RETURN TO KIGALI

Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, autumn 2018.
Impeccable streets lined with glass facades, skyscrapers, beautifully manicured parks. Quiet avenues where the latest models of cars glide amid nonchalant and disciplined traffic.
This city bears no resemblance to the one I knew ten years ago. It has undergone a total metamorphosis. Rwanda, now in full economic boom is the model African city, as cited by international institutions.

On the third floor of one of these glass and concrete buildings are the premises of an association of psychiatrists and therapists working with survivors of the genocide. I knew the man who set it up - Dr. Naason Munyandamusta - an exceptional man. A psychiatrist who went back home to devote himself to rebuilding so many damaged souls and in so doing to rebuilding the soul of his country. Naason died two years ago, and his role is now continued by the team he formed.

Today, there is an increase in the cases of trauma among young patients born after 1994, who did not experience the genocide directly. Behind Rwanda's impeccable 2018 showcase the effects of the genocide are still working their poison. What happened in 1994 remains and will remain a story about which it is "impossible to remain silent, and impossible to speak" as my friend Naason the psychiatrist put it.

We look carefully at some drawings made by patients as part of their therapy. Disturbing shapes, broken, chopped lines, a lot of red, a lot of violence. Sometimes we recognize militiamen, weapons, machetes. And then there, in a corner, a soldier in uniform, machete in hand. I look more closely ... The soldier is white. On his sleeve, a French flag.

Throughout my travels in the country, I heard the same accusations against the French authorities. Some seemed outrageous to me. How could I begin to imagine that my country, France, took a direct part in the genocide of the Tutsi? In Kigali, many people feel deeply convinced about it. When conversations homed more precisely onto subjects and were less formal - we were able to distinguish between the regime's propaganda, for which the memory of the genocide and the accusations against France act as a real national binding agent, and the disturbing and perfectly legitimate questions about the very great partiality of the French authorities throughout this tragedy. A bias, which gradually transformed into a complicity with the forces directly responsible for the genocide.

Here are the different lines of investigation that we will take, each one offering potential new revelations. Combined with a certain amount of existing information but which has been disseminated among a mass of published information on the subject, these new elements, be they in the form of testimonies or documents, enable us to highlight a real overall picture of this giant jigsaw puzzle.

A jigsaw puzzle spread out over different levels, from the Rwandan hills to the UN Security Council, through the neighbouring countries of Rwanda and major Western capitals. France is not the only country responsible for the paralysis of the international community. But as we will see, it was the only one in a position to stop the infernal machine.
Which it did not do.