Rwandan genocide: Emmanuel Macron accepts his 2021 declarations on French “responsibility”

“There are no words to add” or “subtract.” Emmanuel Macron repeated this Sunday comments made on May 27, 2021 regarding the Rwandan genocide, when he said he had come to “recognize” France’s “responsibility” for the massacres during a trip to Kigali. “France takes over everything and that is exactly what I used that day,” the head of state insisted in a video broadcast this Sunday to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

“We all threw hundreds of thousands of victims into this hellish closed session,” he admitted in 2021 during his trip. “I have no words to add, no words to take away from what I told you that day,” the head of state insisted on Sunday. On Thursday he had already assessed that Paris, “which could have stopped the genocide together with its Western and African allies, lacked the will”, according to comments published by the Elysee Palace.

After decades of tension between Paris and Kigali, up to the severance of diplomatic relations between the two countries between 2006 and 2009, rapprochement was made possible by the creation of Emmanuel Macron’s commission, which in 2021 concluded that France had a “heavy and overwhelming responsibility” excluding complicity.