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FACTBOX-Key facts about strained Rwanda-France ties

24 Nov 2006 18:35:08 GMT
Source: Reuters

Nov 24 (Reuters) - Rwanda broke off diplomatic ties with France on Friday, angry at a French judge's call for Rwandan President Paul Kagame to face trial over the 1994 downing of a plane that killed the country's leader and unleashed a genocide.

The move marks a new low in relations between the two countries, at loggerheads since the end of the 1994 genocide of 800,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in the tiny central African country.

Kagame, a Tutsi, has long accused France of training and arming Hutu militias who were the main force behind the 100 days of slaughter. Paris denies the charges.

Here is a brief chronology of Kigali-Paris ties.

* Although Rwanda was a Belgian colony until independence in 1962, France maintained close links with the Francophone country from 1975 to 1994, providing financial and military support to the government of Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda's Hutu president killed in the 1994 attack on his plane.

* France intervened militarily in Rwanda three times between 1990 and 1994, and each time has been accused by genocide survivors and the Kagame government of complicity genocide or events leading up to it.

* From October 1990 to December 1993, the French army led "Operation Noroit" which many Rwandans saw as backing Habyarimana's government against the Tutsi-led invasion of Kagame's Rwanda Patriotic Front rebels.

* Two days after Habyarimana's plane was shot down in April 1994 with ground-to-air missiles, France launched "Operation Amaryllis" to evacuate 1,500 residents, mostly Westerners trapped in Kigali. Rwandan survivors have criticised the French for turning away Rwandans who wanted to escape the killings.

* In 1998, Rwanda dismisses the findings of a French parliamentary inquiry, which blamed the United Nations for failing to avert the genocide, as a "whitewash".

* Last month, a Rwandan government-appointed commission launched a probe into France's role in the genocide.

* On Nov 21, French anti-terrorism magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere filed a document with the Paris prosecutor's office, that said there was evidence Kagame and members of his military staff had devised the operation to destroy Habyarimana's plane. In it, he calls for Kagame to be brought before a U.N. court.

* Kagame denounces the move as "bullying and arrogant" a day later. But his bitter broadside against France does not prevent Bruguiere from issuing international arrest warrants for nine Kagame associates on Nov 22.

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Last updated:Fri Nov 24 18:38:07 2006