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RevolutionaryHair91 t1_j2vrxta wrote

Reply to comment by Niccolo101 in Rwanda report: France ‘complicit’ in 1994 genocide | Human Rights News by Character-Rabbit-127

While I understand your point I think we also need to think in a very pragmatic way. Those soldiers in the story had orders and can't act on their own gut feelings. Taking a stance here would have had so many implications.

I don't see a way where France would not be blamed. If the French army had taken a strong stance and toppled the Rwandan power, I don't know if it could have prevented anything in terms of civil war and massacres, but it would have been sure to create a power vacuum in the middle of a bloody civil war from a western former colonial power.

I guess the best option was to leave completely, impose fast sanctions, and not get involved further. Still a massacre with a loss of influence as well for the aftermath.

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Niccolo101 t1_j2vxbfb wrote

Point.

I am no politician and have, like, zero knowledge of the delicacies of international politics, so I can't authoritatively say what the correct action for the French government would have been. And I am not a soldier either, so I can't really fault the soldiers in the story too much - they did have orders of some kind. I have no idea what I would do when faced with such a scenario, so I'm not going to sit here in my armchair with 20/20 hindsight and say "Oh they all should have done X or Y".

But I can say that refusing to condemn the acts, lying to their own troops, not asking their allies what the hell they were doing, and even stymieing efforts to bring the perpetrators of the genocide to justice, were almost certainly not the right actions to take.

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