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A onetime Deputy Chief of Operations of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) yesterday testified that French soldiers trained Interahamwe militias preceding the 1994 Genocide.

13 years after the genocide, in which a million Tutsis and conservative Hutus were killed, Rtd. Lt. Col. Walter Ballis, testified that French troops intensively skilled civil groups of radical Hutus in a valley near Kigali International Airport.

“We were tipped that the trainings were being conducted in an exclusive ground near the airport but at the time Gen. Romeo Dallaire (the UNAMIR force Commander) sent us for reconnaissance, the French had learnt of the mission and relocated the training wing,” he told the seven-man commission hearing the role of France in the 1994 Genocide.

He alleged that the participation of the French in the masterminding of the Genocide dated backwards when they refused to take to their motherland after the Operation Noroit between 1991 and 1993. After the signing of the Arusha Peace Accord, the French troops were supposed to depart Rwandan land by December 1993 because their consent had expired.

“But the French soldiers remained around disguising in simple apparel. I came across one of the soldiers whom I personally knew at Meridien Hotel and I was shocked,” Ballis said. He said that by the fact that the soldier was not open to him supposed that there was a mission in Kigali at the moment their sanction was over and done, it gave a clear-cut image that they were in the nation to help the radical regime in preparing the Rwanda Genocide.

The operations launched by the French included; Noroit (1991-93) that led warring RPF and the opinion MRND regime into the Arusha peace accord, Amaryllis (evacuation of international experts) at the start of the Genocide on April 8, 1994 and lastly the notorious Operation Turquoise that was established at the beginning of the human slaughter in which French troops purportedly aided the Interahamwe.

The retired Colonel told the committee at Prime Holdings Conference Centre in Kimihurura, a Kigali suburbia that in all these operations the French, in some manner, aided the extremists and abandoned the masses in the conception of the Genocide and subsequently during the Genocide in Rwanda.

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Posted by Grace Nakawooya