French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Rwanda on Thursday for a highly symbolic visit aimed at turning the page on a quarter century of diplomatic tensions over France’s role in the country’s 1994 genocide.
Macron is the first French leader since 2010 to visit the central African country, which has long accused France of complicity in the mass killings of Rwandan Tutsis.
The French president arrived in the capital, Kigali, early Thursday and is set to hold talks with Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
He will visit a memorial to the 1994 slaughter that left an estimated 800,000 people dead, mainly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus who tried to protect them from Hutu extremists.
Two reports completed in March and in April that examined France’s role in the genocide helped clear a path for Macron’s visit.
The French report, which was commissioned by Macron and released in March, included a adamning indictment of Paris’s role in the bloodshed.
In findings accepted by the French government, the historians accused Paris, which had close ties to the ethnic Hutu regime behind the massacres, of being “blind” to preparations for the genocide and said it bore “serious and overwhelming” responsibility.
The commission found no proof, however, of French complicity in the bloodshed.
For Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who led the Tutsi rebellion that ended the genocide and had led the charge against France ever since, the report was a game-changer.
On a visit to France last week, Kagame, who at one point broke off relations with France, said the report had paved the way for France and Rwanda to have “a good relationship”.
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