Rwandan, according to its minister of state for foreign affairs Olivier Nduhungirehe, invited French President Emmanuel Macron to attend the Rwandan Genocide 25th Anniversary which claimed close to a million lives in 100 days between April and July 1994, when the Moderate Hutus Fought the minority Tutsis in what was globally perceived as ethnic cleansing, Rwanda’s state
Rwanda had accused France of aiding the genocide and helping to train the soldiers and militiamen who carried out the killing of minority ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the 1994 genocide.
Although President Macron has not yet given nod to the invitation, scheduled to hold in the Rwandan capital on April 7,
Macron, if he accepts the invitation would have only been the second French president to visit the country since the genocide, which still poisons relations between the two nations.
Former President Nicolas Sarkozy was the first to visit Kigali in February 2010, when he admitted France had made “serious errors” but gave no apology.
Paris has consistently denied any involvement in the massacre, which the UN says claimed about 800,000 lives in 100 days between April and July 1994.
In December, French judges dropped a long-running investigation into the killing of former Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana in April 1994, the event that sparked the blood-letting.
The probe represented a major source of tension between the two countries after seven people close to President Paul Kagame were charged in the French investigation.
Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu, was killed in a missile strike on his plane near Kigali’s airport, but a Rwandan commission in 2009 found Hutu extremists responsible for the assassination.
The first judge to lead the French probe, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, backed the theory that it was Tutsi militants from the former rebellion led by Kagame, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR), who shot down the plane.
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