France, j'accuse

This past month has seen the phrase, "crimes against humanity" feature heavily in the media with the issuing of a warrant for the arrest of Omar al-Bashir, the incumbent president of Sudan, by the ICC, for complicity in the ongoing atrocities in Darfur. Then at last, the Serbian government decided to get a bit serious and arrested Radovan Karadzic, former president of Serbia and architect of the massacres in Srebenica.

Yesterday, the Rwanda commission that spent 2 years conducting an inquiry produced a 500 page report that detailed the roles former senior French government officials played in the mother of all massacres - the 1994 savage, wanton killing of 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates, by Hutu extremists, in 100 days while the rest of the world sat on their hands and the UN Security Council failed to beef up their contingent of peacekeepers, despite the increasingly beleaguered requests of their Canadian head, Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire - Kofi Annan was the UN Head of Peacekeeping Operations, Madelaine Albright was Secretary of State and Bill Clinton was president of the US of A.

The attempt to ethnically cleanse Rwanda of all Tutsi shone a light on the resident evil that lies dormant in each and everyone of us and which seemingly takes very little to surface. It wasn't just that the Tutsi and Hutu moderates were killed, it was the manner in which they were killed; hacked to pieces with machetes, burnt to death in schools and churches - places where they had gone to seek refuge and sometimes with the complicity of the headmaster, nun or priest (so much for religious tolerance). The gruesomeness of the killings was attributed to the fact that in the eyes of the Hutu extremists, the Tutsis and Hutu moderates were "inyenzi" (cockroaches) - the Hutu extremists' propaganda machine, Radio Mille Colines was very effective in dehumanising the Tutsi and the Hutu moderates.

Women were systematically raped in front of their families, mothers then their daughters, while the fathers and sons watched helplessly.

The massacre ended when Paul Kagame, Rwanda's current president, led the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) to drive the Hutu extremists out of Rwanda. Alongside the fleeing Hutu extremists were ordinary Hutus who poured into the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), fearful of Tutsi vengeance.

So while the architects of this vicious genocide were undoubtedly Hutu, the report alleges that they were aided and abetted by former senior French government officials - I wonder if will be seeing those named in the report at the ICC anytime soon.