NEWS ANALYSIS : France’s Big Gamble Pays Off in Rwanda : Africa: Skeptics had felt peace mission could have been ‘another Somalia.’

The experts doubted it would work. They suspected the French would take sides. And they spoke darkly of “another Somalia,” from where U.S. troops had been forced by American public opinion to beat an ignominious retreat.

But three weeks ago, as the United States and every other nation did little more than wring their hands about the ethnic bloodletting in Rwanda, France airlifted 2,500 of its young sons and daughters in uniform into the heart of the Central African conflict.

Now, the decisive French gamble, in sharp contrast to the American action in Somalia in 1992, appears to have already paid off.

French troops have, without a single French casualty, been able to prevent at least some ethnic killing in western parts of the country. Most of the fighting has ended with a rebel takeover of the capital, Kigali. And now the French, still holding to their “humanitarian mission,” are appealing for help for several million displaced people.

The reason the French have succeeded, thus far, is linked to this country’s colonial past--and present--in Africa, its self-image of a world leader, the strong support from the French public and a long penchant for intervening on the African continent without apologies.

“France sees itself as a world power,” Prime Minister Edouard Balladur explained in a recent television interview. “This is its ambition and its honor, and I wish for it to preserve this ambition.”

Part of the impetus for the armed intervention in Rwanda may have less to do with power and more to do with guilt. A broad spectrum of the French public has supported the intervention, but for widely different reasons.

Some saw it as an opportunity to make amends for France’s support of dictators across Africa, not the least among them Rwanda’s late president, Juvenal Habyarimana. The Hutu strongman came to power in a 1973 coup and quickly won military backing from France. When his plane, a gift from the French government, was shot down April 6, his death reignited the genocidal war between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis.

But others in France considered the intervention a golden opportunity to re-exert French influence in the tiny, densely populated nation, by saving lives and protecting their friends in the Rwandan government.

“The French have a long tradition of getting involved in Africa, and they’ve gotten involved for much less worthy causes, on behalf of all sorts of skunks without there being the least hue and cry back home,” said a non-French Western diplomat with long experience in Francophone Africa.

Of course, during the Cold War years the United States also helped out notorious dictators, including the late Samuel K. Doe, who ruthlessly ruled Liberia, and Mobutu Sese Seko, who has siphoned off millions from the impoverished people of Zaire.

But France, alone among the former colonial rulers in Africa, has maintained military as well as political links with its former colonies and other French-speaking countries, such as the former Belgian colony of Rwanda. Over the years, French troops have rushed to Senegal, Gabon, Chad, Zaire, the Central African Republic, the Comoros and Togo to easily put down unseemly uprisings and keep friendly rulers in charge.

But in Rwanda, the politics for France are more complicated. Some in the United Nations were squeamish about giving France the OK to intervene, and five Security Council members abstained from the vote, because of France’s deep, often-secret previous ties with the Hutu government.

Since 1975, France had a military agreement with the Rwanda government and it welcomed generals into the most prestigious French military academies. The government’s main opponents were in a Tutsi rebel movement, known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which was based in Uganda, a former British colony. Many of its rebel leaders, driven into exile in the 1960s and 1970s, received their military training in Britain.

When French troops arrived in Rwanda last month, the rebels were advancing on Kigali, which was still held by the government. And the French government believed that the victims of the killing were about evenly divided between Hutus and Tutsis.

To their surprise, though, they discovered that the wave of genocide had been started primarily by the Hutu-dominated government. And French soldiers found themselves facing hundreds of thousands of Tutsis fleeing Hutus.

The French also originally thought they could save the Hutu-dominated government from defeat by the rebels. But when the rebels took control of Kigali, the thinking in France changed. President Francois Mitterrand declared that the rebels “are not our enemies, and we are not trying to prevent them from winning the civil war.”

That marked a turning point in the French intervention. French officials, after negotiations with the new leaders, carved out a “safe zone” in the southwest, and the French vowed this week to keep armed militia from the old government out.

For their part, the Tutsi-led rebels have picked a Hutu as the prime minister as a gesture of reconciliation in the country. And although the new leaders still distrust the French, they appear to have decided to tolerate the foreign soldiers for now in the interests of peace.

On Friday, though, they increased France’s diplomatic discomfort by demanding that the French arrest Hutu government leaders hiding behind their troops in southwestern Rwanda. The French said they would consult with the United Nations about the demand.

Serious questions remain, meantime, about the rebels’ ability to bring democracy to Rwanda. They represent less than 15% of the population, and any free election could drive them from power.

Even as the rebels celebrate their apparent victory, some fighting in rural areas continues and the humanitarian disaster is escalating alarmingly. Aid agencies say upward of 1 million displaced people roam the hilly countryside; more than 500,000 have crossed the western border into Goma, Zaire.

The U.N. mandate for the French deployment runs out Aug. 21, and the United Nations has promised to replace the troops with a force drawn mostly from other African countries.