French press review 10 January 2013

A French police officer's forged death certificate adds a new twist to the controversy over the origins of Rwanda's genocide. Can an agreement between unions and bosses save the French economy?

Libération has a front-page exclusive on Rwanda, under the headline "A French secret".

The facts date back to April 1994, at the start of the genocide in which at least 800,000 people lost their lives. The killings began immediately after the shooting down over Kigali of a plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana.

The judge who is trying to discover who killed the French crew of the presidential plane has also looked into the deaths of two French police officers and the wife of one of the officers, mysteriously shot dead on 6 April, the day of the shooting-down of the presidential jet.

It turns out that the death certificate for one of the dead police officers, bizarrely indicating accidental death as a result of gunshot wounds, is a forgery. The family of the dead policeman were told at the time not to ask any questions. The relatives of the dead wife were visited by a high-ranking officer and were obliged to sign a French army document agreeing never to inquire into the circumstance of her death.

The two murdered officers worked in Kigali, with responsibity for radio transmissions between the French embassy and the Rwandan army. Libération's editorial asks if they had overheard conversations concerning the attack on the presidential aircraft and the start of the genocide. If that is true, you have to ask who killed them.

Libération goes on to hope that an answer can be found to that question, and that, subsequently, some clarity will finally emerge on the exact nature of French involvement in, and responsibility for, the terrible events of the summer of 1994 in Rwanda.

Today sees the start of two days of negotiations between trade unions and bosses with a view to making French industry more competitive. The unions want more job security for workers; the bosses want more flexibility in the matter of hiring and firing. It's hard to see much ground for compromise.

The tragic fact is that French unemployment figures continue to rise. The number of those out of work, already three million, is expected to reach 11 per cent of the population by the middle of this year.

Right-wing Le Figaro says the negotiators have 48 hours to show the courage necessary to save the French economy from total ruin. When they say "negotiators", Le Figaro clearly means the workers . . . They have to have the courage to ensure that French industry is flexible, so that the bosses can adapt to changing demand by altering production schedules and by lessening the wage bill, it says.

Otherwise, warns Le Figaro, we're on our rapid way to catastrophe, as already predicted by the international ratings agencies, the IMF and the German neighbours.