Unfortunately, these days some French people are only hard-core about their entitlements from the state and a short work week.

Yet this seemingly passive identity belies a sometimes putrid moral core. France admits that it provided the Habyarimana regime with military, financial, and diplomatic support.

France is the only former sponsor of this regime which has not recognized its fault and apologised to the Rwandan people.

Let us not pretend that full-scale genocide came as a complete surprise to France. Habyarimana's government had broadcast genocide-inciting radio and committed warm-up massacres for years before April 1994.

Also, let us not lose ourselves in petty squables over how many meters separated French soldiers from their machete-swinging and grenade-tossing Rwandan colleagues, or the precise number of génocidaires that the French allowed to escape into the Congo. We would thereby forget the main thrust of the story. The French news media seem to want to lead us down this path, always emphasizing that someone has exaggerated French involvement in Rwanda.

Why would the French, or their government, support a genocidal government in the Republic of Rwanda? If we do not know the answer to this question, we can scarcely imagine that France shares the responsibility for the sea of lives destroyed.

Frankly, they were bored and conceited.

Because they did not know how to occupy themselves, they played with the bad boys. They handed out guns and missiles the way a child passes around matches for torturing insects.

France cultivated several client states in Africa just to show everyone the importance of France, not because of any real national interest, nor because these states were following France in terms of democracy and the rule of law.

Now, many French campaigners for human rights and intelligent foreign policies exist; we should not forget them. Some even appealed to the French people to come to their senses in Rwanda -- years before the full-scale genocide began.

However, at this moment the general opinion posits that collaboration with ruthless dictators is merely an enlightened openness to local systems. It constitutes a refusal to impose one's own methods on another people.

In fact, this collaboration represents nothing more than a pact to keep brown-skin and yellow-skin peoples in utter misery and subjugation (races do not exist, but people seem to think so).

Have the French ever supplied the arms and support necessary to exterminate their own kind, i.e., white-skin atheists?

These days, many French reserve their ire for three countries, each of which reminds them of their own imperfection: Israel, which is populated with the survivers of the Holocaust, committed with the support of French collaborators; the United States, the major liberator of France, which could not hold out against the Germans for more than two weeks; and tiny Rwanda, despised because of its living witnesses to French crimes. The news media in France, surprisingly homogenious for a free press, along with the political class, endeavor to show that these countries want blood. Using double standards and distortions, they try to obscure France's embarrassing history with these states.