Open wound of the Rwandan genocide still festers

In a shadowy area of recent French history, the ideological battle over a wound that has yet to heal remains ongoing. Ranged against each other, two camps of intellectuals, politicians and activists are at war over a question that is as simple as it is terrible: is France in part to blame for the Rwandan genocide which claimed 800,000 lives in one month?

Close to 18 years after the massacre, the question remains the subject of virulent controversy, which says as much about internal political divides in France as it does about the 1994 genocide itself.

No other recent event has resulted in such entrenched positions, personal hatreds, and such a level of verbal fury: not even Bosnia or Kosovo. You have to go back to the Algerian war – or refer, to a lesser degree, to the Palestinian question – to find such serious allegations, and such a rift between two camps, which in this case can be roughly designated as “anti-France” against “eternal France.

The crime and the accusation are so enormous that certain actors appear to have lost their reason in their quest for definitive truth. Journalists and activists have assumed the role of police investigators, judges have donned the mantle of historians, while historians have masqueraded as investigative journalists: is Rwanda reponsible for such madness?....