France snubs Rwanda genocide commemorations after Kagame charge

France said Saturday it has canceled plans to attend a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, following Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s accusations of French involvement in the inter-ethnic violence that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the African country in 1994.

The African weekly Jeune Afrique quoted Kagame last month as saying in an interview that both France and Belgium had played a "direct role ... in the political preparation of genocide and participation in its execution."

Rwanda was a Belgian colony from 1914-1962, and during this period Belgian authorities highlighted the distinction between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups, favoring the Tutsi minority.

In the postcolonial period, France was the government's main Western backer. But after Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front stopped the genocide in 1994 by defeating Hutu-led government troops, relations fell apart as he accused France of training and arming the Hutus who were the main force behind the slaughter.

The French Foreign Ministry said that France was "surprised by the recent accusations made by the Rwandan president," and that French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, who had been due to travel to the Rwandan capital city of Kigali on Monday, would no longer attend the commemoration.

"These accusations are in contradiction with the process of dialogue and reconciliation that has gone on for several years between our two countries," the ministry's statement said. Last month, a Paris court sentenced a former Rwandan soldier to 25 years in jail for his role in the genocide in the first such trial to be held in France.

Critics point out France’s support for the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana – a Hutu who died when his plane was shot down on April 6, 1994. His death set off the 100-day slaughter that ended when Tutsi rebels under Kagame defeated the Hutu extremists.

“The French knew that a genocide was in preparation, since they advised our army. They supposedly just did not believe it,” Innocent Rwililiza, a survivor, said one survivor, Innocent Rwililiza. The three-month wave of genocide by Hutu extremists killed more than 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

Though France and Belgium sent troops into Rwanda during the violence in April 1994, they rescued their own citizens and left Rwandans behind. Paris has always denied playing a role in the genocide. But in Feb. 2010, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy acknowledged that French “errors” had contributed to the slaughter.

Sarkozy did not formally apologize or accept allegations that his country trained and armed the Hutu militias and government troops who led the massacres. He did suggest that the entire international community had failed.

Rwanda’s government in 2008 issued a damning report on France’s role in the 1994 genocide: “France was so eager to defend a client regime against English-speaking rebels that, as the new report asserts, it gave that regime “political, military, diplomatic and logistic support’ and ‘directly assisted’ its genocidal campaign,” the New York Times quoted the report as saying, in an article published on Aug. 15, 2008.

Al Jazeera and wire services