Hubert Vedrine is a genocide denier and a historical revisionist. He served as the diplomatic advisor to the French president from 1981 to 1986, then as the president’s spokesperson from 1988 to 1991, and the president’s secretary-general from 1991 to 1995. He played a pivotal role in the executive power in various areas, namely African affairs. He participated in all the restricted council meetings where decisions were made regarding interventions in Rwanda, including those concerning Operation Noroît. He was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs by Jacques Chirac in 1997, following the recommendation of Lionel Jospin.
Vedrine’s actions are both appreciated on the right and on the left. Due to his position, he quickly became the go-to person for a wide range of media outlets to provide geopolitical expertise in line with current events. He is frequently invited on French national television channels and radios. He is a member of the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS) led by his friend Pascal Boniface and teaches at Sciences Po in Paris.
According to Vedrine, France believed that it was necessary to nip in the bud a potentially atrocious civil war between Hutu and Tutsi, so starting in 1990, France militarily assisted Rwanda in resisting the offensive led by the RPF from Uganda. At the same time, according to Vedrine, it put pressure on the Habyarimana regime to compel it to share power with its Hutu opposition and with the RPF. France therefore in his view exerted constant pressure to bring about the Arusha peace negotiations. Once the agreements were signed in August 1993, France withdrew its troops and made way for the UN. When the genocide erupted in April 1994, France, according to Vedrine, was the only country to intervene and put an end to the massacres with Operation Turquoise, which is a distortion of the official history of Operation Turquoise.
Hubert Vedrine in an article in Le Point published in 1996 “Hutus et Tutsi: à chacun son pays” shares the racial obsession of the masterminds of the genocide. According to him, the political life of Rwanda revolves around the opposition between two ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi, with the Hutu majority having freed themselves from the yoke of what he calls Tutsi aristocrats or feudal lords. He frequently uses the argument of the ‘majority people’ directly derived from genocidal theories.
He also uses the rhetoric of external aggression from Uganda against Habyarimana’s Rwanda to label the struggle of Rwandan Tutsi refugees to reintegrate their ancestral homeland. Hubert Vedrine does not hesitate to place responsibility for the genocide against the Tutsi on ‘the Tutsi’ or even on the current Rwandan government.
He often cites a handful of notorious denialists such as Reyntjens, Rever, Onana, Del Ponte, and what he calls “the Congolese”. Vedrine’s various expressions are most of the time openly complicit with the perpetrators of genocide and denialists:
- On April 2014, during a hearing by the Commission of National Defense and Armed Forces, he stated that after the start of the genocide, “there remained arms relations, and there is no need to discover with an outraged tone that deliveries continues: it’s a continuation of the commitment from before… The military offensive had to be blocked. That has never been denied. So, there is no need to discover it, to present it as some kind of abominable hidden practice.”
- “Apply the directive”, when a handful of officers from the Turquoise operation, under UN mandate, do not understand why they are instructed to rearm the refugee camps.
- Regarding the double-genocide theory he supports, he states in an article in Le Figaro published in 2006 entitled “A Kigali, la France a mené une politique de prevention”, he writes: “What I know is that there is a certain consensus to estimate the number of Tutsi and Hutu victims of the April 1994 genocide at 800,000. Since then, the International Crisis Group in Brussels, along with other organizations, estimates that the number of Congolese victims of Rwandan and Ugandan actions in the region, directly or as collateral damage, since 1997, is 3.5 million. I leave it to you to characterize those deaths.”