US lawyer jailed in Rwanda: US Embassy didn't help

By JASON STRAZIUSO
Associated Press
06.20.10

NAIROBI, Kenya -- A U.S. lawyer released from a Rwanda prison on medical grounds credited America's Secretary of State with his release but said Sunday the U.S. Embassy did not help him secure food or medicine while in prison.

Peter Erlinder, 62, said he had to sleep on a concrete floor without a blanket and without assistance from the embassy after his May 28 arrest in Kigali, Rwanda's capital. The Minnesota law professor thanked U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for saying Rwanda shouldn't arrest lawyers but said embassy officials in Kigali and Nairobi have not helped much.

U.S. Embassy officials in Nairobi did not immediately respond to inquiries from The Associated Press.

"My government insisted that I take my medications from my captors rather than bringing me medications directly," Erlinder told a news conference in Nairobi, his first public comments since his arrest. "It was impossible for them to arrange a doctor whom I would pay so that I wouldn't have to get my food and my medication from my captors."

Erlinder did not outright say that he feared taking food from Rwandan authorities, but that was the implication. He added that it wasn't clear to him that "my own embassy was working in my interests." He did not elaborate.

A Rwandan judge ruled Thursday that Erlinder, a lawyer at the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda, should be freed from prison on medical grounds. Erlinder said he would soon go to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He did not explain his health problems and declined to comment on his statements in a Rwandan court that he had attempted suicide in prison.

Rwanda's top prosecutor said after the medical release that he would continue his investigation of Erlinder, who said Sunday he would return to Rwanda to face charges if called by the court to do so. Erlinder has not yet been charged, but Rwandan authorities detained Erlinder on suspicion of what it calls minimizing the country's genocide.

That fact did not prevent Erlinder from making new statements that could anger the government of Rwanda, which has laws against minimizing the 1994 genocide in which hundreds of thousands of Rwandans, the vast majority of them ethnic Tutsis, were massacred by extremist Hutus over 100 days.

International accounts of the violence say more than 500,000 Rwandans, mostly ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus, died during the genocide. But Erlinder has said there are two sides of the story, and said Sunday that there may be enough evidence to show that more ethnic Hutus died than Tutsis, a statement that could anger the government of President Paul Kagame.

"There is no question that there was a genocide in Rwanda. I've never denied it, and the prosecutors, after scouring all of my publications, were not able to find one time that I denied that there was a genocide against Tutsis," said Erlinder, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul.

Erlinder was in Rwanda to help with the legal defense of opposition leader Victoire Ingabire. Ingabire, a Hutu, wants to run for president in Aug. 9 elections, challenging incumbent President Kagame, a Tutsi. But she was arrested in April and charged with promoting a genocidal ideology. She was freed on bail but her passport was seized and she cannot leave Kigali.
The U.S. lawyer has a reputation for taking on difficult, often unpopular defendants and causes. A past president of the progressive National Lawyers Guild, Erlinder leads a group of defense lawyers at the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is trying the alleged leaders of the 1994 genocide.