“Kwibuka 27” is written on the large sign in front of the five-star hotel where Emmanuel Macron freshen up after his night flight to Kigali.

As a reminder ("Kwibuka") of the genocide in Rwanda 27 years ago, there are several signs on the morning drive before the motorcade of the guest from Paris stops at the entrance to the genocide memorial in Gisozi on a hill in the capital.

Not only has the French president been reminded, he wants to turn "a new page in our relationship with Rwanda and Africa" ​​after 27 years of denial, state secrets and half-hearted confessions about the French role in the genocide.

Michaela Wiegel

Political correspondent based in Paris.

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    "The historians' commission paved the way," says Freddy Mutanguha, director of the British NGO Aegis Trust, which administers the genocide memorial in Kigali. The commission, headed by the French historian Vincent Duclert, highlighted France's “heavy and overwhelming responsibility” for the genocide in a report of more than a thousand pages in March. Mutanguha has been standing under the palm trees on the red-paved forecourt that extends in front of the modern building of the memorial since early this morning. "What are a few minutes if you've been waiting for this moment for years," he says, visibly moved.

    As far as the view over the hills extends, you can see the landmarks of the flourishing, booming capital of Rwanda, modern hotel palaces and a new congress center, glass office buildings and construction cranes.

    But beneath the memorial lies a past that does not want to perish.

    Heavy concrete slabs cover the burial chambers of at least 250,000 victims of the genocide.

    Most of the remains could not be identified; they come from the mass graves in which the murderers disappeared during the blood rush in the spring of 1994.

    Giving back the dignity

    The bones of those killed were found all over the capital and lowered to their final resting place in coffins "to restore their dignity," as Mutanguha points out. More than a million people in the country, which then had a population of just over seven million, were murdered in the hundred days of the genocide, according to a plaque in the center. Next to it is: "When you said after the Holocaust: Never again !, were you only referring to certain people and not others?"

    Like most of his staff, the director is a survivor. The director recognizes himself in the eyewitness reports filmed and shown to President Macron during the tour. His two little sisters and his mother were killed, not by unknown killers, but by a Hutu friend of the family. "The poison of hatred spread long before the killing began," he says. France has shown itself to be “blind” in the face of the looming disaster.

    President Macron takes his time to take in the photos of the murdered in the memorial, looks at the children's pictures for a long time. “His skull was smashed against a wall when it was thrown,” says the photo of a laughing toddler. When the president signs himself in the guest book, like Benjamin Netanyahu, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush before him, he looks depressed.

    “Ibuka, remember,” he begins his speech under the tent roof that is set up near the tombs. “You can't compare genocide. He has a story. He's unique, ”he says. “You cannot erase genocide.” The murderers would not have had the faces of French people. France could not be accused of complicity. “The blood that flowed did not dishonor our soldiers,” he emphasizes. But France did not understand in 1990 that it was "de facto on the side of a genocidal regime". Macron alludes to the military aid that swallowed up more and more money the more the regime in Kigali became radicalized.