Historian's Report: France Shares Responsibility for Genocide in Rwanda

France bears a "grave and overwhelming share of responsibility" for the genocide, says the 1,200-page report prepared by historian Vincent Duclert and 12 collaborators for the attention of Emmanuel Macron.

It says French authorities "failed" during the four years of escalation in Rwanda: they "strengthened" the corrupt, racist dictatorship in the capital, Kigali, and themselves pursued an "ethnicist" view of the conflict. Specifically, France had trained the Rwandan army - from whose circles the Hutu killers came - and supplied it with "considerable quantities of weapons and ammunition."

However, the Duclert report also states that France did not directly equip the murder gangs. Rather, Paris "did not understand" what was going on in Rwanda. There was therefore no actual complicity in the genocide. In short, the report, for which the authors had unrestricted access to the archives, including those of the Élysée Palace, concludes that there was joint responsibility, but not joint guilt.