In deciding, upon taking office and with the agreement of the President of the French Republic, to restore normal diplomatic relations with Rwanda, I knew that I was embarking on a dangerous and essential path. Difficult as it was in human terms, complex as it was politically and hazardous as it was legally, the decision was nevertheless in my view indispensable. I based it on my familiarity with the country, with our common history and above all with the disasters we have experienced.

To understand relations between France and Rwanda it is no doubt necessary to go back to the Fashoda Incident, the covert and overt struggles among the colonial powers and an antiquated and irrational vision of Africa that readily misapprehended the reality of human beings and suffering, claimed that crimes were customs, saw the peoples of the regions as elusive or abstract and considered a humane approach to be a luxury for misguided utopians. This viewpoint has enabled some to interpret the Rwandan tragedy as a tribal issue and others to continue to deny its reality.

Yet there is the fact that hundreds of thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed, that smashed skulls littered the ground on which we walked, that there was a genocide very similar to our own genocides and yet very different and that we, our Army and our soldiers are now under a serious and unbearable cloud of suspicion.