The hearings, broadcast live, are held before a sevenperson examining commission. Next week, testimony will be heard from 25 genocide survivors, some of whom will testify to serious humanrights abuses . . . including rape and murder . . . by the French military.

The commission is currently exploring the role of France during Operation Turquoise, the French military intervention in 1994 whose ostensible aim was to save Rwandan lives.

The evidence produced before the commissioners supports research by human rights groups in France who have previously alleged that, in June 1994, French soldiers tricked thousands of Tutsi survivors to come out of hiding only to abandon them to the Interahamwe genocidal militia.

The genocide in Rwanda lasted three months and claimed up to a million lives in a campaign to eliminate the minority Tutsi population.

There is no doubt of the close links which existed between France and Rwanda, a tiny African country that had been ruled by a Hutu dictatorship for 20 years. There is no disputing that France was the biggest supplier of heavy military equipment to Rwanda. France sent troops to help Rwanda in 1990 to repel a military offensive launched from Uganda by the largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), that was fighting to end the corrupt and violent regime of President Juvenal Habyarimana.

During the resulting civil war, which lasted nearly three years, increasing numbers of French troops were sent to Rwanda and senior French officers in some instances assumed operational control on the battlefield.

In 1993, an international peace agreement provided for the French military to leave Rwanda to make way for UN peacekeepers whose task was to monitor the creation of a powersharing democracy.

The French government denied for years any part in the planning or complicity in the genocide. Its own parliamentary inquiry in 1997, while calling the genocide one of the greatest tragedies of the century, admitted only that France had underestimated the threat of a possible genocide.

The enquiry did, however, reveal that the former French president, Francois Mitterrand, had been largely responsible for French policy towards Rwanda, and that politicians were not adequately informed of the complexity and the specifics of the Rwandan crisis. French policy had been unaccountable to either parliament or the public.