Former French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur said on Wednesday that in 1994 France avoided becoming an “acolyte” of the Rwandan Hutu genocidal government by preventing a French military operation in Kigali, which he said was called for by the entourage of Socialist President François Mitterrand.
In the spring of 1994, when the Tutsi genocide was underway in Rwanda, “all those who advocated an intervention by the French army were in fact in favour of the Hutu government”, and wanted to support it against the Tutsi rebels of the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front), Balladur said in an interview with France 24 and RFI.