixed directives", therefore to "rearm" the killers.
We also know the revelations of General Jean Varret (7), the passivity of the French army in the face of the Bisesero massacre (8), the revelations of the former French officer Guillaume Ancel (9), and the whole story between Rwanda and France (10). I can only come to one conclusion: the French State by its perseverance in lying continues to persecute the Tutsi after having collaborated in their massacre.
We, the survivors and their children, those who have been massacred, who have lost their families, their loved ones, their friends, whose world has been turned upside down, must fight to find out how, and by whom, and with what complicity they were exterminated. Their pain does not stop at the end of the massacre, it is revived by the French lie. The massacre is obviously not enough for some, we should forget. Even when some are fighting to remember their dead, fighting so that the world never forgets what they lived through, the French state is now treating them as enemies. We remember Alain Ngirinshuti, whose naturalization was refused for "lack of loyalty to France and its institutions" because of his membership in the association of survivors Ibuka (11).
The behavior of the French State in regards of the survivors of the Tutsi genocide is indeed persecution: not allowing access to archives is not simply doing nothing, it is going looking for the dead in the tomb – it should be remembered that these dead have no burial, knowing that bodies are still found today (12) – to exterminate them again. It is persecuting them a second time. Even in death they have no rest.
The French State does not do anything, on the contrary it does everything against the truth, the French State acts actively against what would be for us a means of truly commemorating our dead : access to the truth. Not so long ago that last month the Senate hosted a conference on “Africa of the Great Lakes” to which deniers of the genocide of Tusi were invited (13). Even when the French State claims to act for the truth, it does not do so: I am thinking of the commission of inquiry made up of historians responsible for studying the French archives in Rwanda, some of whom historians have been discarded like Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (14), a commission in which there is no specialist in the Great Lakes region (15).
Massacred, exterminated, persecuted, reduced to silence, it is only in the fight for the truth that the Tutsi can attempt to commemorate their dead. Since we do not have access to the truth, it is in the struggle for this truth that our dead will not be forgotten.
(1) Ibuka - Suzanne Nyiranyamibwa (Bxls-2006)https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1cnp7
(2) https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2017/09/17/si-ma-mere-devait-rester-cafard_1597019
(5) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXygweundBo
(6) http://www.revue21.fr/zoom_sur/rearmez-les/