Rwanda Recalls Ambassador Over French Investigation

Rwanda today said it had recalled its ambassador from France after a French judge accused the African country's leader of ordering the assassination of a former president that led to genocide.

"We have recalled our ambassador to France for consultations," Rwanda's foreign affairs minister, Charles Murigande, told Reuters. "Given the level of enmity as expressed by the latest move, we are beginning to question the need of maintaining diplomatic relations with such a country that is aggressive to us."

Mr Murigande said Rwanda had also summoned the French ambassador in Kigali late yesterday to explain "why his country has continued to harass us for the past 12 years".

A French anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, who is investigating the shooting down of President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane in 1994, last week called for President Paul Kagame to be tried for planning the killing and has issued arrest warrants for nine senior Rwandan officials.

After the plane was shot down by missiles, militants from the Hutu ethnic majority, known as interahamwe, set up roadblocks across Kigali and began killing Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Some 800,000 people were slaughtered in 100 days.

According to Mr Bruguiére, Mr Kagame instructed his rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front, or RPF, to shoot down the plane.

"The final order to attack the presidential plane was given by Paul Kagame himself during a meeting held in Mulindi on March 31 1994," Mr Bruguiére wrote in court documents.

Other investigations have concluded that Hutu extremists were probably responsible for shooting down the plane because they moved swiftly to seize power and instigate the genocide.

Mr Kagame has immunity under French law but the judge called for him to be tried by a UN court. Rwanda says the charges are part of a French attempt to cover up its role in training interahamwe militants who later carried out the genocide. Mr Kagame has also accused France of doing too little to stop the massacres once they started.

Rwanda is conducting its own inquiry into the French role. Before the slaughter, French officers were attached to a number of elite battalions who came to play a leading role in the killing.

When French troops arrived at the beginning of the genocide they evacuated white foreigners and their pets while ignoring the pleas of fleeing Tutsis for protection. A French contingent abandoned about 2,000 Tutsis under their protection at a school to be murdered. Mr Bruguiére is investigating the downing of Mr Habyarimana's plane because it had a French crew. The families of the pilot, co-pilot and mechanic, who all died in the crash, filed a suit in France in 1998.