For the first time, three Tutsi women speak in a discovered face of rapes that they suffered from French soldiers just after the genocide they had recovered in 1994.
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“We thought naively that the white was a Savior and necessarily brought peace. But our problems worsened.” It is by the brutal testimony of a Rwandan that the silence of words begins. A Korealized documentary by the Franco-Rwandan artist Gaël Faye, Author of Small Country (Grasset, 2016), and Michael Sztanke, director, 2019, Rwanda, Chronicle of a genocide announced for France 24. He traces the broken destiny of three Tutsi refugees who would have been raped by French military – whose mission, under mandate of the United Nations, was to “protect the populations”.
At the end of June 1994, the Rwanda hills still red blood from the 800,000 victims of the Tutsi genocide, France sends 2,500 soldiers for a military-humanitarian operation called “turquoise”. In the refugee camps of Nyarushishi and Murambi pile up survivors who escaped the Mackets of Hutu killers. There are thousands of women among them.
“The French soldiers were still watching, looking for a pretty girl, says Marie-Jeanne Murakette, aged 51 today. Sometimes they went out of the tent and made you this that they wanted. “” Their desires were orders, add Prisca Mushimiyimana. It was necessary to get to four legs or lift the leg, they realized all their fantasies. “” They played me on the ground, remembers, in tears. , Musabyimana dealer. A soldier took pictures and another was rapeting. “
Transmission concern
With courage and modesty, these three women confident face camera. The emotion is strong when they come back to the places where they have experienced hell. “Go back will make us a lot crying, but we will feel better after”, ensures one to encourage the other. “It is said that those who do not know where they come do not know where they go,” says Prisca. In a concern for transmission, Marie-Jeanne Murakette offers his daughter to accompany him so that she knows “what happened”, that she “sees where we survived”.
The words of these women had never been broadcast on television. At the bar of a court, on the other hand, they have already been heard. In 2004, thanks to the support of Dr. Annie Faure, who worked for doctors in the world during the genocide, Prisca, Marie-Jeanne and Concess, filed a complaint against X for rape in front of French justice. But the two decades of education, at the genocide and crime against the humanity of the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris, did not advance their files.
According to the documentary, the great mute “refuses to cooperate in the identification of the soldiers concerned”. As for the report Duclert, if it has allowed to point “a set of heavy and overwhelming responsibilities” of Paris, it is also surprisingly mute on this other shadow share of the “turquoise” operation.