By KEVIN DIAZ
Star Tribune
June 11, 2010
He wasn't exaggerating. Neither are Rwandans, who are holding him in jail for the crimes of "denying and downplaying genocide" and "spreading rumors ... capable of threatening the security of the Rwandan people."
The accusations, detailed in Rwandan court documents obtained by the Star Tribune, reflect a U.S.-aligned regime struggling to mend a legacy of bloody ethnic conflict -- and jealously guarding the commonly accepted history of Tutsi victimization at the hands of the majority Hutu population.
As documents filed this week show, Erlinder, a longtime human rights lawyer, has clearly challenged the Rwandan authorities' version of the 1994 mass killing of an estimated 800,000 people -- though not the killings themselves.
One of the key pieces of evidence against him: a federal lawsuit he filed in Oklahoma City last month accusing Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a U.S.-trained Tutsi military officer, of triggering the Rwandan genocide by shooting down the previous president's plane.
Kagame has long denied the accusation, made in French courts and elsewhere, calling it politically motivated revisionism.
Apart from the conflicting accounts of history, Rwanda's case against Erlinder has alarmed his defense team because none of the writings or statements cited in the court documents were made in Rwanda.
"It's a bizarre intellectual exercise," said Erlinder's main U.S. attorney, Kurt Kerns, who just returned from Africa this week.
Legal groups and members of Minnesota's congressional delegation are pressing for his release. But Erlinder's attorneys have little hope that he will be released before Rwanda's August presidential election. Erlinder had entered the country late last month to represent Kagame's opponent, Hutu candidate Victoire Ingabire, who also faces charges of "denying genocide."
Appearing gaunt and tired Monday before a Rwandan judge, Erlinder, 62, was ordered held in "provisional" detention for another 30 days while prosecutors prepare formal charges that could carry penalties of between 10 and 20 years in prison. The court ruled that Erlinder's two hospitalizations since his arrest -- including one after a suicide hoax -- failed to constitute grounds for release.
According to a decision issued Monday by High Court Judge Maurice Mbishibishi, Erlinder's chief offense came in a 2009 article recounting a set of criminal indictments in Spain and France that held Kagame and his followers responsible for the 1994 plane crash that killed the former presidents of Rwanda and neighboring Burundi.
The offending passage: "... the crime that triggered... civilians-on-civilians killings in Rwanda."
In the view of Rwandan prosecutors, the term "civilians-on-civilians" negates the official view that the killings were planned and orchestrated by the previous Hutu regime.
"The fact that (Erlinder) said that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 were civilians-on-civilians killings is evidence that he denies genocide," Mbishibishi wrote.
As some of Erlinder's colleagues feared, the case against him also relies on his work as a defense attorney before the International Criminal Tribunal, where, Mbishibishi wrote, "he managed to prove that the genocide has (sic) not been planned nor executed by the military officials he was representing."
Again, the judge concluded, this is evidence that Erlinder "denied or downplayed genocide."
The court records cite another Erlinder article, identified as "Rwanda: no conspiracy, no genocide planning ... no genocide?" which argues that Kagame avoided prosecution for his own crimes during the ethnic conflict largely because of his close ties to the Clinton administration, which later acknowledged it did not do enough to stop the violence.
I hope you were not in Rwanda when the genocide took place. You seem to have only learnt it from your relatives.You may want travel over there yourself and ask others at your village. I've heard killers saying offering excuses such as "the genocidaire government " instructed me to kill my neighbors, but have never heard them deny that it was planned. I may not agree with with every policy the government of Rwanda puts forward, but I think it's deeply troubling to suggest that the genocide was not planned. I would refer you to Kangura's writings, Bikindi's songs, interahamwe's famous songs, and Bagosora's own statement about "preparing the Apocalypse." You coulees also ask moderate Hutus who were there saw it all and paid the price for refusing to endorse the genocide ideology. Just keep in mind that Rwanda is more than Kagame and that any personal matters with him should not serve as an excuse by those who dislike him to distort the history of this country.
ReplyDeleteAlso may I remind readers here that Rwanda is more progressive than some here seem to suggest. It has the best environmental and Business policies among other developing world, it has the best gender equality policies, and a health care system that works.
Finally, before you cast Kagame as the biggest murder around, show me any other country where killers are allowed to live free on the hills where they murdered their neighbors. Remember, there are at least a half-million genocidaires living in Rwanda and this number is the lowest estimate I can possibly make.