“At no time have I minimized what seems to me absolute horror,” hammered the columnist, also editor of the weekly Marianne.

On March 18, 2018 on France Inter, she had evoked the Rwandan genocide by considering "necessary to look in the face what happened at that time and which ultimately has nothing to do with a distinction between bad guys and good guys. ".

"Unfortunately, we are typically in the kind of case where we had bastards facing other bastards (...) That is to say that I think that there were not on one side the nice and on the other the bad guys in this story,” she added.

However, since 2017, the law on the freedom of the press punishes the fact of denying, minimizing or trivializing in an outrageous way all the genocides recognized by France, and not only that of the Jews during the Second World War.

At the end of 2020 and against the opinion of the prosecution, an investigating judge had sent the columnist to trial for "disputing the existence of crimes against humanity".

By the terms "bastards", Ms. Polony explained that she was referring to the leaders, not to the population, and to the "crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF, mainly Tutsi) of Paul Kagame committed before, during and after the genocide".

These abuses could, according to her, explain then "the total inability of France to understand the genocidal mechanism" of the power in place.

The witnesses cited by the civil parties - including Ibuka, an association supporting the victims of the Rwandan genocide, and the Mrap - noted the "deep ambiguity" of the words used by Ms. Polony.

“We cannot put hunters and prey on the same footing,” said Espérance Mutuyisa-Brossard, close to victims.

According to the UN, about 800,000 people, mainly in the Tutsi minority, were killed in three months during massacres perpetrated by Hutu Interahamwe militias and the Rwandan Armed Forces after the attack on the plane of Rwandan Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994.

“Does evoking the violence of the RPF amount to denying the genocide?” Questioned Me Jean-Yves Dupeux, defending the journalist.

To which historian Stéphane Audoin-Rousseau, cited as a witness, responded by detailing the "specificity" of denial of the Tutsi genocide linked, among other things, to the fact that "the target group (of the genocide) took power" and then fought "a civil war with all the violence of a war".

"We are no longer in the case of a perfect victim. We are in a complexity which opens a permanent door to the thesis of the double genocide. The problem is that it is not the same violence", he said. he argued.

The trial continues on Wednesday.

© 2022 AFP