Jocelyn Coulon: ...I would like to invite now Linda Melvern to address us.

Linda Melvern: Thank you so much for inviting me to speak at a school of journalism.  I'm an investigative journalist, and for 10 years, I have concentrated on the exact circumstances of the genocide in Rwanda.  The events in Rwanda in '94 were defined for our generation, the consequences of the failure of intervene in the face of mass murder, and there remains little doubt that what took place, the failure to predict it, to prevent it, and then to stop it is one of the greatest scandals of the last century.

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Gerald Caplan: ...Melvern is tireless in demanding from each of those who either betrayed or abandoned Rwanda that they must set up a serious independent commission to investigate the role each country or institution played. The government of Stephen Harper has formally acknowledged the reality of the Turkish genocide against the Armenians in 1915, and has apologized to both Chinese-Canadians and native Canadians for injustices against them perpetrated by the Canadian governments of their time. Maybe they will continue this admirable record by allowing the truth of our abandonment of Rwanda to be discovered.

Read Our Rwandan Berayal on The Globe and Mail

Speaker: Linda Melvern. This event was recorded on 6 May 2009 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

In a detailed report, the Rwandan government is accusing France of being complicit in the "preparation and execution" of the 1994 genocide that killed some 800,000 people. The report released by the Rwandan Ministry of Justice Tuesday accuses top French officials, including former prime minister Dominique de Villepin and the late former president Francois Mitterrand, of playing a major role in the genocide. We speak with investigative journalist Linda Melvern, author of two books on Rwanda. Melvern testified in July 2007 before the Rwanda commission investigating France's role in the genocide.

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...A British expert on the Rwandan genocide, Linda Melvern, author of the investigative study Conspiracy to Murder, says she is surprised at the lack of convincing new evidence in the French judge's allegations given that, at the time of the shooting down of the plane, France had very close relationships in the region.

"At the time of the planning of the genocide the French government had 47 senior officers embedded into the Rwandan army , which subsequently played such a large role in the genocide , and the best informed government of (them) all of what was going on in Rwanda was the French," she says

Ms Melvern said the evidence the French judge had presented alleging President Kagame's involvement in the murder of his predecessor was very sparse, and that some of it, concerning the alleged anti-aircraft missiles used to down the presidential jet, had already been rejected by a French Parliamentary enquiry.

.....Ms Melvern sums up: "The assassination of Juvenal Habyarimana led to the elimination of the pro-democracy opposition in Rwanda. It then led to a genocide in which an estimated one million people were murdered in the space of 100 days."

"I think that although my book shows the genocide was planned beforehand (...) the trigger was this assassination.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6196226.stm