The native language of Rwandans is Kinyarwanda.  Due to their history of Belgian colonial rule, the general second language is French.  Since independence, Rwanda's Hutu rulers had moved it into the French sphere of influence.

At independence, a series of pogroms drove out hundreds of thousands of Tutsis into exile in Uganda.  In 1990, fed up with repeated Rwandan refusals to allow them to return, the refugees formed an armed group and presented their demands by force.

Uganda is, of course, a former British colony, and the Tutsi refugees now spoke English rather than French, and were likely to move Rwanda into the "Anglo-Saxon" sphere of influence.  (Anglo-Saxon...what a ridiculous term, really.  England is every bit as Norman-French as it is Anglo-Saxon, and has been for nearly a millenium.  But I digress.)

The oppressed regularly become the oppressor, and nothing makes them more dangerous than the fear of becoming the oppressed again.  Rwanda had been dominated by Tutsis in colonial times, and the fear of Tutsi return almost literally drove the Hutu leadership mad.  Quietly and methodically, they began preparing a Final Solution.  For two years, they stockpiled weapons in caches across the country.  They organized an unruly youth militia, the Interahamwe, and fed the nation a steady diet of vicious hate propaganda using the notorious Mille Collines radio station.

During this time, France continued to supply the regime with money, weapons, and training.  The evidence of impending genocide - "practice" massacres, wildly racist radio broadcasts - was out there in the open, but France chose to look the other way.

On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was assassinated, and the genocide began.  "Zero Hour" death squads, equipped with voters' lists, went house to house killing Tutsi and moderate Hutus.  Roadblocks sprung up almost overnight across the country, blocking fleeing Tutsis from escaping.

One can have nightmares for weeks reading survivors' accounts.  Almost every conceivable atrocity was committed.  Women were raped and mutilated, with spears or boiling water thrust up vaginas.  Babies were thrown into rivers, or trampled upon.  The Kagera River leading into Lake Victoria was choked with dead bodies.  Even today, one can visit churches where the pews are still stained with the blood of machete victims.  

More than 800,000 people died in Rwanda in just over six weeks in April-May 1994.  It is a rate of murder unsurpassed in human history.  Per day, five times as many people perished as at the height of the Nazi Holocaust.

It is inconceivable that this was anything but a preplanned, carefully plotted operation.  Yet French policymakers could not bring themselves to admit that 'their' (French-speaking) people had committed such barbarities.  The Tutsi victims were also French-speaking (as opposed to the English-speaking Tutsi returnees) but that didn't seem to count.  As late as July, President Mitterrand responded "which genocide?" when asked a question about it, apparently believing that the killings had been a two-way street.

Genocide deniers claim that Habyarimana was killed by the Tutsis; this in turn was a spark that set off spontaneous rioting and communal violence in both directions.  The truth is that the genocide was a planned operation waiting only a signal to proceed; a signal which was given after the president's death.  Whether he was killed by Hutu or Tutsi hardly matters.

It is in this context that we hear of a French judge issuing a warrant for the arrest of senior Tutsi leaders.  Not for any genocide, but the assassination of Habyarimana!  Never mind that international courts have dismissed the warrant as frivolous.

There is no Western country that can be proud of its conduct during the genocide - certainly not the United States, which spearheaded a UN resolution to withdraw what few peacekeepers were there.  And the current Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government is no saint - it has certainly not hesitated to use white guilt as a political tool to cover atrocities committed by its allies in the DR Congo.

Nonetheless, it is absolutely unconscionable that, twelve years after the fact, French courts would deliberately try to muddy the waters on one of the most monstrous crimes against humanity since the Holocaust.