USA: Interpreting Rwandan genocide

By Alan J. Kuperman
LBJ School of Public Affairs
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas

Globe and Mail Letters to the Editor
June 14, 2010

Gerald Caplan remarkably defends Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s indefensible arrest of his leading political opponent, Victoire Ingabire – and Peter Erlinder, the American lawyer representing her – on specious grounds of genocide denial. (The Law Society Of Upper Canada And Genocide Denial In Rwanda – online, June 11).

Ms. Ingabire, an ethnic Hutu, explicitly acknowledges the 1994 genocide against Tutsis. Her complaint is that Mr. Kagame denies and prevents discussion of his troops killing tens of thousands of innocent Hutu before, during and after the genocide. Mr. Kagame has now arrested Mr. Erlinder for arguing that the genocide was not premeditated.

But it is Mr. Erlander’s job to make that argument as a defence counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. His argument has prevailed at the court, which has acquitted everyone accused of pre-planned “conspiracy to genocide,” issuing convictions only for crimes committed after the assassination of Rwanda’s Hutu president.

Rwanda today is a dictatorship run by a tiny elite of the Tutsi minority that suppresses the Hutu majority and denies past violence against Hutu civilians. The only hope for peace is power-sharing with the Hutu and acknowledgment by both sides of their past crimes – precisely what Ms. Ingabire advocates.

If Mr. Caplan truly wants to promote peace in Rwanda, rather than the myth that past violence was one-sided, he should support the rights of Ms. Ingabire and her lawyer.

Alan J. Kuperman, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas.

Related Materials:
Explaining the Ultimate Escalation in Rwanda: How and Why Tutsi Rebels Provoked a Retaliatory Genocide