Andrew Wallis: Rwanda ... A Step Towards Truth

Andrew Wallis is a researcher who specialises in central and east Africa.

The source of the rocket attack on an aeroplane carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, on 6 April 1994 is a matter of profound historical importance, since this event was the prelude to the genocide that over the next eight weeks saw 800,000 of the country's citizens massacred. In 2006, a report on the incident authored by the French report judge Jean-Louis Bruguière was published, but its conclusions were immediately contested and the report failed to convince that it had established anything near the truth of the matter.

Now, parts of a new report looking into responsibility for the incident - also written by a French judge, Marc Trévidic - have been published. This report demolishes the conclusions of its (already discredited) 2006 predecessor; confirms what most independent analysts have thought all along about the direct source of the 1994 attack; and marks a watershed in an increasingly bitter political, judicial and ideological debate surrounding the incident.

But the report also poses more questions than it answers. In the process it highlights the fact that the surrounding controversy has for many become less about the authorship of the genocide than the status of Rwanda’s current leader, Paul Kagame. Even if the facts are now established, the blame-game is far from over...