Role of the international community in the Rwandan genocide soldiers who took part in a military humanitarian mission in the south of the former Belgian colony of being both accomplices and "actors" in the bloodbath. On August 5, 2008, an independent Rwandan commission said France was aware of preparations for the 1994 Rwanda genocide and helped train the ethnic Hutu militia perpetrators. It accuses France of training Hutu militias responsible for the slaughter, helping plan the genocide, and participating in the killings. The report accused 33 senior French military and political officials on Tuesday of involvement in the genocide. Among those named were François Mitterrand (the president at the
Hutu of Rwandan national unity, but has been criticized as an attempt at historical revisionism. Still others suggest that the two groups are related but not identical, and that differences between them were exacerbated by Europeans, or by a gradual, natural split, as those who owned cattle became known as Tutsi and those who did not became Hutu. Mahmood Mamdani states that the Belgian colonial power designated people as Tutsi or Hutu on the basis of cattle ownership, physical measurements and church records. There is an ongoing debate as to whether the Hutu and Tutsi are really separate groups or not;