Recently, I've been (somewhat inadvertantly) studying French international involvement. Today's lesson is on their role in the Rwandan massacre of 1998 in which nearly 800,000 (yes, that's right) minority Tutsis were killed by the Hutu majority. Its seems, from what I'm finding, that much of the blame can be laid on the Clinton administration, Belgium, U.N., and (of course), the French.

(You can skip everything I'm writing here if you just want to go read my source materials for yourself. Most of what I write here is lifted from an excellent Frontline documentary on the subject, especially this page. They also provide a helpful timeline. But the following summary is shorter and more to-the-point. Your choice.)

Starting with the most minor players first...

The Clinton administration, still winded from their flight from Somalia, signed a decree limiting U.S. involvement in U.N. peacekeeping. But more importantly, the Clinton administration also pressured the U.N. to limit its own role -- perhaps fearing U.S. non-involvement might reflect poorly on the Clinton administration's stated commitment to international humanitarian causes. (This is the same President Clinton who stood up during the early days of the Bush and demanded U.N. involvement in any Iraqi decisions lest the U.N. diminish its role as an international peacekeeper.)

Later, when other nations failed to act, Rwanda's African neighbors tried to intervene, pleading with the Clinton administration for minor assistance. But the Clinton administration successfully blocked their efforts by demanding to be paid a paltry fifteen million dollars before we'd help out:

So May became June. By then, a consortium of eight fed-up African nations had proclaimed their readiness to send an intervention force to Rwanda, provided that Washington would send fifty armored personnel carriers. The Clinton administration agreed, but instead of lending the armor to the courageous Africans, it decided to lease it to the U.N.--where Washington was billions of dollars in arrears on membership dues--for a price of fifteen million dollars, transportation and spare parts included...

The Clinton administration also scrupulously avoided calling the killing of the hundreds of thousands of Tutsis "genocide" (a term which would have required international intervention by the U.N.), and instead released many statements about how wrong the "killings" were, and later, apologies to the dead Tutsis.

Belgium and the U.N.: Hutus initially killed 10 Belgian soldiers. Belgium, the tiny nation which wants to try U.S. leaders for war crimes, withdrew its troops, who had been keeping 2,000 Tutsi refugees safe from Hutus. The refugees are immediately slaughtered.

Belgian soldiers, aggrieved by the cowardice and waste of their mission, shredded their U.N. berets on the tarmac at Kigali airport. A week later, on April 21, 1994, the UNAMIR commander, Major General Dallaire, declared that with just five thousand well-equipped soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu Power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt. No military analyst whom I've heard of has ever questioned his judgment, and a great many have confirmed it. The radio transmitter of the genocidal propaganda station RTLM would have been an obvious, and easy, first target. Yet, on the same day, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that slashed the UNAMIR force by ninety percent, ordering the retreat of all but two hundred seventy troops and leaving them with a mandate that allowed them to do little more than hunker down behind their sandbags and watch...

In fact, the Clinton administration's ambassador to the U.N., Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of two hundred seventy in Rwanda...

A week after UNAMIR was slashed, when the ambassadors of Czechoslovakia, New Zealand, and Spain, sickened by the barrage of irrefutable evidence of genocide in Rwanda, began pushing for the return of U.N. troops, the United States demanded control of the mission. But there was no mission to control. The Security Council, where Rwanda conveniently occupied a temporary seat in 1994, could not even bring itself to pass a resolution that contained the word "genocide." In this proud fashion, April gave way to May. As Rwanda's genocidal leaders stepped up efforts for a full national mobilization to extirpate the last surviving Tutsis, the Security Council prepared, on May 13, to vote once again on restoring UNAMIR's strength. Ambassador Albright got the vote postponed by four days. The Security Council then agreed to dispatch five thousand five hundred troops for UNAMIR, only--at American insistence--very slowly.

And of course, the French also contributed to the mess, and did so for very interesting reasons...

In the final days of the slaughter, while the Hutus were hunting down the few remaining Rwandan Tutsis, the multi-ethnic, Tutsi-led RPF entered Rwanda from Uganda in an effort to stem the bloodshed and push back the Hutus.

France's current colonialist policy is near-unconditional support for groups which (prepare for a shock here) speak French. In Rwanda, France had established friendly ties with, and supported the genocidal Hutus, who spoke French. In contrast, the RPF Tutsis spoke (quel horreur!) English. So France decided if it didn't do something soon, its Hutu friends, who had just slaughtered 500,000+ unarmed civillians, might meet with some kind of justice -- at the hands of English speakers!

France was chafing for an opportunity to rescue its investment of military and political prestige in Rwanda. That meant salvaging Habyarimana's Hutu Power heirs from the increasingly likely prospect of a total defeat at the hands of the dreaded Anglophone RPF. Communications between Paris and Kigali remained constant, cordial, and often downright conspiratorial. Hawkish French diplomats and Africa hands generally adopted the official position of Rwanda's genocidal government ... that Rwandans were simply killing each other as they were wont to do, for primordial tribal reasons, since time immemorial...

[A]lthough France had rarely hesitated in the past to conduct unilateral, partisan military invasions to prop up its African clients, the genocide made such a move awkward. The French press was crowding the French political and military establishment with exposes of its blatant complicity in the preparation and implementation of the butchery. Then, in mid-June, the French government hit on the idea of billing a military expedition into Rwanda as a "humanitarian" mission and carrying it out under the U.N. flag, with some rented Senegalese troops along for the ride to create an aura of multilateralism...

Neat, huh? To whit:

Gérard Prunier, a political scientist who was part of the task force that worked out France's intervention scheme, has written that the great worry in Paris as plans for the mobilization got underway in mid-June was whether its troops would find any large concentrations of Tutsis to rescue before the television cameras.

So unsuprisingly, when the French entered the country, their actions were not so much humanitarian as simply to protect their genocidal Hutu allies from the [Tutsi] RPF, and sometimes even support them in the slaughter:

Opération Turquoise was eventually credited with rescuing at least ten thousand Tutsis in western Rwanda, but thousands more continued to be killed in the French-occupied zone. Hutu Power brigades draped their vehicles with French flags to lure Tutsis from hiding to their deaths; and even when real French troops found survivors, they often told them to wait for transport, then went away and returned to find that those they had "saved" were corpses. From the moment they arrived, and wherever they went, the French forces supported and preserved the same local political leaders who had presided over the genocide.

Looking back on the French tendancy to use force rather than peaceful means...

[Tutsi RPF General] Kagame recalled another incident when his men had French troops in custody and tense negotiations had to be carried out through General Dallaire. On that occasion, Kagame said, "They threatened to come in with helicopters and bomb our troops and positions. I told them that I thought the matter was going to be discussed and resolved peacefully, but that if they wanted to fight, I had no problem with that." In the end, he said, the French pleaded for their men back, and he let them go. Kagame, who grew up in Uganda as a Rwandan refugee and spoke English, told me that he couldn't comprehend France's support for the "génocidaires" -- as even English-speaking Rwandans call the adherents of Hutu Power -- and he scoffed at French fears of an Anglophone conquest of Rwanda. "If they wanted people here to speak French, they shouldn't have helped to kill people here [Tutsis] who spoke French."

So this is the great moral nation which deplores any use of force against Saddam's government? Ask yourself how likely it is such a government is truly standing on humanitarian principles, given the above.

Update: More developments here.