Former French premier to open archives over Rwanda genocide

Former French premier Edouard Balladur said Monday that he would grant public access to archives concerning his government's actions during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a subject that has long impaired relations between the two countries.

Balladur, a rightwing premier under Francois Mitterrand's Socialist presidency, said in a statement that he opened access "so that everyone can freely see what were our actions and their results".

Access will be granted in April, when a panel of historians will submit their findings on France's role during the slaughter of over 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, in the 1994 massacres.

President Emmanuel Macron commissioned the panel in 2019 to mark the 25th anniversary of the genocide, amid persistent claims by many Rwandans that France supported the Hutu forces behind the killings.

They point in particular to Operation Turquoise, a UN-mandated French force sent to halt the massacres in June 1994 but which many experts say had little effect.

In his statement, Balladur, who served as premier between 1993 and 1995, insisted that Turquoise "ensured the survival of victims on all sides and discouraged further violence".

Hugues Hourdin, a former advisor to Balladur, told AFP the documents "will show that neither the government nor the army has anything to blame itself for".

"Mr Balladur would like to remove all doubts about the actions of the government he led, and purge this debate that has been festering for 25 years," he said.

France's Rwanda commission has already had access to the archives of both Balladur and Mitterrand.

Macron's decision to form the panel was seen as a groundbreaking effort to confront France's troubled history in Africa.

While Rwanda was never a French colony, successive French governments cultivated close ties after the country's independence in 1962, including training its top military leaders.

It also signed military deals with the Hutu strongman President Juvenal Habyarimana, whose death in 1994 sparked the massacres.