France to open archive for period covering Rwandan genocide

 PARIS (AP) — France’s role before and during the 1994 Rwandan genocide was a “monumental failure” that the country must acknowledge, the lead author of a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron said, as the country is about to open its archives from this period to the public.

The report, published in March, concluded that French authorities remained blind to the preparations for genocide as they supported the “racist” and “violent” government of then-Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and then reacted too slowly in appreciating the extent of the killings. But it cleared them of complicity in the slaughter that left over 800,000 people dead, mainly ethnic Tutsis and the Hutus who tried to protect them.

Macron’s decision to commission the report — and open the archives to the public — are part of his efforts to more fully confront the French role in the genocide and to improve relations with Rwanda, including making April 7, the day the massacre began, a day of commemoration. While long overdue, the moves may finally help the two countries reconcile.

Historian Vincent Duclert, who led the commission that studied France’s actions in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994, told The Associated Press that “for 30 years, the debate on Rwanda was full of lies, violence, manipulations, threats of trials. That was a suffocating atmosphere.”

Duclert said it was important to acknowledge France’s role for what it was: a “monumental failure.”

“Now we must speak the truth,” he added. “And that truth will allow, we hope, (France) to get a dialogue and a reconciliation with Rwanda and Africa.”

Macron said in a statement that the report marks “a major step forward” toward understanding France’s actions in Rwanda.

About 8,000 archive documents that the commission examined for two years, including some that were previously classified, will be made accessible to the general public starting Wednesday, the 27th anniversary of the start of the killings.

Duclert said documents — mostly from the French presidency and the prime minister’s office — show how then-President Francois Mitterrand and the small group of diplomats and military officials surrounding him shared views inherited from colonial times, including the desire to maintain influence on a French-speaking country, that led them to keep supporting Habyarimana despite warning signs, including through delivery of weapons and military training in the years prior to the genocide.

“Instead of ultimately supporting the democratization and peace in Rwanda, the French authorities in Rwanda supported the ethnicization, the radicalization of (Habyarimana’s) government,” Duclert stressed.

France was “not complicit in the criminal act of genocide,” he said, but “its action contributed to strengthening (the genocide’s) mechanisms.”

“And that’s an enormous intellectual responsibility,” he said.

The report also criticized France’s “passive policy” in April and May 1994, at the height of the genocide.

That was a “terrible lost opportunity,” Duclert noted. “In 1994, there was a possibility to stop the genocide … and it did not happen. France and the world bear a considerable guilt.”

Eventually they did step in. Operation Turquoise, a French-led military intervention backed by the U.N., started on June 22.

Duclert said that France’s “blindness must be questioned and, maybe, brought to trial,” though he insisted it was not the commission’s role to suggest charges.

The report was welcomed as an important step by activists who had long hoped France would officially acknowledge its responsibilities in the genocide. On a visit to Rwanda in 2010, then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted that his country had made “errors of judgment” and “political errors” regarding the genocide — but the report may allow Macron to go further.

Dafroza Gauthier, a Rwandan who lost more than 80 members of her family in the mass killing, welcomed it as a “a great document against genocide denial.”

“For 27 years, or longer, we were in a kind of fog,” said Gauthier, who with her husband, Alain, founded the Collective of Civil Plaintiffs for Rwanda, a French-based group that seeks the prosecution of alleged perpetrators of the genocide. “The report is clearly stating things.”

There also may be a shift in the attitude of Rwandan authorities, who welcomed the report in a brief statement but have given no detailed response. They said the conclusions of their own report, to be released soon, “will complement and enrich” it.

That’s different from Rwanda’s firm assertions of French complicity as recently as 2017. Relations between the two countries, strained for years since the genocide, have improved under Macron’s presidency.

Félicien Kabuga, a Rwandan long wanted for his alleged role in supplying machetes to the killers, was arrested outside Paris last May.

And in July an appeals court in Paris upheld a decision to end a years-long investigation into the plane crash that killed Habyarimana and set off the genocide. That probe aggravated Rwanda’s government because it targeted several people close to President Paul Kagame for their alleged role, charges they denied.

It now appears Rwandan authorities will accept “the olive branch” from Paris, said Dismas Nkunda, head of watchdog group Atrocities Watch Africa who covered the genocide as a journalist.

“Maybe they’re saying, ‘The past is the past. Let’s move on,’” he said of Rwandan authorities.

The Gauthiers said the report and access to the archives may also help activists in their efforts to bring people involved in the genocide to justice — including potentially French officials who served at the time.

There have been three Rwandan nationals convicted of genocide so far in France, they stressed. Four others are expected to go on trial. That’s out of about 30 complaints against Rwandan nationals living in France that their group has filed with authorities.

That’s still “very few” compared to the more than 100 alleged perpetrators who are believed to live on French territory, they said.

Associated Press journalists Jeffrey Schaeffer in Paris and Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, contributed to this report.

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Latest attack pushes US Capitol Police further toward crisis

 WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Capitol Police are struggling.

One officer was killed and another injured when a driver slammed into them at a barricade Friday afternoon. The attack comes after officers were overrun and injured when a violent mob of Trump supporters overran the Capitol on Jan. 6, breaking through insufficient barriers and pushing their way to within steps of lawmakers. One officer died and another killed himself.

Scores of officers are considering early retirement, top leaders have resigned and those in office face increasing criticism. Security concerns over the events of the past four months may alter not only how the department operates, but also whether the historically public grounds can remain open.

The head of the Capitol Police union said officers are “reeling” following the death on Friday of Officer Billy Evans, who was on the force for 18 years. He was struck at a Capitol entrance by a man who, according to investigators, suffered from delusions and suicidal thoughts. There is currently no indication that Evans was stabbed or shot, contrary to initial indications that he might have been slashed by a knife, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Evans’ death comes after Officer Brian Sicknick, who was among hundreds of officers trying to fight off rioters without the necessary equipment or planning, died following the Jan. 6 riot. Officer Howard Liebengood died by suicide shortly afterward.

Hundreds of officers are considering retirement or finding jobs elsewhere, union chair Gus Papathanasiou said in a statement. “They continue to work even as we rapidly approach a crisis in morale and force numbers,” he said, noting that officers are dealing with “massive amounts of forced overtime.”

Dozens of officers were injured on Jan. 6 and others have been held out of work during an internal investigation into the department’s response, including the officer who fatally shot a 35-year-old woman attempting to climb through a broken window as she and others massed at a barricaded doorway. That’s further depleted a force that has more than 200 vacant positions, roughly 10% of its authorized force level.

In the months since the insurrection, many officers have routinely worked 12-hour days or longer to protect the building during Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration and impeachment proceedings against former President Donald Trump.

“This rips the scab off and continues to provide a level of uncertainty and worry about the workplace and what’s happening there,” said Rep. Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat who chairs a subcommittee overseeing Capitol Police funding. “And I think this is very personal for so many of us who have come to really love and respect the Capitol Police even more than we already had, because of what they did on Jan. 6, and then immediately turning it around to make sure that the inauguration was safe.”

Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman received a vote of no confidence from the union in February, reflecting widespread distrust among the rank and file. Pittman was an assistant chief in charge of intelligence during the riot and has admitted she did not see an FBI assessment the day before warning of “war” at the Capitol.

Steven Sund, who resigned in January as the agency’s chief amid scrutiny over whether the police force was adequately prepared for the riot, told The Associated Press that officers he had spoken to were “on edge.”

The grief and crises that have engulfed the Capitol Police are also part of broader social forces that have tested the country, Sund said.

“There’s the impact of the pandemic on the American psyche,” Sund said. “There’s a lot of stuff in social media and a lot of action in reference to the actions of law enforcement. Law enforcement has been attacked in cities around the country. So there’s just a lot of things gearing up that make 2020, 2021 a little unique.”

The Capitol Police are not a typical law enforcement agency. The roughly 2,000 officers are responsible solely for protecting Congress — its members, visitors, and facilities, an area of about 16 acres.

The department dates back to the early 1800s after President John Quincy Adams asked that a police force be established to help protect the building following incidents there. Now they have an operating budget of $460 million.

The driver in Friday’s incident, 25-year-old Noah Green, was shot by officers shortly after emerging from the vehicle wielding a knife, authorities said. Green died later at a hospital. There is no known connection between the insurrection and Green, who described himself in online posts as being under government thought control and being watched.

New concrete barriers are in place around the checkpoint where Evans and a colleague were standing guard north of the Capitol. But the attack underscores that the Capitol will always be a target, said retired

New IMF reserves could fund vaccines in poor nations: Rockefeller

G20 is expected this week to back $650bn in new IMF allocations to help countries cope with COVID pandemic.

Moves to bolster the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) emergency reserves could provide the $44bn needed to vaccinate 70 percent of the population in lower- and middle-income countries by the end of 2022, at no added cost to rich countries, according to a new Rockefeller Foundation report due to be released on Tuesday.

Finance officials from the Group of 20 top economies are expected to back a $650bn new allocation of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) this week to help countries cope with the pandemic and its economic effects.

SDRs are supplementary foreign exchange reserves used by the IMF to make emergency loans. Countries facing balance of payments shortfalls can exchange their SDRs with other IMF member countries for commonly traded currencies to meet short-term needs.

Vaccination rates and economic development are diverging widely across the globe, according to the IMF and other experts.

The Rockefeller report says rich countries could reallocate their new SDRs to quickly close the funding gap and get more people vaccinated around the world, preventing virus mutations that could stall a global economic recovery.

Africa’s needs

The World Bank estimates that Africa alone would need about $12bn for COVID-19 vaccines to attain sufficient levels of inoculations to interrupt virus transmission, according to a new paper by the lender and the IMF.

The paper, published on Monday, argued for an extension of the Group of 20’s debt service moratorium through to the end of the year, citing the continued high liquidity needs of developing countries and their deteriorating ability to sustain their debts.

The World Bank estimates that Africa would need about $12bn for COVID-19 vaccines to attain sufficient levels of inoculations to interrupt virus transmission [File: Ebrahim Hamid/AFP]

But it said additional resources would be needed, noting that the amount of money Africa needed was about the same as the total amount of official debt service payments already deferred by 45 of the poorest countries participating in the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI).The Rockefeller report noted that high- and upper-middle-income countries accounted for 86 percent of COVID-19 shots administered worldwide as of the end of March. It said advanced economies should aim to reallocate at least $100bn in SDRs to fund the vaccination drive and other measures needed to help poor and middle-income countries.

Donor countries could pledge new SDRs to the IMF’s Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust, which provides loans to 63 low-income countries, but could also provide them to 16 approved institutions, including the World Bank, which could make them more widely available via low- or no-interest loans.

Another option would be for those institutions to use re-allocated SDRs to back the issuance of bonds earmarked specifically for pandemic response and the vaccination drive, the report said.

SOURCE: REUTERS

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Manhunt on for 1,800 inmates after brazen Nigeria prison attack

Attackers armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades have launched a series of coordinated attacks in southeastern Nigeria, freeing more than 1,800 inmates from a prison.

The attacks began at approximately 2am Monday in Owerri, a town in the state of Imo, and lasted for about two hours, according to local resident Uche Okafor. Gunmen also assaulted other police and military buildings, authorities said.

“Efforts are in top gear to re-arrest the fleeing detainees,” said Nigeria prison spokesman Francis Enobore, adding that 35 other inmates stayed behind during the prison break.

The coordinated attacks come less than two weeks after another wave of violence in southeastern Nigeria, when at least a dozen security officers were killed during attacks on four police stations, military checkpoints, and prison vehicles.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the Nigeria inspector general of police blamed the the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its Eastern Security Network, a paramilitary wing of the secessionist movement active in the region.

“Preliminary investigations have revealed that the attackers… are members of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra,” said Frank Mba, a spokesman for the Nigeria police force.

The IPOB has said it is fighting to protect the Igbo people from foreign armed invaders, but the group denied it was behind the prison attack.

Police said the assailants were heavily armed with assault weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, and improvised explosive devices during the violence.

“The attempt by the attackers to gain access to the police armoury at the headquarters was totally and appropriately resisted,” a police statement said.

Several police stations have been attacked in southeastern Nigeria since January, with large amounts of ammunition stolen. No groups have claimed responsibility for the attacks.

SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES

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