Crisis in Darfur has parallels with Rwanda – Kagame
Dec 05, 2006 (LONDON) — The African Union’s inability to deal with the crisis in Darfur echoes the West’s earlier failure to prevent the genocide in Rwanda, the small country’s president said Thursday during a visit to Britain.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame said he could not understand why the humanitarian disaster in the war-torn region was continuing, even though the United Nations, the African Union and Sudan itself had agreed it was serious.
“There has been a lot of dilly-dallying, a lot of sashaying, a lot of debate, similar to what happened in Rwanda,” he said. “Why the Sudan, the AU and the U.N. have not decided how the intervention should be carried out raises more questions than I can answer.”
Rwanda has contributed several thousand troops to the AU peacekeeping mission in the vast region of Darfur, in western Sudan, but the violence — which has claimed over 200,000 lives and left two-thirds of the population needing aid — continues.
Kagame resisted the possibility of a more aggressive role in the region for Western countries, saying that while material and logistical help was welcome, leadership roles should remain in African hands.
“It is always useful to have partnerships,” he said, “but Africa should take the lead in handling these problems.”
During a speech at London’s Chatham House, a foreign affairs think tank, Kagame also addressed the recent collapse of his country’s relations with France.
Late last month, a French judge accused Kagame of masterminding the assassination of then-President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994, an act which immediately preceded Rwanda’s genocide. French prosecutors have also issued international arrest warrants for nine of Kagame’s close associates.
After the judge’s report, the French ambassador was expelled from Kigali.
Calling the French report an act of “severe arrogance and insensitivity,” Kagame said the French government was using the indictments as cover for its own complicity in the bloodshed, which claimed the lives of some 500,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis.
Kagame also dismissed a French move earlier which annulled Rwanda’s entire A45 million (US$57 million) bilateral debt, saying the money had been borrowed before the genocide to buy weapons for Hutu extremists engaged in the killings.
“The French were part and parcel of that genocide,” he said.
(AP)