According to the dominant ideology, Rwanda was about nothing but an ethnic genocide, Yugoslavia was about nothing but an ethnic genocide, Darfur in Sudan is about nothing but an ethnic genocide, etc. Imperialism first helps ethnicize politics in reality half way (by simplifying and hardening formerly fluid tribal formations into often racialized ethnic groups and using one to govern the rest) and then ethnicizes people's understanding of it totally in ideology. If what's happening is an ethnic genocide, there are "good victims" -- the ethnic group subjected to genocide -- and "bad guys" -- the government in the Third World committing genocide. You go in by declaring that what you are doing is to save "good victims" from "bad guys" and end by deposing the government and setting up the "good guys" who say they represent "good victims" in power. The "good guys" then run the country for you. In the process you help sentimentalize and dumb down politics in your own country: realpolitik, the ruling class think, should be reserved for closed meetings of the power elite, for masses don't and shouldn't understand it.
Realpolitik that the French socialist power elite around Mitterand discussed in closed meetings, a glimpse of which is available in the newly declassified documents, is that, the way they saw it, Rwanda was about a proxy war between the French-backed Mouvement républicain national pour la démocratie et le développement (MRND) government, its Forces armées rwandaises (FAR), and peasant militias loyal to the MRND on one hand and the Front patriotique rwandais (FPR) of Paul Kagame, which was backed by Uganda and the USA, on the other hand. The French understanding of realpolitik is closer to reality than the sentimental ideology of an ethnic genocide, but the French socialist imperialists lost, so they totally lost the ability to control the narrative, too, which they had already all but lost to the American and Americanized media favoring US imperialists even before their actual defeat.
The Le Monde article that the Independent cites not only claims that what was happening in Rwanda was nothing but an ethnic genocide and but also that the French socialist imperialists should have gotten hints by late 1990 that a genocide was being prepared and should have certainly recognized that a specific plan for it was hatched _between_ the Arusha accords and the assassination of the then Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana.*
Notice, however, that the only source of the plan was an anonymous informant, uncorroborated by others. The media, generally devotees of humanitarian imperialism, find it useful, though, because the Arusha accords and the Habyarimana assassination might disrupt their narrative without it for they both might remind some of the reality of the civil war that was an inter-imperialist proxy war.
That said, the Le Monde article has bits that felicitously reveal the line of thinking common to all imperialists when they confront a looming defeat. Here's one from February 1993.
Le lendemain, le général Christian Quesnot, chef
d'état-major particulier de François Mitterrand,
ainsi que le numéro 2 de la cellule Afrique de
l'Elysée, Dominique Pin, présentent différentes
options au président.
La première consiste à évacuer les Français et
à retirer le dispositif Noroit. Les auteurs la rejettent
aussitôt : "C'est l'échec de notre présence et de
notre politique au Rwanda. Notre crédibilité sur
le continent en souffrirait."
"Our credibility in the continent would suffer from it [our defeat]." That's how they think -- French imperialists regarding Rwanda and US imperialists regarding Iraq and Iran. So they soldier on . . . till the bitter end that is, alas, bitterer to natives than colonizers.
* <http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3224,36-930272,0.html> Génocide rwandais : ce que savait l'Elysée LE MONDE | 02.07.07 | 10h48 • Mis à jour le 02.07.07 | 18h37
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12 janvier 1994
"Eliminer 1000 d'entre eux dès la première heure"
Dans un télégramme diplomatique du 12 janvier, l'ambassadeur à Kigali rapporte les confidences d'un informateur du représentant des Nations unies. Celui-ci a livré les détails "graves et plausibles" d'un plan de déstabilisation radicale du pays. Il commencerait par des provocations contre les troupes du FPR à Kigali, pour susciter une riposte.
"Les victimes rwandaises que ne manqueraient pas de provoquer ces réactions seraient alors le prétexte à l'élimination physique des Tutsis de la capitale, explique le diplomate. Selon l'informateur de la Minuar, 1700 Interhamwe [membres des milices populaires] auraient reçu une formation militaire et des armes pour cela, avec la complicité du chef d'état-major FAR. La localisation précise des éléments tutsis de la population de Kigali devrait en outre permettre d'éliminer 1000 d'entre eux dans la première heure après le déclenchement des troubles."
Trois mois plus tard, le 6 avril, un missile abat l'avion transportant le président Juvénal Habyarimana. En quelques heures, la machine génocidaire se met en marche comme prévu. -- Yoshie