The decision of the French judiciary bringing the proceedings concerning Bisesero to an end deserves the respect due to any judgment delivered at the conclusion of a lengthy judicial process. It cannot, however, bring our reflection on Bisesero to an end. A court decision may close legal proceedings; it cannot close History, memory, or the questions that the tragedies of the past continue to pose to our present-day conscience.
For me, Bisesero will remain, above all, a symbol of resistance and resilience.
On those hills of western Rwanda in 1994, Tutsi women and men hunted down by the génocidaires refused to be led passively to their deaths. With the most rudimentary means—sometimes no more than stones and sticks—they organized themselves, resisted, and protected their own as best they could. Many were massacred. Others survived. It is to them that our thoughts must turn first.
The debate over France’s role, however legitimate and necessary, should never have the paradoxical effect of obscuring those who stand at the heart of the story of Bisesero: the victims, the resisters, and the survivors.
It is also important to distinguish between different forms of responsibility. Criminal responsibility is governed by exacting standards: it requires the establishment of specific facts attributable to identified individuals, as well as the constituent elements of the alleged offence. When a court determines that these conditions have not been met, that conclusion must be understood within its proper legal scope.
But the absence of established criminal responsibility does not necessarily bring historical, political, or moral questioning to an end. History may continue to examine what criminal law has not established: what was known, what should have been known, the decisions that were taken and those that were not, errors of judgment, institutional failures and, above all, lost opportunities to save human lives.
In this respect, Bisesero carries a lesson that extends far beyond Rwanda and the controversies surrounding Operation Turquoise. It concerns the prevention of genocide itself. Everything I have experienced in this field has convinced me of one fundamental truth: when there is a risk of mass atrocities, time is never neutral. Between warning and action, between information and decision, between a cry for help and the arrival of those able to provide protection, human lives hang in the balance.
Bisesero confronts us precisely with this painful question: what does it mean to know that human beings are threatened with extermination when there is still an opportunity to act? It is a question that should haunt every institution entrusted today with the prevention of mass atrocities.
Too often—from Rwanda to Srebrenica and elsewhere—we have seen the international community explain, after the event, why it was unable to act. Genuine prevention begins before such explanations become necessary: when the warning signs emerge, when victims cry out for help, and when action can still make the difference between life and death.
This is why Bisesero must not belong only to the past. Bisesero must become a universal place of learning about prevention.
It also reminds us of something that the very language of genocide can sometimes obscure. Those targeted for extermination are not merely victims. They remain agents of their own history. They resist. They organize. They protect their children. They defend their community. They preserve their dignity even in the most inhuman circumstances.
Recognizing this capacity for resistance in no way diminishes the horror of the crime. On the contrary, it restores the full humanity of those whom genocidal ideology sought precisely to dehumanize.nThat is why the memory of Bisesero must belong, first and foremost, to the resisters and the survivors.
The French judiciary has now stated what, on the basis of the law and the evidence before it, it was able to establish regarding the criminal responsibility of those implicated in the proceedings. That decision must be respected. But no court can dismiss the case of History. No judicial decision can relieve us of the responsibility to continue seeking historical truth, listening to survivors, and learning from the failures that can allow mass atrocities to continue when international action comes too late.
Thirty-two years after the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, Bisesero therefore addresses to us less an accusation than an imperative. Never look away. Never confuse the absence of certainty with the absence of danger.Never allow delays in decision-making to become a death sentence for those awaiting protection. And, above all, never forget those women and men who, on the hills of Bisesero, when an enterprise of extermination sought to deprive them even of the right to exist, confronted their killers with something no genocide can ever entirely destroy: human dignity and the will to live.
It is in this sense that Bisesero remains, for me, a symbol of resistance and resilience.
