President Emmanuel Macron spent nine years making peace with Paul Kagame, and in that time France lost almost everything else it had in Africa.
| African lives are not worth less. African deaths are not normal. Western interests must never become a licence to kill African people. |
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Introduction: A Reset Built on One Relationship
When Emmanuel Macron took office in May 2017, he promised to rebuild France's relationship with Africa. Six months later, in a speech to students in Ouagadougou, he told a continent that the age of Françafrique was over. Nine years on, the results are plain. France has no permanent military base left in West or Central Africa, three Sahel governments refuse to attend its summits, and anti-French protest has become a feature of politics from Bamako to Kinshasa.
At the centre of Macron's Africa diplomacy stood one country: Rwanda. After decades of bitter accusations from Paul Kagame and his former foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo over France's role in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, Macron made reconciliation with Kigali the showpiece of his presidency. He did not invent the approach: Nicolas Sarkozy restored diplomatic relations in 2009. But Macron completed it and placed it at the heart of his Africa policy. The bet was that if France could settle its hardest quarrel in Africa, trust would follow everywhere else.
That bet failed. It failed because Africa is not one country, because most African grievances against France had nothing to do with 1994, and because in the one place where Rwanda dominated public opinion, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Macron's friendship with Kigali became a liability. The sections below set out how France courted Kigali, why that courtship meant little to the rest of the continent, how it backfired in Congo, how French justice was drawn into the reset, where Paris applied double standards, what France actually gained, and what the Nairobi summit of May 2026 tells us about the lessons Paris has, and has not, learned.
The Long Courtship of Kigali
The scale of the reset is clearest when measured against how far relations had fallen. When Rwanda broke off relations in November 2006, it gave the French ambassador 24 hours to leave and ordered French interests in the country closed. In 2008 English replaced French as the language of instruction in Rwandan schools, although French remains an official language. In 2014 the French cultural centre in Kigali was closed and its building demolished, with city authorities citing new height rules for buildings in the capital.
The list of French concessions that followed under Macron is long. In 2018 Paris backed Louise Mushikiwabo, the same minister who had spent years denouncing France, to become Secretary-General of the International Organisation of La Francophonie. She won in October 2018, giving Kigali a senior post in an institution built around the French language. Yet by the organisation's own estimate, only about 6% of Rwandans speak French, some 793,000 people in 2022. Its 2015 estimate, made three years before Mushikiwabo took office, gave the same proportion.
In 2019 Macron declared 7 April a national day of remembrance of the genocide against the Tutsi, and set up a commission of historians led by Vincent Duclert to examine the French archives. Its report, published in March 2021, concluded that France bore heavy and overwhelming responsibilities for its support of the Habyarimana regime, while stopping short of finding complicity in genocide. A month later, a report Kigali had commissioned from the US law firm Levy Firestone Muse went further, calling France a collaborator of the Habyarimana regime and rejecting the claim that Paris had been blind to the coming genocide.
The Duclert report examined only one part of a continuous history. Its mandate asked it to consider the role of other actors, but it worked only from French archives, and it did not examine the conduct of the Rwandan Patriotic Front with anything like the same rigour. Yet the events of 1990 to 1994 cannot be understood in fragments. The origins and conduct of the civil war, the actions of every armed party, the RPF's own record and the violence that continued after 1994, in Rwanda and then in Congo, belong to the same story. Examining one government's conduct without comparable attention to the others does not merely leave gaps; it risks misleading readers, who may take the absence of findings on matters outside the report's reach as proof that those matters were examined and found insignificant.
Historians have raised similar concerns. Writing for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès in February 2022, Serge Dupuis argued that the report's reliance on French archives left its picture of the RPF untested, and that it judged French decisions too often in the light of what came later. He cited the political scientist Marie-Ève Desrosiers on this hindsight bias, and the historian Frédéric Bozo, who argued that the report should be a starting point for historical research rather than its conclusion. Recognising the genocide against the Tutsi does not require ignoring crimes against Hutu civilians or the allegations against the RPF. A credible history must examine them together, with the same standard of evidence for all.
Yet in French public life the report has been treated as the settled account of the genocide. Observers who attended genocide trials in Paris told Africa Realities Media that the report has been invoked in court by parties supporting Kigali's account of 1994.
In May 2021 Macron went to Kigali and recognised France's role in a speech at the Gisozi genocide memorial. He did not formally apologise, but Kagame welcomed the speech. At their joint press conference, according to an account published by Jambonews, a journalist asked about the idea of a "double genocide", and Macron replied, in substance, that those who speak of a second genocide are reinventing history. With one sentence, standing beside Kagame, the French president closed the question of crimes against Hutu civilians, including the killings of Hutu refugees in Congo that a 2010 UN mapping report said could, if proven before a competent court, be characterised as genocide.
The visit also opened the money taps. During the trip Macron opened a new French cultural centre in Kigali, and France named its first ambassador to Rwanda in about six years. The French Development Agency, which had resumed work in Rwanda in 2019 after a 25-year absence, was set a target of 500 million euros for Rwanda by the end of 2023. By February 2024 it reported 504 million euros committed, in health, education, French-language teaching, climate finance and vocational training.
The relationship soon took on a strategic dimension. From July 2021 Rwandan troops deployed to Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique, where an insurgency had halted TotalEnergies' multi-billion-dollar gas project. France supported European Union funding for that deployment through the European Peace Facility. In April 2024, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the genocide, Macron went further still, saying that France and its allies could have stopped the killing but lacked the will to do so.
The friendship held even as Rwanda's role in eastern Congo grew. After Rwandan-backed M23 forces took Goma in early 2025, Britain paused most bilateral aid to Rwanda and Germany suspended new development funding. Washington's position was mixed: it brokered a peace plan between Kinshasa and Kigali, signed a five-year health agreement in December 2025 worth up to 158 million dollars in US funding, then sanctioned the Rwanda Defence Force and four senior officers in March 2026, and in late October 2026 sanctioned Rwanda's Ministry of Defence and the Zigama Credit and Savings Society, which the US Treasury said had facilitated payments for the Rwandan army and M23. France announced no step against its own aid, which had grown from almost nothing to more than half a billion euros in commitments in five years. Its official account of its response, given to the Senate in May 2025, lists diplomacy, a UN Security Council resolution, support for EU sanctions and a request to suspend an EU-Rwanda raw materials agreement. When the EU confirmed in January 2026 that it would stop funding the Rwandan mission in Mozambique, French officials and TotalEnergies began looking for ways to keep the troops in place, and Macron argued that isolating Rwanda would make its cooperation less likely.
None of this was wrong in itself. France's record in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994 deserved an honest reckoning, and the Duclert report provided one on France's side. The problem was what Macron expected the reckoning to achieve. He treated reconciliation with one government as a key that would open doors across the continent. It opened very few.
Africa Is Not Rwanda
Macron applied the same memory diplomacy elsewhere. He acknowledged colonial-era abuses in Cameroon, Senegal and Algeria and returned looted artefacts to Benin. Reporting on his record notes that he went further than any predecessor in admitting France's colonial crimes in countries including Rwanda, Cameroon and Senegal. Yet the anger that drove French troops out of Africa was not mainly about the past. It was about the present.
Across francophone Africa, the grievances were concrete: thousands of French soldiers stationed on African soil, the CFA franc and its link to the French Treasury, visa restrictions on African students and traders, and Paris's long habit of standing beside unpopular rulers. When Idriss Déby died in April 2021, Macron flew to N'Djamena for the funeral and sat beside the military council that had installed Déby's son in power, in breach of Chad's constitution. To young people in the Sahel, that image said more about French policy than any speech in Kigali.
The Sahel is where Macron's Africa policy was truly decided. Operation Barkhane, France's counter-insurgency mission, failed to stop the spread of armed groups and became a symbol of foreign occupation. Coups followed in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, and each new junta expelled French forces. An Oxford researcher writing for the Carnegie Endowment concluded that France was unable to rethink its security policy in the Sahel, and so lost most of the diplomatic goodwill it had earned.
In Niger, resentment also centred on uranium. Niger supplied about 19% of France's uranium between 2005 and 2020, fuel for a nuclear fleet that produces more than two-thirds of French electricity. In 2024 only about 21% of Nigeriens had access to electricity at all. For many in Niamey, that contrast summed up the relationship.
The retreat then spread to France's most loyal partners. Chad ended its defence agreement in late 2024. Senegal's new president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, declared that foreign bases were incompatible with national sovereignty. Côte d'Ivoire handed back the French base at Port-Bouët in February 2025. In July 2025 France returned its last two bases in Senegal, leaving Paris with no permanent camps in West or Central Africa. Small French detachments remain in some countries for training and cooperation, and France keeps its permanent base in Djibouti in East Africa, but the network of bases that anchored French power in the region is gone. A reconciliation with Rwanda, a country that had never hosted French troops after 1994, could do nothing to stop this.
Where Rwanda Mattered, It Backfired
There was one country where Rwanda was the central issue: the Democratic Republic of Congo. The M23 rebellion re-emerged in late 2021 and seized large parts of North Kivu. United Nations experts documented Rwandan support for the group; Kigali denied it. For Congolese citizens, the question of how a foreign government treated Rwanda was the test of whether it took their suffering seriously.
Macron failed that test. When he arrived in Kinshasa in March 2023, perceptions of French support for Rwanda had already fuelled anti-French feeling, and citizen groups had called for protests. At the joint press conference, President Félix Tshisekedi urged him to back sanctions against Rwanda and told him to stop looking at Congolese with a paternalistic eye. Macron replied that since 1994 Congo had not been able to restore its own sovereignty, and that this was "not France's fault". In a city where millions had been displaced by a war Kinshasa blamed on Kigali, the remark landed badly.
Only in April 2024 did Macron say plainly, beside Tshisekedi in Paris, that Rwanda must halt its support for M23 and withdraw its forces from Congolese territory. By then the damage was done. France had paid a price in Kinshasa, a country of more than 100 million people and the largest French-speaking nation in the world, to protect its friendship with a country of 14 million. That trade tells us exactly how Macron ranked his African priorities.
Justice in the Service of Diplomacy
The reset also reached the French courts. For two decades the case that most poisoned relations with Kigali was the investigation into the shooting down of President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane on 6 April 1994, which killed everyone on board, including three French crew members, and triggered the genocide. In 2006 judge Jean-Louis Bruguière issued arrest warrants against nine senior figures close to Paul Kagame. Rwanda broke off diplomatic relations with France in response.
Bruguière's investigation had real weaknesses, though some of the criticism aimed at it is unfair. He never visited Rwanda or interviewed those he accused, but no French judge could have worked there: relations were hostile and Kigali would not cooperate, and investigators routinely build cases without access to the scene of the crime. One of his witnesses, the former RPF officer Abdul Ruzibiza, retracted his account in 2008, presenting himself as a victim of political manipulation. That retraction must be weighed with care. He gave no public reason for having changed his story, and silence is not proof that no pressure was applied: in a case where other witnesses had been killed or had disappeared, and from a government that Human Rights Watch has documented threatening, abducting and killing critics abroad, a witness may have reasons to recant that he cannot safely state. Nor can one retraction discredit an investigation that rested on the testimony of several former RPF members and years of work. The problem of evidence was not of Bruguière's making alone: the judges who later closed the case themselves described an inquiry marked by killings and disappeared witnesses.
A US diplomatic cable from January 2007 recorded that he made no secret of his personal wish to see Kagame's government isolated. In 2007 he left the bench to stand, unsuccessfully, for parliament, and judges Marc Trévidic and Nathalie Poux inherited the file.
The judicial turn began under Sarkozy, not Macron. Paris and Kigali restored diplomatic relations in November 2009, and Sarkozy visited Kigali in February 2010, saying he wanted those responsible for the genocide found and punished. Rose Kabuye, Kagame's protocol chief, had been arrested in Germany in November 2008 on Bruguière's warrant; once Trévidic and Poux placed her under formal investigation, the Rwandan defence gained access to the file. The warrants against Kabuye and other officials, including then Defence Minister James Kabarebe, were lifted, and the accused were allowed to return to Rwanda. French judges travelled to Rwanda about a dozen times, and a team of experts went to Kigali in September 2010. Its report, published in January 2012, named the Kanombe military camp, held by Habyarimana's own forces, as the most probable launch site among six examined.
Marc Trévidic was not a stranger to the system that produced Bruguière's investigation. He had worked in the Paris anti-terrorism machinery for years, and the Belgian daily Le Soir described him as Bruguière's long-time disciple. Yet it was under his direction, during the diplomatic thaw, that the investigation changed course. When lawyers for the crew's families and for Agathe Habyarimana challenged the report's acoustic findings and asked for a counter-expertise, Trévidic largely refused in June 2012. We do not claim to know what Trévidic knew or believed about his predecessor's work. But the sequence speaks for itself: in the Habyarimana case, the direction of French justice changed when the direction of French diplomacy changed, and that alone should trouble anyone who believes judicial independence means anything.
The case then drifted until judge Jean-Marc Herbaut and Nathalie Poux ordered a dismissal on 21 December 2018, two months after France helped Mushikiwabo take the Francophonie post. Weeks before the decision, a source close to the Élysée had told La Croix that the judicial side of the relationship was making things harder. The judges found the case rested on contradictory or unverifiable testimony in an inquiry marked by killings and vanished witnesses. The Paris Court of Appeal upheld the dismissal in July 2020, and the Court of Cassation confirmed it in February 2022.
Three levels of French judges reached the same conclusion, and readers should weigh that. But the timing, and the result, fit the pattern of a reset that began under Sarkozy and was completed under Macron: the French case that reached furthest into Rwanda's current leadership ended with no culprit, and the deaths of three French citizens remain unpunished.
They were not the only French victims. Two French gendarmes, Alain Didot and René Maïer, and Didot's wife Gilda were killed in Kigali in April 1994. A French intelligence note from that year suggested they may have been eliminated because they had witnessed the attack on the plane; it is an intelligence assessment, not a judicial finding. According to their relatives and the NGO Survie, who filed a complaint in April 2024 seeking an inquiry, no autopsy or investigation was ever carried out. The two gendarmes have since been officially recognised as having died for France. Recognition has come; answers have not.
France has also pursued Rwandans accused of taking part in the genocide, which is right. Those trials have not been rubber stamps. In 2022 a Paris court acquitted former prefect Laurent Bucyibaruta as a direct perpetrator and convicted him of complicity, imposing 20 years where prosecutors sought life. In August 2025 two investigating judges dismissed the case against Agathe Habyarimana, before the Paris Court of Appeal overturned that decision on 6 May 2026 and ordered the investigation to resume. Neither ruling settles her guilt or innocence. Yet Rwanda's main survivors' organisation was open about the politics: after the Bucyibaruta verdict, Ibuka's executive secretary credited France's political will and linked the outcome to improved ties between the two countries.
The real issue is not the individual verdicts but what France chose to pursue. Under Macron, French justice has prosecuted those accused of genocide against the Tutsi, while the only case touching the Rwandan Patriotic Front was closed, and no French inquiry has examined crimes attributed to Rwandan forces in 1994 or in eastern Congo since. Justice that runs in one direction only is not neutral. It becomes another instrument of foreign policy.
An Old Habit: Private Deals Between Presidents
Macron promised to end the personal, opaque style of Françafrique, in which African policy was run from the Élysée through networks of envoys and favours. The history he inherited shows why that promise mattered. In 2011 the lawyer Robert Bourgi claimed he had delivered suitcases of cash from African heads of state to Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin. Mamadou Koulibaly, then Speaker of Côte d'Ivoire's National Assembly, confirmed a transfer of around two billion CFA francs, roughly three million euros, from Laurent Gbagbo to Chirac in 2002. Chirac and Villepin denied the claims and announced defamation complaints, and Paris prosecutors closed the case because the allegations could not be corroborated.
A later case went further. In September 2025 a Paris court convicted Nicolas Sarkozy of criminal association over a scheme to obtain Libyan funding for his 2007 campaign, and he spent 20 days in prison. When Mediapart first reported the allegations in 2012, Sarkozy called its key document a crude forgery and sued; French courts dismissed his complaint three times. Sarkozy denies wrongdoing and his appeal verdict is due on 30 November 2026, so the conviction is not yet final.
Macron's Rwanda policy was not of this kind, and nothing in the public record suggests it was. But it shared one feature with the old system: it was personal. It rested on a relationship between two presidents, it was conducted from the Élysée, and it was measured by gestures rather than by results for ordinary Africans. That is why it could coexist with a collapse of French standing everywhere else.
Nairobi: The Reset After the Reset
In May 2026 Macron went to Nairobi to co-host the Africa Forward summit with Kenyan President William Ruto. It was the first Africa-France summit hosted by an English-speaking country, and a diplomat described it to AFP as a report card on his Africa policy. Macron announced investment commitments of 23 billion euros, 14 billion from French investors and 9 billion from African investors, in sectors including energy, artificial intelligence and agriculture. These were announcements, not completed investments.
The summit also revealed how little the underlying approach had changed. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger stayed away, and Macron criticised them from the podium. He drew backlash for interrupting a panel to demand silence from the audience. And he summed up his outlook in a single line: "We believe that Africa is a continent." Moving the summit from Paris to Nairobi was a welcome change of venue. But replacing one favoured partner, Rwanda, with another, Kenya, is still a continental gesture rather than a country-by-country policy.
Double Standards: Rules for Some, Exceptions for Kigali
Macron's Africa policy did not apply one set of rules to every government. Coups are the clearest example. When Idriss Déby's son took power in Chad in 2021, Paris accepted it. When soldiers overthrew Ali Bongo in Gabon in August 2023, France condemned the coup, but the Swiss journalist Richard Werly noted Macron's remarkable caution and observed that France has historically made its peace with putschists. In Niger a month earlier, by contrast, France refused to recognise the junta, kept its ambassador in place and backed West African threats of military intervention. The security researcher Niagalé Bagayoko compared the Bongo dynasty to the Déby dynasty that Paris had supported in Chad.
The same selectivity applies to political opposition. Victoire Ingabire, Rwanda's best-known opposition leader, spent eight years in prison after returning to Kigali in 2010, and was arrested again in June 2025. In July 2026 a UN working group found her detention arbitrary and called for her release. It is hard to imagine Paris treating the jailing of an opposition leader in Niamey with the same quiet.
Space for dissent about 1994 itself has narrowed in France. In December 2024 a Paris court convicted the Franco-Cameroonian author Charles Onana and his publisher of contesting the genocide against the Tutsi; Onana has appealed. He has also complained on social media that he is kept off French public broadcasting, and we have found no record of him being interviewed on France Télévisions, RFI or France 24; his views have circulated instead on private radio such as Sud Radio and online. Whatever the outcome of his appeal, the case shows how little room remains in French public life for questioning the dominant account of the genocide and of the RPF's role in the war.
Nowhere was the contrast sharper than over sanctions. In March 2026 Washington sanctioned the Rwanda Defence Force and four senior officers, and imposed visa restrictions on senior Rwandan officials, though not on Kagame himself. Two months later, in an interview with France 24 and RFI at the Nairobi summit, Macron rejected collective sanctions against Kigali on the American model, arguing that isolating Rwanda would compromise cooperation. As France's closest ally tightened the pressure, Paris kept the red carpet out. Kagame, received at the Élysée in May 2025, returned to Paris in June 2026 to inaugurate a genocide memorial beside Macron. A president who would not risk his relationship with one leader, even as Washington moved to punish that leader's army, was no longer conducting a balanced policy. It looked like a fixation.
That memorial deserves its own attention. On 2 June 2026 Macron and Kagame inaugurated L'Archive, a memorial on the banks of the Seine to the victims of the genocide against the Tutsi. Those victims must be remembered. But France has made no comparable gesture towards the Hutu civilians killed by RPF forces in Rwanda and in Congo, killings the UN mapping report documented and said could, if proven before a competent court, be characterised as genocide. A memory policy that recognises one group of victims and stays silent about another, unveiled beside the leader whose forces stand accused of the other killings, risks deepening the very division Rwanda needs to overcome. Remembering the genocide against the Tutsi and acknowledging Hutu victims are not competing duties. A France committed to the whole truth would do both.
The pattern was visible again in Paris in October 2025. At an international conference on the Great Lakes, which raised around 1.5 billion euros, Macron announced that Goma airport would reopen for humanitarian flights in the coming weeks. M23 called the plan inopportune, and Rwanda's foreign minister Olivier Nduhungirehe said Paris could not reopen an airport when the main stakeholders were absent. Weeks later Kigali insisted that the conditions belonged to the Doha negotiations, not to Paris. Macron's reported criticism fell on M23, not on the government accused of backing it. According to the French Foreign Ministry, the participating countries and organisations had disbursed all 850 million euros of the emergency humanitarian funding by January 2026. But in January 2026 the airport was still closed, and M23 declared that only it could reopen it. A French president made a humanitarian promise, Kigali and its allies set it aside, and Paris did not name Rwanda.
What Did France Gain?
Defenders of the reset point to Mozambique, where Rwandan troops protect TotalEnergies' gas project, worth around 25 billion dollars. But Rwanda's role there says less about friendship than about France's retreat. Any capable army could have done the job. What France could not do, while pulling its own soldiers out of Africa, was send French troops to protect a French company's investment. It needed someone to go in its place. Rwanda went, its deployment was funded through a European facility that France supported, and when that money stopped in 2026, French officials and TotalEnergies looked for ways to keep the Rwandan troops there. That is not a dividend of reconciliation. It is security outsourcing, and it handed Kigali leverage over Paris.
The end of the diplomatic feud was real, but its price was paid by others. While Paris protected its friendship with Kigali, Rwandan-backed forces seized much of eastern Congo, and France was slow to name the government its own partners in Kinshasa blamed. Kigali, meanwhile, gained far more than Paris: the leadership of the Francophonie, half a billion euros in French development commitments, a French president who dismissed talk of crimes against Hutu civilians, and years of French restraint over eastern Congo.
French critics have been blunt about the wider record. After the Gabon coup in 2023, Senator Alain Joyandet, a former minister for cooperation, said French diplomacy in Africa had become hard to understand, and the researcher Serge Michaïlof, a former director at the French Development Agency, said Macron had made blunder after blunder. Opponents put the failures down to misjudgement and to a personal, Élysée-run style of diplomacy. Whether the Rwanda strategy reflected a misreading of Africa, a president's search for a historic legacy or the weight of a personal relationship with Paul Kagame, the result was the same: a foreign policy that served one partner well and France poorly.
Conclusion: One Country Is Not a Continent
The reckoning with France's role in 1994 was necessary, and the Duclert report will outlast Macron, even though its one-sided scope remains contested. Defenders of his record will also argue, fairly, that the Sahel collapse was driven by jihadist violence, military coups and Russian influence that no Rwanda policy could have prevented. Both points are true. Neither rescues the strategy.
Macron's error was to treat memory politics as foreign policy, and one capital as a stand-in for fifty-four. He assumed that settling France's hardest quarrel would buy trust everywhere. Instead, African states judged France on what it did now: where its soldiers stood, which rulers it embraced, how it treated their sovereignty, and, in Congo, how it treated Rwanda's present conduct rather than its past suffering.
The heaviest price was paid by people who never featured in the reset at all. While Paris celebrated its reconciliation with Kigali, Congolese civilians in North Kivu were killed in their thousands and displaced in their millions, and France hesitated for two years before naming the government their leaders blamed. A policy that honours the victims of one genocide while looking away from the victims of a present war is not reconciliation. It is selection.
The question for Macron's successor is simple: will France build relationships with African countries one by one, on their own terms, or will it look for another single partner to stand in for the continent? And will it apply the same standards to every African government, on coups, on jailed opponents and on wars across borders, whether or not that government is a friend of Paris?
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Macron prioritise relations with Rwanda?
Macron saw reconciliation with Rwanda as proof that France could break with its past in Africa. Kigali had been France's harshest critic over the 1994 genocide, so a successful reset there was meant to signal a new era across the continent.
Did France apologise for its role in the Rwandan genocide?
France recognised its responsibility but did not formally apologise. In Kigali in May 2021, Macron accepted the findings of the Duclert report, which found heavy and overwhelming French responsibilities but no complicity in genocide.
Why did French troops leave West Africa?
French troops left because successive governments asked them to go. Juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger expelled them after coups, and then elected or long-standing allies in Chad, Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire ended defence arrangements, citing sovereignty. The last permanent bases in Senegal closed in July 2025, although small French detachments remain in some countries for training and cooperation.
How did France's Rwanda policy affect the DRC?
It damaged France's standing in Congo. Many Congolese saw Paris as reluctant to criticise Rwanda over its alleged support for the M23 rebels, which fuelled protests during Macron's 2023 visit. France only called openly for Rwandan troops to leave Congolese territory in April 2024.
Did France cut aid to Rwanda over the M23 conflict?
No. France announced no suspension of its own aid, which the French Development Agency had raised to 504 million euros in commitments by early 2024. Britain paused most bilateral aid and Germany suspended new funding in 2025, while France backed EU sanctions and asked for the EU-Rwanda raw materials agreement to be suspended.
Why was the French case over Habyarimana's plane dismissed?
Investigating judges dismissed it in December 2018 for lack of sufficient evidence, finding that the accusations against Kagame's associates relied on contradictory or unverifiable testimony. Appeal courts upheld the dismissal in 2020 and 2022, but its timing during the Franco-Rwandan rapprochement has fuelled suspicion that diplomacy shaped the outcome.
What was the Africa Forward summit in Nairobi?
The Africa Forward summit, held in Nairobi on 11 and 12 May 2026, was the first Africa-France summit hosted by an English-speaking country. It produced 23 billion euros in announced investment commitments. Co-hosted with Kenya, it was presented as a new partnership of equals, but Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger did not attend.
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Author: Africa Realities Media Editorial Team
Disclaimer: This article is analysis and commentary on political events, diplomatic policy and judicial proceedings, based on the published record. Nicolas Sarkozy's conviction is under appeal and he is presumed innocent until a final judgment. Allegations described here were denied by those concerned unless a court has ruled otherwise. Dismissals and acquittals are not findings that any person did or did not commit a crime. Nothing in this article states or implies that any judge, expert or government acted unlawfully in the cases discussed.
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