The Paris Court of Appeal canceled, on Wednesday June 21, the dismissal order issued in September 2022 in the investigation into the inaction of the French army during the massacres of Bisesero, in Rwanda, in June 1994, learned Agence France-Presse from sources familiar with the matter.
The investigating chamber canceled this order for a procedural reason and sent the case back to the investigating judges of the crimes against humanity division of the Paris court.
In this case, the associations Survie, Ibuka, the International Federation for Human Rights and six survivors of Bisesero, civil parties, accuse the French military-humanitarian mission “Turquoise” and France of “complicity in genocide” for having, according to them, knowingly abandoned for three days Tutsi civilians who had taken refuge in the hills of Bisesero (western Rwanda). Hundreds of them had been massacred by the genocidaires from June 27 to 30, 1994.
On September 1, 2022, seventeen years after the opening of this judicial investigation, two investigating magistrates closed the file by signing a dismissal order. According to them, the instruction did not establish the direct participation of the French military forces in abuses committed in the refugee camps, nor any complicity by aid or assistance to the genocidal forces or complicity by abstention of the French soldiers in Bisesero.
The civil parties appealed against this dismissal, first challenging the regularity of this order. In June 2022, a summary of the report of the commission chaired by historian Vincent Duclert, which in April 2021 pointed to France’s “profound failure” during the Bisesero massacres, was added to the investigation file at the request of one of the magistrates in charge of the case. For the civil parties, this act amounted to a relaunch of the investigations, closed in July 2018.
But two months later, the dismissal order was issued. The civil parties argued during a hearing in mid-May that the judges should have notified a new notice of closure of the investigations before ordering this dismissal, a notice followed by the investigating chamber.
This sensitive issue is emblematic of the historical controversy over the objectives of the “Turquoise” mission, deployed in Rwanda under a UN mandate to put an end to the genocide of the Tutsi. According to the UN, the massacres caused more than 800,000 deaths between April and July 1994, mainly among the Tutsi minority.