President Paul Kagame has given a detailed account of a tense and dramatic visit to Paris in 1991, during which he says a senior French official warned him that even if the Rwanda Patriotic Front captured Kigali, it would “not find its people” there.

Kagame said the statement, made nearly three years before the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, remained etched in his memory and later led him to conclude that some French officials may have known more than they publicly admitted about the danger facing Rwanda’s Tutsi population.

Speaking at the RPF Political Bureau meeting, Kagame said he travelled to Paris around September 1991 after the RPF was invited for talks that were presented as part of an effort to discuss peace.

At the time, Kagame was the RPF’s vice chairman.

He recalled that senior RPF members strongly opposed the trip because they feared for his security and questioned why French officials had insisted that he personally attend rather than the movement’s chairman.

“They insisted I should not go because there was chaos, there was danger,” Kagame said.

Despite the concerns, he decided to travel, arguing that refusing the invitation would allow the RPF’s opponents to portray the movement as interested only in fighting.

“If we don’t show up, we will never be understood. They will think we are just there fighting and we don’t want peace,” he recalled telling his colleagues.

Upon arriving in Paris, Kagame said he attended a morning meeting with several French officials, including Paul Dijoud, whom he identified as a senior official in the French Foreign Ministry.

According to Kagame, the discussion quickly became confrontational.

He said Dijoud repeatedly pointed a finger at him and ordered the RPF to stop fighting.

“You must stop fighting,” Kagame quoted him as saying.

Kagame said he attempted to explain that the RPF had not launched its armed struggle for pleasure or out of a desire for war, but because of Rwanda’s history, the persecution and exclusion of refugees, and the failure of peaceful efforts to secure their return and political rights.

The official, however, allegedly remained unmoved.

As the exchange became heated, Kagame said Dijoud made the statement that transformed the meeting from a difficult diplomatic encounter into something far more disturbing.

“He said, ‘You must stop fighting because, even if you take Kigali, you will not find your people,’” Kagame recalled.

Kagame said he initially struggled to understand the meaning of the remark.

But he later interpreted it as a warning that the Tutsi population inside Rwanda would be killed before the RPF could reach the capital.

“Directly, it meant they would be killed,” he said.

Kagame said the meeting ended badly. As they walked out, Dijoud allegedly made another sarcastic remark, telling him that he hoped to meet him again as commander of Rwanda’s new army.

Kagame responded that if that day came, he would perform the responsibility well.

“If and when that happens, you rest assured I will do a good job of it,” he said he told the French official.

The confrontation at the ministry was not the end of the episode.

Kagame said he returned to a hotel in Paris, where he was staying with senior RPF colleagues. He identified those accompanying him as Aloisea Inyumba, Dr. Ndahiro and Tom Byabagamba.

At about 4 a.m., he said, he woke up to find the lights on and six or seven armed men inside his room.

The men, according to Kagame, wore civilian clothes rather than police uniforms.

“I woke up to this light in the room and about six or seven people in the room with guns,” he said.

Kagame recalled repeatedly demanding to know who the men were and what was happening.

One of them appeared surprised that he spoke English and reportedly told the others: “You hear him? He is even speaking English.”

The armed men demanded his documents and briefcase. Before he could open the briefcase, Kagame said, they broke it.

Looking through a connecting door, he saw some of his colleagues seated in the neighbouring room with handcuffs on their wrists.

Kagame said he himself was not handcuffed, but the group was taken away and placed in detention.

“They took us and dumped us somewhere in prison,” he recalled.

It was, he said, both his first visit to Paris and his first experience in prison.

The group was held in a basement cell inside a building whose location Kagame said he did not know.

Their associates initially did not know where they had been taken. Later, Jacques Bihozagara and a French friend of the RPF, Jean-Christophe Carbonne, managed to locate them.

They brought bread and milk because Kagame and his colleagues had refused to eat the food offered in detention.

“I told them, ‘I’m not going to eat anything in that prison,’” Kagame said.

French officials then attempted to interrogate them.

Kagame said he was asked about the people he had met during his visit and was pressed to provide names. Investigators also attempted to subject him to a polygraph examination.

He refused.

“I told them, ‘I’m not going to have a lie detector at all,’” he said, adding that he told the officers they could kill him if that was their intention.

During the interrogation, Kagame said he named Paul Dijoud as one of the officials he had met.

When he referred to another official as Christopher, his interrogators reportedly challenged him, asking who had told him the man’s name.

Kagame refused to repeat himself, telling them that he was not the person who had given the official his name.

The RPF delegation was eventually released at around 8 p.m.

Kagame said he left Paris that same night and travelled by road to Brussels, where he boarded a flight the following day.

Although the detention itself was significant, Kagame said the most troubling part of the episode was Dijoud’s warning that the RPF would not find its people alive even if it captured Kigali.

He connected the remark to the mass killings that followed in 1994.

“Somebody actually implied that something was going to happen to our people,” Kagame said.

“Connecting that with what eventually happened, I could not but conclude that was the meaning. They were privy to what was going to happen.”

Kagame used the story to draw a broader lesson about international responses to threats of mass violence.

He suggested that powerful governments sometimes possess information about impending atrocities but choose to ignore, minimise or politically reinterpret it.

He linked the Paris episode to Rwanda’s present concerns about violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, particularly attacks against communities in and around Minembwe.

Kagame said that when Rwanda raised concerns about reports of civilians being targeted by drones in markets and churches, some international actors allegedly responded that the matter was none of Rwanda’s business.

For Kagame, that response echoed what he said he experienced in Paris in 1991: a warning sign was visible, but those with influence appeared unwilling to confront it.

“It is like the story of Paul Dijoud,” he said.

“It is like those people being killed for their identity is none of your business.”

The President argued that dismissing such warnings does not remove the danger. Instead, he said, it allows violence to escalate while those raising the alarm are told to remain silent.

“But if it is not my concern, maybe it should be yours,” Kagame said. “So why are you not concerned?”

More than three decades after the Paris visit, Kagame presented the encounter as both a personal ordeal and a political warning: that history can repeat itself when credible signs of identity-based violence are dismissed, manipulated or treated as inconvenient.