Through a ground-breaking trial, France is at last coming to terms with its much-criticised response to Rwanda's genocide.
Pascal Simbikangwa (Sim-BEE-kangh-wah), a Rwandan former intelligence chief, is to appear today in a Paris court for an expected seven-week trial to face charges of complicity in genocide and complicity in crimes against humanity.
France is playing catch-up to a UN tribunal and other courts that have convicted dozens and shed light on the genocide nearly two decades ago.
Activists hope the Paris trial will remind French leaders of their role and responsibility in Africa where French power is felt today in Mali and Central African Republic and mark the end of an era in which France provided a haven for those who committed atrocities abroad.
In 2004, the European Court for Human Rights based in the eastern city of Strasbourg condemned France for taking too long to consider one woman's legal effort over the Rwanda genocide.
"Finally!" Bernard Kouchner, a humanitarian aid activist in Rwanda at the time and later French foreign minister, said of the Simbikangwa trial.
"France played a bad role in this genocide. It didn't allow justice to do its job, and investigate correctly, or bring to justice those responsible who had fled to France," Kouchner said in a telephone interview.
The case is steeped in historical symbolism: In a country whose Nazi collaborationist regime in World War II sent thousands of Jews to their deaths, a Justice Ministry spokeswoman said it is the first trial in France on charges of genocide.
It may be the first of many such trials, made possible under 1990s laws allowing near-universal jurisdiction for exceptional crimes. Another 27 cases linked to Rwanda's genocide await in the Paris court's war crimes and crimes against humanity unit, including one focusing on the widow of the Rwandan president, whose killing set off the genocide.
"The message of this trial is also that France will no longer be a safe haven for Rwandan suspects of genocide, hopefully, after all these years," said Clemence Bectarte, a lawyer with the International Federation of Human Rights, one of several civil parties to the state's case.
The story about why France has taken so long speaks in part to the era of "Francafrique," a pejorative buzzword for the cushy personal ties that many French businessmen and officials had with African dictators in the postcolonial era.
Under President Francois Mitterrand, France armed and trained Rwandan forces, ignored government abuses, and helped some genocide perpetrators flee the country, critics say.
