Jacques Semelin remains grateful to the French army for granting him a research contract about non-violent civil defense during the time of Defense Minister Charles Hernu, which led to the writing of the book
La défense civile which he co-signed with Jean-Marie Muller and Christian Mellon. This leads him to refuse to see the massacres of Tutsi committed since 1990 by the Habyarimana regime. That the French soldiers continued to train Rwandan soldiers during these massacres does not constitute for him an aid to the preparation of new crimes. The aptitude of the Rwandan soldiers or gendarmes to massacre was known before 1994. Otherwise why would the military attaché René Galinié, who was certainly not a choirboy, have resigned from his post? Semelin reaches the height of the claim of the French intellectual by refuting the testimonies on the rapes committed by French soldiers "
which no research work has come to confirm".