http://www.iht.com/articles/1995/07/15/assess_1.php (and the answer to their question was "yes")
And he became PM in 1995 - see Rwandan timeline.
And of course, I know those events were not so simple. The Iraq war is not simple either. Inexcusable does not require simple.
As for Mitterand, his knowledge of geography is morally impressive.
The moral failings of the US Democrats, sadly, do not redound to the moral credit of the French government.
Foreign policy is the province of the President. One of the only ones, in fact, unless she decides to declare a state of emergency. Being a PM in cohabitation means next to nothing in this regard.
Your IHT article is equally uninformative; the facts discussed occur well after your original charge of inaction in the face of "genocide" in Bosnia. As for that Kosovo thing America finally got serious about....well, where was the genocide?
As for Irak, here the facts are relatively simple: naked imperial aggression by an American government bought and paid for by the wealthy, but financed via the future of its middle classes with the blood of its poor, via the best "democracy" American Kapital can buy. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
May 1995 - Chirac wins election as President of France.
July 1995 - brave European peacekeepers at Srbrenica "safe area" turn over unarmed civilians to General Ratko Mladić's soldiers who murder more than 8000 of them. Chirac bravely and honorably makes some statements and even speeches. The Court at the Hague later declares this to be genocide, but since there is no way to blame the USA, we know it must be nothing of the sort.
Are we talking about Rwanda, Srebrenica, or Bosnia?
The Rwandan genocide happened in 1994. Mitternad was President, conservative Edouard Balladur, who Chirac would go on to beat in the 1995 Presidential election by running to the center, was PM in cohabitation. Chirac has also been PM under Mitterand in an earlier cohabitation government, but not while the tragedy of Rwanda took place.
The Bosnian conflict and the resulting ethnic cleansing began in 1992. Over 100,000 dead and almost 2 million people displaced, with the ethnic cleansing in the center-eastern part of Bosnia, where Srebrenica is, beginning in that year. The area was considered very strategically important to the Bosnian Serbs, who were angling for their own independant state, starting in 1992, and most of this area had already been "cleansed" of Bosniaks by the Bosnian Serbs well before 1995, with Srebrenica, a so-called UN safe-haven, a notable exception.
The Srebrenica genocide occurred weeks after Chirac became President, as Dutch troops let in Mladic's war criminals and 8,000 men and boys were massacred. A Dutch government fell because of the shame of this, though the siege conditions which obtained for the Dutch peacekeepers, which reduced them and residents of Srebrenica alike to scrounge for food due to lack of it, and do foot patrols because there was no fuel, certainly couldn't have made protecting Srebrenica very easy. Clearly, the blame for Srebrenica lies squarely at the feet of the Bosnian Serbs themselves, as they have in fact admitted. Far less the UN, and certainly not Jacques Chirac. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
As far as I can tell, while Americans are generally in total ignorance about what goes on beyond their borders, Europeans are generally in total denial about what their own governments do and indulge in a great deal of unwarranted self-congratulation about how their amoral power obsessed and incompetent hacks are no doubt far better than those Yankee swine.
