dismissal in the investigation of the French army in Bisesero

French justice has dismissed the investigation into the charges of complicity in genocide and complicity in crimes against humanity which targeted the French army during the massacres committed on the hills of Bisesero, in Rwanda, in 1994 , announced Wednesday, September 7 the Paris prosecutor’s office in a press release.

In their dismissal order issued on 1^er September, the investigating judges considered that “the elements of the procedure did not establish the direct participation of the French military forces in the abuses committed in the refugee camps, nor any complicity by aid or assistance to the genocidal forces or complicity by abstention of the French soldiers on the hills of Bisesero”.

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The classified procedure

This decision is consistent at the requisitions of the Paris prosecutor’s officewhich had estimated in May 2021 that the investigation opened since 2005 had not made it possible to establish “no aid or assistance from the French military forces during the commission of abuses, any adhesion of the latter to the criminal plan pursued by the genocidal forces nor any abstention from intervening in the face of crimes constituting genocide or crimes against the ‘humanity’.

The associations Ibuka, Survie, FIDH and six survivors of Bisesero accused the French military force Turquoise, deployed in Rwanda under a UN mandate, of having deliberately abandoned to the genocidaires hundreds of Tutsi refugees in the hills of Bisesero, in the western Rwanda. At their request, the report “France, Rwanda and the Tutsi Genocide (1990-1994)” written by a commission of historians chaired by Vincent Duclert, returned in March 2021 before a trip by President Emmanuel Macron to Kigali, had been sent to the instruction last year.

But the investigating magistrates found no reason to relaunch the judicial investigation because “the documents referenced by the authors of the report in support of their findings, in their vast majority, were already in the procedure”explains the prosecution in its press release.

The procedure, which targeted five officers of Operation Turquoise on counts of “complicity in genocide”, “complicity in crimes against humanity” and “conspiracy to commit genocide or a crime against humanity”, is therefore definitely classified.

The World with Reuters