Rwanda police break up anti-French protests
Source: Reuters
By Arthur Asiimwe KIGALI, Nov 27 (Reuters) - Rwandan riot police chased away thousands of protesters gathered outside the French embassy in the capital Kigali on Monday as a deadline expired for French diplomats to leave the tiny central African nation. Rwanda severed diplomatic ties with France on Friday after a French judge called for Rwandan President Paul Kagame to stand trial over the killing of a former leader in 1994, the event which unleashed the country's genocide. Rwanda had given France's ambassador 24 hours to quit the country, and other diplomats 72 hours. "We want to see if there are any more French inside there," Claude Kibibi, one of about 3,000 protesters crowded outside the French embassy, told Reuters. "We condemn the French and their evil intentions towards our country." Others waved placards, written in English, saying: "Down with the French. We are tired of your neo-colonialism." Scores of riot police in body armour prevented the demonstrators from reaching the embassy, which was not damaged. But in further signs of deteriorating relations with Paris, the Rwandan government also ordered the closure on Monday of a French school and entertainment centre in Kigali, and cut off FM broadcasts by Radio France International. Protests began last week after French anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere issued arrest warrants for nine associates of Kagame over the 1994 shooting down of a plane carrying former President Juvenal Habyarimana. The downing of the plane triggered Rwanda's genocide, in which some 800,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days of bloodshed. Kagame has rejected the accusations. In a Reuters interview on Saturday, the president said senior Rwandan Hutu commanders shot down the plane with French backing. He also accused France of harbouring former government officials who masterminded the genocide. Kagame's rebel Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) defeated the Hutu extremists in a march across the hilly country to Kigali. France has said Bruguiere is acting independently and that his decisions were not politically motivated. Bruguiere's investigation followed a complaint by the families of the French crew flying Habyarimana's plane and the leader's widow Agathe. Although Rwanda was a Belgian colony until independence in 1962, France maintained close links with the Francophone country from 1975 to 1994, providing financial and military support to the Habyarimana government.
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