Well, that is what the declassified French documents say:
The former French president François Mitterrand supported the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide despite clear warnings that mass killings of the Tutsi population were being orchestrated, according to declassified French documents.
The publication of the documents in today’s Le Monde for the first time confirms long-held suspicions against France. The previously secret diplomatic telegrams and government memos also suggest the late French president was obsessed with the danger of “Anglo-Saxon” influence gripping Rwanda. In three months from April 1994, at least a million Rwandans – mainly Tutsis – were systematically slaughtered in killings engineered by the Hutu regime to exterminate its ethnic rivals and repel the Uganda-trained Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
So, again, happens the same: how many MSM have published this in bold letters?
What would have happened if any other country -specially any Anglo-Saxon one- would have made this?
Also there’s the role played by Chirac in Iraq h/t Extreme Centre.org, persuading Saddam that he should not give the concessions which could have saved his regime. Saddam was sure that both the French -mainly- and the Russians were going to save him in the last hour. [My translation, original in French. If you understand French you MUST read it]. An excerpt:
The reality was that Chirac stabbed in the back of his allies, it was a treason to Iraqi people and all their hopes of development which are a common ground on every people going out of a dictatorship, that encouragement of the anti-Western feeling that nourrishes the terrorism (of which it is a vain hope that it would be only anti-American because thay can be separated) and that shameful anaesthesia of the democratic option -called cynical tyrannophilia– which should be considered as the real legacy of Chirac to history.
But Chirac, whose inmunity ended on June, 17th, 2007, is not the only one having bad times lately: French magistrates probing an alleged dirty tricks campaign have searched offices once used by the ex-prime minister, Dominique de Villepin in connection with the Clearstream scandal:
Mr de Villepin faces claims that he encouraged the leaking of papers which falsely implicated Mr Sarkozy in a bribery scandal, sources say.
Mr de Villepin has strenuously denied any involvement in the affair.
He has demanded to be declared an “assisted witness” in the inquiry, a move which would enhance his legal rights and give his lawyers access to police files.
He has curtailed a holiday to monitor the search.
A separate six-hour search of his home was conducted in Paris on Thursday.
Chirac’s silence
The alleged scandal is known as the Clearstream affair, after the Luxembourg clearing house in which Mr Sarkozy and other figures were falsely accused of holding secret accounts into which bribes were paid.
He was French foreign minister at the time of the alleged plot, but went on to become prime minister. The claims against him suggest he was hoping to scupper Mr Sarkozy’s presidential ambitions.
Jacques Chirac’s lawyer says he will not work with investigators
Justice officials say some information key to the inquiry was allegedly retrieved from the laptop computer of a former military intelligence general.
The computer files were said to support claims that Mr de Villepin initiated a meeting that led to Mr Sarkozy being falsely accused of receiving money in relation to a controversial defence contract – the sale of French frigates to Taiwan in 1991.
More in Financial Times:
Mr de Villepin, who was not at home at the time of the raid, on Thursday rejected the “unfounded accusations” against him and denied blackening the name of any politician in the Clearstream affair. He said he would vigorously defend himself.
The Elysée palace said it had no comment to make on a judicial matter.
The convoluted Clearstream affair paralysed the government for weeks last year as the three most senior ministers traded accusations through the media.
While in office, Mr de Villepin was questioned as a witness for 17 hours. Investigating magistrates also questioned Michèle Alliot-Marie, defence minister at the time, who employed Gen Rondot. Ms Alliot-Marie has since succeeded Mr Sarkozy as interior minister.
At the time the affair was widely seen as part of a far bigger power struggle between Mr de Villepin and Mr Sarkozy over who would become presidential candidate of the neo-Gaullist right and succeed Jacques Chirac as president.
More in International Herald Tribune:
The police raid was the first time the home of a former head of the French government has been searched and suggested that the three-year-old Clearstream affair may be entering a combustible stage. The case is a knot of secret investigations and allegations of impropriety involving the financial clearinghouse Clearstream in Luxembourg.
[…] One of the suspects, Jean-Louis Gergorin, a former vice president of the defense consortium EADS, said last year that he had given the list to a magistrate. According to excerpts of the Rondot files quoted by several newspapers, he had written on his computer that he was told “Gergorin received instructions from Dominique de Villepin, which were themselves formulated by the president of the republic, to destabilize Nicolas Sarkozy.”
Villepin, who testified in the case in December, is expected to be summoned for questioning by the end of the month, a judicial source said. If the two suspects cited in the recovered computer files confirm Rondot’s account in scheduled testimony on July 17 and 18, Villepin could face charges of “complicity in calumnious denunciation.”
The former prime minister has denied any wrongdoing. He issued a statement Thursday night saying he never “sought to investigate or compromise any political personality in the Clearstream affair.” Four people have been charged in the case so far.
Dominique de Villepin, after the searches: “I have lived some moments that, as you can imagine, they have not been agreeable, but I have to say that truth will prevail”.
De Villepin could face charges for this affair.
Related news:
- Sarkozy is going to support Dominic Strauss-Kahn for the International Monetary Fund, after Rodrigo Rato’s departure.
- Michélle Alliot-Marie wants to improve the knowledge of imams in France. She wants to create a French Islam… What???
- French representatives are speaking with Russian ones about missile defence, after First Deputy Prime Minister Ivanov has menaced with installing new missile forces in Kaliningrad: This region, in other times called East Prussia, with capital in Königsberg, was German territory till the end of the WWII. It constitutes a very important site, strategically speaking, between Lithuania and Poland, in the middle of European Union.
- France is one of the five or six countries, which are objetives of the Islamic terrorists. Roland Jacquard, President of the International Watchdog of terrorism. Video in French.
- French Housing Minister, Christine Boutin, suggested last year Bush was behind Sept. 11 attacks. Asked in an interview last November, before she became minister, whether she thought Bush might be behind the attacks, Boutin says: “I think it is possible. I think it is possible.” Boutin backs her assertion by pointing to the large number of people who visit websites that challenge the official line over the September 11 strikes against U.S. cities. “I know that the websites that speak of this problem are websites that have the highest number of visits … And I tell myself that this expression of the masses and of the people cannot be without any truth.” Boutin’s office sought to play down the remarks, saying that later in the same interview she says: “I’m not telling you that I adhere to that position.”
Spanish Pundit 