French press review 11 January 2012

Who killed Rwandan president Juvenal Habyaramina? The controversy rages on. The media - should you believe us? And the limits of French fraternité.

Libération gives pride of place to the latest French legal investigation into the shooting-down of the plane carrying the then Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, as it prepared to land at Kigali Airport.

That assassination, on 6 April, 1994, sparked three months of Hutu violence against Tutsis, a genocide in which 800,000 people died at the hands of their former neighbours.

The latest report suggests that the attack was, in fact, a coup d'état.

On the basis of ballistic evidence, this report confirms that the missile that brought the plane down was fired from Kanombe military barracks, where elements of the presidential guard, the para-commando battalion, and most importantly, the anti­-aircraft battalion, were based.

The new French investigation arrives at the the same version of the facts as the locally compliled Mutsinzi report which, in 2009, concluded that the Habyarimana assassination was the work of Hutu extremists who calculated that killing their own leader would torpedo the Hutu-Tutsi power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha Accords.

The president was on his way back from negotiating that Arusha deal when he was assassinated.

The reason the new report is significant is that it reverses the 2006 findings of another French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière.

He accused members of the current, predominantly Tutsi, government of involvement in the assassination, thus suggesting that the genocidal uprising against Rwanda's Tutsis had actually been provoked by Tutsis under the control of Paul Kagame, the man who is now Rwanda's president.

Libération's editorial welcomes the latest clarification, but does wonder how much the then French government, under Socialist François Mitterrand, actually knew about the preparations for what was clearly a minutely planned uprising.

Genocide survivors have welcomed the latest findings. However, Habyarimana's widow, Agathe, is disappointed.

She wanted the French inquiry to find out who had bought the allegedly Russian-manufactured missile that hit the plane because that would help to identify those behind the attack.

Despite the clarity brought by the latest investigation, the difficulty of understanding Rwanda's dark days has not been swept away.

Communist L'Humanité looks at the media - press, TV and radio - and decides that, far from being the fearless defenders of truth and objectivity that most working journalists like to imagine themselves as, we are nothing more than the guardians of uniformity.

Who really decides what the media talk about? Who sets the angles of approach to the various stories? Who are the so-called expert analysts who show up everywhere, selling the same line of explanation? Why should we believe anything we are told by the media?

The fact is, says L'Humanité, that the players in the fields of economics, politics and the media are all passengers in the same boat and media independence is, even in a free-speech environment such as contemporary France, a very flexible concept.

The recent coverage of the European economic crisis is a case in point for L'Humanité. We saw the same experts everywhere for a few weeks, offering a uniform, and uniformly wrong, analysis of the situation.

The few individuals who actually had something worth reporting about the collusion between, say, German manufacturers and the Greek government, were quickly written off as insignificant.

Le Monde's main story says France last year naturalised 30 per cent fewer foreigners than in 2010, and escorted 33,000 people to the national borders.

The current right-wing government, perhaps eyeing the rabidly anti-immigration National Front electoral bloc, is proud to announce as a policy the reduction of French immigration levels to 1990s levels.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité, my arse!