Paul Kagame, the Rwandan President, says his country will cement its bitter divorce from France and the French-speaking world, which he holds responsible for the 1994 slaughter of up to one million of his countrymen, by joining the Commonwealth later this year.

“There are many benefits for us in joining the Commonwealth — cultural, economic, political,” he told The Times.

Mr Kagame has been invited to attend the next Commonwealth summit as an observer. “I hope they will then approve our membership. I am looking forward to it,”he said.

Mr Kagame, a lanky former guerrilla fighter with an austere, manner, rarely shows any emotion. But the softly spoken 50-year-old struggles to contain his anger when discussing France in Africa.

“They are the ones who armed and trained the militias ... the evidence is everywhere. They continued to do so even after the genocide started,” he said.

The bitter relations between the two countries burst into the open in November when a French judge accused Mr Kagame and several of his top aides of shooting down the aircraft of the former president Juvenal Habyarimana, the incident that triggered the 100-day massacre of mainly Rwandan Tutsis and of moderate Hutus opposed to his regime.

Rwanda retaliated by severing diplomatic relations with Paris. Thousands of infuriated Rwandans took to the street in government-supported, anti-French protests.

“They are hyping up the downing of the plane,” Mr Kagame said. “They are trying to present it as the event which started the genocide and divert attention from their prior support of the genocidal regime. The preparation for genocide was going on [before the plane came down] and was known by the international community and particularly the French. They are trying to shift attention from that,” he declared.

Rwanda, like neighbouring Burundi, was colonised by Belgium, but after independence in the 1960s it became a major player in the Francophone world and enjoyed close relations with France, which sent forces to help President Habyarimana repel Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels in 1990.

Mr Kagame was brought up as a refugee in neighbouring Uganda, where he learnt to play cricket. He later took command of the RPF and can barely conceal his pleasure at the thought of how Paris will view his country’s membership of the Commonwealth, the 53-member English-speaking club of countries with colonial ties to the United Kingdom.

He smiles as he asserts his “entire experience of France and French influence” has been negative.

Other than the recent creation of the Rwandan cricket board, it is hard to imagine an act more calculated to put French noses more out of joint than joining a body so closely associated with the British Empire and the Queen of England, who always attends Commonwealth summits.

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