The anti-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda was not spontaneous. French archival documents demonstrate beyond doubt that the orgy of violence that killed up to 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus. Hutu militants and génocidaires raped an addition quarter million Tutsi women.
In 2021, Robert Muse, a well-respected Washington lawyer, led a team to research documentary and diplomatic evidence from the time, much of which was stored at the Quay d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry. His subsequent report is damning. The French trained and encouraged some of the worst elements, knew in advance about plans for Hutus to slaughter Tutsis. Some French soldiers even manned checkpoints alongside the Interahamwe—then Hutu equivalent of Germany’s SS—as the genocide unfolded. The French then spun a cynical narrative that the Tutsis had provoked the genocide. This is akin to arguing the Jews provoked the Holocaust. The génocidaires’ supporters in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Belgium still promote the myths France amplified. A month after Muse released his report, French President Emmanuel Macron visited Kigali and acknowledged the French role.
The documentary evidence suggests that a prime motivator for then-French President François Mitterrand was antagonism to the Tutsi for seeking to go Anglophone. While first the Germans and then the Belgians—not France—were the colonial powers in Rwanda, Mitterrand and many in the French policymaking class sought to preserve Francophone regimes, even at the cost of genocide.
The Rwandans welcomes Macron’s half-apology with grace. After all, Rwanda is a very different place today than it was three decades ago. President Paul Kagame has defeated dysfunctional corruption and he has sought to erase the Tutsi-Hutu distinction crafted by the Germans and the Belgians during the age of eugenics; he has also reintegrated and rehabilitated Rwandans who participated in the 1994 slaughter so long as they subjected themselves to a truth and reconciliation process.
Today, Rwanda is well on its way to becoming the Singapore of Africa.
While Rwandans have learned lessons and moved on, have the French? Unfortunately, here, the answer appears to be non.
Like Rwanda, Germany initially colonized “Kamerun” though after World War I, the United Kingdom and France assumed responsibility for different portions of the territory: The British administered Northern and Southern Cameroons, a strip of land alongside Nigeria, while the French ran the rest of the territory. French Cameroun gained independence in 1960 as the Republic of Cameroun, but the British-run trusteeship adjacent to Nigeria resisted joining Cameroun, preferring to join Nigeria instead. Ultimately, a plebiscite led Muslim dominated northern sections to join Nigeria while Southern Cameroons joined Cameroun to create the Federal Republic of Cameroon; the plebiscite did not offer independence as an option for the two British-run Cameroons.
Cameroon failed as a state following the incorporation of southern British Cameroons into the new federal republic. The basis of the union was that both British Southern Cameroons, also called Ambazonia, and the former French territories would be equal.
Post-independence Cameroon has had only two leaders, both dictators. Ahmadou Ahidjo, ran Cameroon from independence and through the forced merger with British Southern Cameroons, Paul Biya became president in 1982 and has dominated the country for the past 43-years. Under Biya’s rule, Cameroon has become an increasingly brutal dictatorship. Freedom House ranks its freedom as on part with Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Its civil liberties ranking falls below China and Cuba. Cameroonian Americans often describe the interrogations and often arbitrary imprisonment to which they are subject by Cameroonian security services should they visit home. Many now choose only to keep in touch with their families by Whatsapp, since the danger of being in Cameroon is too great, even for U.S. passport holders.
Ahidjo and Biya treated Ambazonia’s English-speakers with disdain. In 1972, Ahidjo unilaterally and illegally abolished the federation. First Ahidjo and then Biya sought to systematically marginalize Ambazonia’s English speakers in governance, education, and economic development. They imposed French as the official language in the English-speaking regions. Through it all, French leaders offered Cameroon’s dictators their full support, while the United Kingdom largely turned its back on its former territory. Even as human rights violations skyrocketed, France has doubled down on bilateral military relations and sales. Paris also relies on Cameroon for much of its uranium needs.
There is only so much abuse the English-speakers could take. The International Court of Justice’s finding against South Africa in its illegal annexation of Namibia suggests Ambazonia has international law on its side.
In 2016, protests erupted in Ambazonia as teachers, lawyers, and civil society activists took to the streets. Cameroon’s military cracked down violently; not only protestors but also the region’s professionals are subject to arbitrary arrest, torture, and worse. The Cameroonian regime had reportedly killed thousands and displaced more than a million more. The violence is ongoing.
Rwanda and Cameroon are not the same, of course. There was not a separatist component to the Hutu repression of Tutsis; theirs was pure ethnic animosity compounded by the legacy of German and Belgian colonial policy and French cynicism and incitement. The Ambazonians wan to right historic wrongs; in their case, they have more in common with the Isaaqs of Somaliland who seek recognition for the abrogation of a 1960 merger between British and Italian Somaliland that was never legally consummated and ended in genocide.
Still, the parallels between the Rwandan genocide and events ongoing in Ambazonia are growing. Again, France gives blind support for a racist Francophone regime simply because its victims prefer English. The Quay d’Orsay puts France’s commercial interests and, in Cameroon’s case uranium, above human rights.

French President Macron from 2017. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Macron, President Bill Clinton, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan have each apologized for their country’s or the UN’s negligence in the run-up to the anti-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda and promised never again. While Norway cites the Rwanda’s anti-Tutsi genocide to virtue signal about human rights, its arrest of Ambazonian leader Lucas Ayaba Cho shows that Norway, like France, today prioritizes cash above moral clarity. Today, Washington, Paris, Oslo and Turtle Bay repeat the same mistakes they did in Rwanda.
This is shameful and should not stand.
About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. A former Pentagon official, Dr. Rubin has lived in post-revolution Iran, Yemen, and both pre- and postwar Iraq. He also spent time with the Taliban before 9/11. For more than a decade, he taught classes at sea about the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts, culture, and terrorism, to deployed US Navy and Marine units. Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics.
Note: The author’s views are his own.

Pascal
February 3, 2025 at 2:47 pm
Good depiction. Thanks for exposing the illegal colonization and genocide going on in AMBAZONIA
Swamplaw Yankee
February 4, 2025 at 7:39 am
This is a great cognitive force at work. Educational!
“Pure ethnic hatred”: what is the standard for this purity? Rubin exposes a factor that needs much more moral clarity. Maybe Rubin will soon gift us with more morphology of his term.
What does Rubin omit? Well, one item may be: The sex trading genocide trail of a centuries old international genocide ethnic group.
Rubin needs to stop avoiding the orc Muscovite pure ethnic hatred. This is vividly seen in his articles. Rubin can not focus on the Orc muscovite elite. He even fuzzies his language up in the “moron mercan” tradition he inserts himself in. We all know Rubin is not blinded by the green opaque slime walls of the Yankee aquarium. His work is that proof.
Rubin needs to relate Muscovite pure ethnic hate of the Ukrainians to his reading public. This neglect is shameful and should not stand.
Back in 2013 Rubin needed to warn of the Western MSM (WMSM) inability to warn of the geopolitical shift the OBAMA “husseinists” + the covert dark state were implementing. That is, OBAMA was covertly giving away free, at no cost, the WEST’s geo-strategical dominance in the middle east. In secret, and with no communication with any USA allies, such as the EU, OBAMA was covertly donating to the orc muscovite elite the ancient Ukrainian land that gave the WEST a vital control point over ambitions of Gog and the orc muscovite elite.
Was Rubin mesmerized with the on going shell game that OBAMA had going over simultaneously in Afghanistan? What was preventing from Rubin seeing that OBAMA scam.
Canadian school kids had saved Kabul and cleared out Kandahar of those frightful Taliban. Did the Canuck kids have huge tech in the billions, air tech galore and huge airports? Nope. Some machine guns + non-air conditioned WW2 tanks seemed to be their tech lot.
The point is OBAMA ensured that billions were used to used cocoon the yellow bellies that fucked up Afghanistan. Like their yellow pops that refused to stem the Communist Muscovite elite and Nazis that attacked Europe in WW2. We can speculate that Rubin can not deal with that reality since he locates inside that aquarium. Maybe he can publish the count and paltry number of brave USA men who volunteered to join Newfoundland and Canadian men when the war started started, not ended. We all know the heroics of the Emperor on Dec 7 1941 when the mercan attempt to beat their Mexican amigos in completely sitting out WW2 was ended by superb American Intelligence.
This pure ethnic hatred by the orc muscovite elite also seems to have beaten the USA intelligence in 2014. The USA allowed their sworn enemy, the orc muscovite elite, a free no-cost takeover of Ukrainian soil.
The muscovite, who spent centuries in sex trading Ukrainian girls and boys to the west and Gog, who carried out the greatest genocide of any ethnic group in our life spans, was given the USA green light to again ethnically cleanse out Ukrainians off the face of the planet. Rubin seems unable to focus in print on those facts. In 2014. And, the orc muscovite has so been cleansing Ukrainians.
If Rubin can effortlessly slide back to colonial days in Africa, he can slide back to the butchery of the free Ukrainian state in ww1 by the orc muscovite genocide elite. Or even, the overwhelming genocide numbers of Ukrainians in 32-33 by the muscovite genociders.
Today, Rubin needs to atone for his moral misdeeds on the above. Yes, clean shots can be had at smaller butchers. But, few op-ed can equal the adroit skill of Rubin. I speculate that the WEST is best served with the acute focus on how Trump will address the Yankee free no-cost give-away of Ukrainian land in 2014 in 2025? Will Trump demand Victory, thru the immediate return of the West advantage with the return of Ukrainian land of Crimea, et al? Will Trump initiate Victory, thru the implementation of a Fortress Europe on the site of Sevastopol? Peer review is a for sure tonic.
Or, Rubin can make future hay as he lets the Jewish faithful know that they are to be finished off by Gog just as as God warned them in the Bible. Rubin can report how Trump became a loser to the Maskarada of the orc Muscovite elite and that the Gog has full access to the shores of Israel. More Red wolf or Blue wolf tech will not atone for Rubins refusal to report the 2014 Yankee mistake with Ukrainian borders. -30-