Intent to Deceive: Denying the Genocide of the Tutsi

by Linda Melvern

A dramatic press campaign was under way in France organised by MSF, the agency having decided to speak out about the genocide. ‘We had a special responsibility, because France has a special responsibility’, said Jean-François Alesandrini, director of communications of MSF-France. Jean-Hervé Bradol, an MSF doctor who had just returned from Kigali, appeared on the French nightly news bulletin (TFI) on 16 May. The huge death toll was not the result of civil war, he explained. The killers were trying to present the catastrophe in Rwanda as the result of tribes slaughtering each other. This was an insult to the victims. Bradol explained that a deliberate, systematic and well-planned extermination was under way. ‘France has a particularly serious role’, he said, and informed viewers that France had funded, trained and armed those carrying out the slaughter, something they kept quiet. It was scandalous that no French authority had explicitly condemned those responsible or called on the killers to stop the slaughter since French officials knew these killers.