Decades of hostility between France and Rwanda burst into the open yesterday when the tiny Central African state recalled its ambassador and broke off diplomatic relations with Paris.

Charles Murigande, the Rwandan Foreign Affairs Minister, said: “We have ordered the French Ambassador to leave our country within 24 hours and given other French diplomats 72 hours to leave the country,” he said. Rwanda made its move after a French anti-terrorist judge issued arrest warrants against nine leading Rwandans for killing a former President, the event that sparked the 1994 genocide.

Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, who brought the terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, Carlos the Jackal, to justice, also said that President Kagame should face trial for the shooting-down on April 6, 1994, of a French plane carrying Juvénal Habyarimana, the former President, and a crew of seven French nationals.

Rwanda, which maintains that France was complicit in the massacre of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus through its support of Habyarimana’s hardline Hutu Government, reacted with fury to the allegations. More than 25,000 people attended demonstrations in the capital, Kigali, yesterday. Many carried placards reading: “The hell with French imperialism” and “They killed our people”.

President Kagame dismissed the judge’s call as “rubbish” and said that the trial should be directed at France, which he accuses of never having come clean about its role in history’s fastest mass slaughter.

“That some judge in France whose name I cannot even pronounce has something to say about Rwanda — trying a president and some government officials — that’s rubbish,” he told diplomats. “That is justice of bullies, arrogance . . . France cannot try anyone. Try who? Over what? They should first try themselves because they killed our people.”

Mr Kagame, who headed the former Rwandan Patriotic Front, which halted the genocide, has always denied that his fighters shot down the French jet to scupper plans for multiparty elections that the Tutsis — who represent only 15 per cent of the population — could never have won. The President, who went into exile in English-speaking Uganda at the age of 2, has a deep-seated resentment towards what he considers to be malign French influence in Central Africa.

Senior Tutsi politicians say that France helped to repel incursions by Tutsi exiles throughout the 1970s and 80s while doing nothing to make the Hutu governments accept power-sharing deals. They claim that it also played a part in reducing the UN peacekeeping force after the genocide began and, along with the United States, blocking Security Council action to end it. Paris angrily rejects such suggestions.

Violent History

1962 Rwanda gains independence. Hutu majority gains political control. Tutsis flee violence

1990 Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invades from bases in neighbouring Uganda

1993 Hutu President Habyarimana signs power-sharing agreement with Tutsis; UN mission sent to monitor peace

1994 Habyarimana killed when his plane is shot down; Hutu militias kill 800,000 Tutsis; major RPF offensive forces a ceasefire

2003 RPF under Paul Kagame wins first multiparty elections

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