Will French justice relaunch the investigations into the 1994 genocide attack in Rwanda? The Paris Court of Appeal ruled on Friday July 3 on the validity of the dismissal given at the end of 2018 in this case which poisons Franco-Rwandan relations.

In the hope of obtaining a trial in France, the families of French victims of the attack on Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana had appealed the decision of the examining magistrates on December 21, 2018, to drop the charges against nine members or former members of the entourage of the current Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

On April 6, 1994, the plane carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira had been shot down during the landing phase towards Kigali by at least one missile. Part of the crew was French. This attack is considered to be the trigger for the genocide which claimed more than 800,000 lives, according to the UN, mainly in the Tutsi minority.

Who is the author of the fatal shot against the presidential plane? French investigators have long favored the responsibility of the Tutsi rebels, led by Paul Kagame who became president of the country in 2000, before moving - without further success - towards the involvement of Hutu extremists, anxious to get rid of a president too moderate in their eyes.

Tensions between France and Rwanda

The validity of the dismissal, given by the French anti-terrorist judges Jean-Marc Herbaut and Nathalie Poux, was examined on January 15 in camera and for almost 8 hours by the investigative chamber of the Court of Appeal of Paris.

At the hearing, the public prosecutor's office had asked to confirm this decision and the magistrates of the court had decided to take six months to reflect before rendering their decision. The latter will be highly scrutinized in this emblematic dossier of the tensions between the two countries, against a backdrop of accusations of the role played by France during the genocide.

"I believe that the past is behind us," Paul Kagame told this week's weekly Jeune Afrique, who broke diplomatic ties with Paris between 2006 and 2009 after issuing arrest warrants for his relatives in this case.

But "to want to reopen a classified file is to want to create problems (...). If these things are not definitively clarified, our relations are likely to suffer in one way or another", a he warned in this interview published Wednesday, illustrating the fragility of global warming between Kigali and Paris under the Macron presidency.

If they do not confirm the dismissal, the magistrates can decide to start again the investigation even to refer all or part of the suspects before a court of assizes.

With AFP 

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