RWANDA, THE END OF SILENCE - Testimony of a French Officer

Preface by: Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau

Against the heavy secret surrounding France's true role and that of its army during the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, Guillaume Ancel sets the truth of his field notebooks — a testimony to the missions in which he took part during Operation Turquoise. The end of silence is also the account of the struggle waged by this former officer to make known what really happened during that summer of 1994 and to "pay tribute, with dignity, to the hundreds of thousands of Rwandan victims we failed to protect."

An officer of the Rapid Action Force, seconded to a unit of the Foreign Legion, Captain Ancel led his men in operations to extract people under threat. Under cover of a humanitarian operation intended to put an end to the massacres, this officer quickly understood that France was supporting the Rwandan genocidal government whose army it had trained. He describes the blunders of the French army, tossed about by political decisions whose motivations remained secret, with official archives kept inaccessible.

This testimony also reveals certain little-known episodes of this "humanitarian" operation during which the French army killed — sometimes in self-defence, sometimes for less honourable reasons.