Re: What world leader to you most admire and why.
What did France do??? Did I not get the Memo?
They did everything they could to support the murder of 800'000 people in Rwanda.
This report is the opinion of the Rwandan government.
This is from 1999.
Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire was the head of UN forces in Rwanda in 1994 and he has been scathing of France. He describes it is harrowing detail in his book "Shake hands with the Devil".
[broken link removed] from Global Policy Forum (they monitor the UN but I know very little about them or their biases) shows the complicity between the Francophile head of the UN at the time and the French government. They are by no means the only people shouting about this.
The bottom line is that the Genocide, which had been meticulously planned for years, kicked off when President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane was shot down. The plane was a present from the French government, crewed by three French secret service agents. The French never carried out an enquiry even though three of it's citizens were killed. The rocket is said to have been Iraqi, confiscated by the French four years earlier during Desert Storm.
Up to 700 French special forces were on the ground fighting with the genocidal forces against the RPA (the guys trying to stop the genocide). When they were beaten back they then sent in thousands of men under the pretext of a humanitarian mission. The real mission was to allow the genocidal forces to regroup. This happened in Goma in what was then Zaire and resulted in tens of thousands more women and children being murdered in Rwanda, the destabilisation of the Great Lakes region and the Congolese civil war (the biggest was since the Second World War).
The USA is by no means clean when it comes to Rwanda (anyone remember Madanile Albright and the State department dancing around the word “Genocide” with “Acts of Genocide” so that they would not have to act on the 1948 genocide convention?) and the UK were not much better but the French were proactive in the killing.
Here I have to admit my bias; over a number of year reading about these event I have grown to admire Paul Kagame, leader of the RPA and now President of Rwanda, more than any modern political or military leader. He is by no means perfect but not only has he performed an economic and social miracle as a politician, as a general he was probably the greatest practitioner of manoeuvre warfare of the last 100 years. My favourite book about him is "http://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Hills-Rwandas-Rebirth-Dreamed/dp/0470120150 (A Thousand Hills) by Stephen Kinzer.