Abstract
- Edouard Balladur informed the government that the UN forces will be on the ground at the end of August with a staff of 2,000 men. The deployment of this United Nations mission will mark the withdrawal of French forces from the humanitarian operation Turquoise, which should begin at the end of July. While waiting for the relief, the French soldiers of the CP in Goma on the Zairian-Rwandan border are still overwhelmed by the flood of refugees.
- Intended for military personnel only, the medical office in Goma - like all the logistics of the French army - is increasingly responding to the unprecedented humanitarian needs of this region.
- It was first necessary to develop an airport, hardly adapted to the 60 to 100 air movements that it experiences per day, that is to say six times more than usual. The French also had to install transmissions and radar. Finally, between the marking of the runway, the blocking of the tarmac and the construction of an additional parking, the Air Force works for everyone.
- The army is not to be outdone in Goma. The paratroopers provide security on the runway crossed between two planes by the crowd of water carriers. As for the civil affairs gendarmes, they put their mobile cisterns at the service of the population of the camps who are dying of lack of water.
- None of this was provided for in UN resolution 929 which only stipulated the protection of humanitarian aid by the French. But it is completely overwhelmed by the scale of the Rwandan drama. In the meantime, the military mission in Goma could only change.
- In the southwest of the country, French soldiers saved some 100 Tutsi threatened by the Hutu population.
- Michel Roussin, the Minister of Cooperation, has just decided on new aid of more than eight million francs to buy medicines and vehicles intended for the distribution of food to refugees.