01. President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted France’s “error of judgement” but stopped short of an apology in connection with the Rwandan 1994 genocide during his visit to the country on Thursday, aimed at kicking off a new era of diplomacy. French President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted Thursday at a joint press conference in Kigali with his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kagame, that France had made “mistakes” at the time of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 people, mainly from Kagame’s Tutsi minority were killed. “What happened here is unacceptable and compels the international community, including France, to reflect on the mistakes that stopped it from preventing and halting this abominable crime,” the French president told reporters. The French leader also visited the main genocide memorial in Kigali. He observed a minute’s silence in front of one of the mass graves containing the remains of some 250,000 people and laid a wreath. The 1994 genocide arose from a complicated and long-standing conflict between Rwanda’s two main ethnic groups, the Tutsis and the Hutus. The man who held the post of Rwandan president at the time, Juvènal Habyarimana, was a Hutu who supported Hutu interests. He died on April 6, 1994, when his plane was shot down from the sky in an apparent assassination. The Hutus promptly blamed the Tutsis, unleashing the mass slaughter of Tutsis over the course of the following months. Sarkozy’s visit—the first by a French president to Rwanda since the genocide—marks an important step in the reconciliation between the two countries. In the past, Kagame has repeatedly accused Paris of aiding the genocide.

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