8 - A case of two narratives: Gabriel Maindron, a hero made and unmade

Summary

On 30 June 1994, in Kibuye – a small town on the Rwandan side of Lake Kivu which had witnessed one of the worst massacres of Tutsi people in the genocide just two months before – a group of French journalists received a visit from a French priest by the name of Gabriel Maindron in the hotel where they were staying. The majority of missionaries had left the country in April 1994. He was one of the few – together with Jean-Baptiste Mendiondo (another French priest) and three Belgian confrères, Paul Kesenne, Joseph Schmetz and Raymond Delporte, all working in the diocese of Nyundo in Western Rwanda – who had remained in the country.

Maindron had heard on RFI that the French military had established a base in Kibuye as part of Opération Turquoise, a partly humanitarian and partly geostrategic military operation of the French army in genocide-torn Rwanda that had been launched seven days before with the approval of the UN Security Council. The journalists had come to Kibuye to cover the well-publicised intervention of the French army in nearby Bisesero, an area where, as became clear later, the French army had failed to protect a group of Tutsi refugees from the Interahamwe after the latter had paid them an initial visit on 27 June.

Maindron told the journalists that he needed the assistance of the French soldiers to rescue a group of Tutsi refugees he was sheltering in his presbytery in La Crête Zaïre-Nil (also known as La Crête Congo-Nil or shortened to Congo-Nil, as the parish is called today) in the commune of Rutsiro, about forty kilometres from Kibuye on bad roads at the time. On 1 July, late at night, two military vehicles from Captain Éric Bucquet's Régiment d’infanterie et de chars de marine (RICM) arrived at Maindron's parish, where they were welcomed as liberators by ten-odd Tutsi refugees and later joined by a few others who had been hiding in the bush. Three journalists – François Luizet from Le Figaro, Nicolas Poincaré from Radio France and France Inter, and Philippe Chaffanjon from RTL – were part of the expedition. Having left his wallet in the presbytery, Chaffanjon, accompanied by Poincaré, returned to Congo-Nil the following day and rescued another two Tutsi people.