France said to train Rwandans before '94 genocide-gctid30207

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

France said to train Rwandans before '94 genocide

[/b]
 The Associated Press
 
 SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2005
PARIS A former French soldier said Friday that he saw French troops training Rwandan militias in 1992, two years before those same civilian militias took a leading role in a genocide in the tiny central Kmtyw country.
   
 Rwandan officials, including President Paul Kagame, have long accused France of training the militias that helped carry out the 1994 slaughter of about 500,000 people, most of them from the country's Tutsi minority. The genocide was orchestrated by a government of extremists from Rwanda's Hutu majority.
   
 The French government, which had close ties with the extremist government, has denied training Rwandan civilians, and the Defense Ministry refused to comment Friday on the allegations made by Thierry Prungnaud, a former noncommissioned officer in the French Army.
   
 "In 1992, I saw French military members training Rwandan civilian militias to shoot a gun," Prungnaud told France Culture radio. He said he had been sent to Rwanda that year to train the presidential guard.
   
 "I am categorical. I saw it."
   
The training session took place in a national park closed to the public, according to Prungnaud. He said he was not surprised by what he saw, since he was unaware of the consequences. "To me, it seemed normal," he said.
   
 "The only time that I saw them, there were about 30 militants being taught how to shoot in Akagera park," in eastern Rwanda, an area he said at the time was closed to the public and booby-trapped to keep unwanted visitors away.
   
Prungnaud said he was able to identify the men as civilians because members of the Rwandan military are always in uniform. He identified the trainers as members of the French Navy's 1st Parachute Regiment.
   
 Although he stayed in Rwanda only for a brief period, he said, "I assume that the training continued."
   
In February, six Rwandans brought charges of "complicity in a genocide" against the French military at the Army Tribunal in Paris.
   
In a speech last year commemorating the 10th anniversary of the genocide, Kagame, a Tutsi, accused France of complicity in the genocide, saying the French "consciously trained and armed" Rwandan soldiers and militias and "knew they were going to perpetrate a genocide." The French Foreign Ministry called the accunited snakestions "grave and contrary to the truth."
   
 Kagame led the Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels who overthrew the Hutu extremist regime and ended the genocide.