The second in a promised trilogy of Rwandan reviews from Tom Odom, serial SWJ contributor and highly regarded Small Warrior.  Link to review #1.  #2 follows:

A review of:

Silent Accomplice: The Untold Story of France's Role in the Rwandan Genocide

Andrew Wallis, London: I.B. Tauris &Co Ltd, 2006.

Reviewed by:

Thomas (Tom) P. Odom

LTC US Army (ret)

Author, Journey Into Darkness: Genocide In Rwanda

As a member of the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization in 1988, I once spent a week on observation post duty in El Arish, Egypt with a French Army captain of Vietnamese-French heritage.  I remember that week well because he convinced me to try Nuc Mong (rotten fish oil sauce).  To my relief, it did not taste fishy.  Seven years later I attended a diplomatic function in Kigali, Rwanda where to my surprise my former El Arish comrade was introduced as the newly arrived second secretary of the French embassy.  Unlike the Nuc Mong in 1987, his arrival in Kigali in 1995 was most definitely fishy.  He was using a different name and he pretended not to know when I grabbed his hand and addressed him by what had served as his first name the last time we met.   This encounter only increased the sour taste I had in my mouth regarding French activities and policies toward Rwanda before, during, and after the genocide.

I offer that vignette as a metaphor well suited to introducing Andrew Wallis's book, Silent Accomplice: The Untold Story of France's Role in the Rwandan Genocide. Wallis offers a wider review of French and Rwandan sources in discussing France's relationship to the Rwandan tragedy.  His interviews with French and Rwandan sources, especially members of the former Rwandan military are quite valuable.  Wallis sets these interviews against a larger examination of the Mitterrand regime that is in itself damning.  France or at least France as defined by that peculiar relationship between the French exterior forces and the French presidential cabinet put as priority number one maintenance of the Francophone African club. In the case of Rwanda, Mitterrand and company would seek to maintain a repressive regime even as it plotted and executed a full blown genocide against its own people.  Worse, France would continue to openly and covertly support and succor that regime as it lost the war. That support continued after the war ended.  Despite Wallis' title, France pursued this policy openly and defiantly.  As a survey of this episode with an attention to French and Rwandan sourced details, Wallis's book does offer new insights.

On the other hand, Wallis's work is not as well researched as its jacket proclaims.  First of all he is not revealing an untold story.  Gérard Prunier's The Rwanda Crisis and Linda Melvern's Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide both walked down this path on the Rwandan genocide.  They remain the standard baseline for journalistic coverage of the war and genocide.  Prunier was actually inside Operation Turquoise as an "advisor." Such credentials are hard to match.  Melvern has done tremendous work in sifting through the available evidence that has emerged after the clearing of the camps in Zaire and the International Tribunal in Arusha.  Wallis falls short of matching their work.

Still I recommend this book to all who want to understand what happened in Rwanda.  I would especially recommend it given current French and French-proxy efforts to market the "two genocide" pabulum espoused by the surviving Hutu extremists and their supporters.