By Olivia Ward
Feb 16 2014
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| Former Rwandan Gendarmerie General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, accused of genocide in Rwanda in 1994, has been acquitted by a criminal tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, in February. |
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| Canadian lawyer Christopher Black has won exoneration for a Rwandan former paramilitary police chief who was held for 11 years on charges the UN court now says are invalid. |
When Christopher Black opened his eyes in the Tanzanian hospital, a doctor was standing over him. “Are you a religious man?” he asked, and offered to call a priest.
In 2000, the Toronto criminal lawyer had just begun defending a high-profile suspect at a trial of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, when he collapsed from malaria.
“Friends found me on the floor, and I was wheeled into emergency,” Black said in a phone interview last week from Arusha, Tanzania. “The doctor told me, ‘we’ll try to keep you going until tomorrow, but likely you’ll die.’ ”
It might have ended there. Instead, the near-death experience was only the beginning of a 14-year odyssey through the tangled thickets of the international justice system, including threats on Black’s life, assassination of at least one witness, perilous political intrigue and a torrent of personal abuse.
“A lot of things have happened that were very dark and bitter,” he says. “In many ways, it’s like a movie.”
But this past week, two decades after the worst genocide in Africa’s recent history, Black’s client Augustin Ndindiliyimana, former chief of staff of the Rwandan paramilitary police, was acquitted by the Arusha-based tribunal.
Ndindiliyimana, arrested in Belgium in 2000, was initially convicted of genocide for allegedly allowing his police guard to supply weapons to the Hutu militia that carried out the slaughter of some 800,000 Rwandans, including Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
“This case was so big and complex it covered the whole war,” Black said. “They had all sorts of charges against him, individual murders. In the end, they threw them all out. The judge accepted that the charges were politically motivated.”
Ndindiliyimana spent 11 years in detention before trial and three years ago was released for time served. One of the most senior officials indicted by the tribunal, he was acquitted on appeal Tuesday along with François-Xavier Nzuwonemeye, a former military battalion commander.
To Black, the original conviction was as perplexing as the lengthy delay, which he says resulted from pressure on Ndindiliyimana to testify against another high-ranking suspect. In 2004, he went on strike, along with other defence lawyers, maintaining that the UN tribunal was politically manipulated.
The Ndindilyimana case convinced him that justice was far from blind. The conviction came after Gen. Roméo Dallaire and Human Rights Watch’s senior Africa adviser Alison Des Forges, among others, had testified on the 70-year-old general’s behalf, saying said that he was not in control of the police and had helped to save the lives of civilians.
But the unpopularity and political explosiveness of the case — seeking to exonerate a man labelled a hated “genocidaire” — put Black’s reputation as well as life in danger. And his dogged, more than decade-long defence is typical of a maverick lawyer who has never hesitated to plunge into the turbulent waters of politics.
Defending what others find indefensible is Black’s trademark. And his empathy for the underdog began early.
Born in High Wycombe, northwest of London, 64 years ago, he arrived in Hamilton at the age of 9 when his father came in search of work. “My parents were working class. They left school at 11,” he said. Nevertheless, the elder Black fought his way up the immigrant ladder and retired as a director of Hamilton’s St. Joseph’s Hospital.
“I went to law school, and didn’t really like it,” Black said with a chuckle. “He told me you have two choices: university or the steel mill.”
His family’s struggle stayed with him, and he joined the left wing of the New Democratic Party. But the bombing of Yugoslavia convinced him to migrate to the Communist Party: “It was the only party that opposed the NATO attack.” It was also opposed to Western imperialism, a recurring theme in Black’s work.
He opened a one-man law practice in Toronto, sharing digs with two other lawyers and taking on legal aid cases, including murder trials. But he was increasingly drawn to international criminal law, winning a reputation as a high-profile contrarian.
He has argued for the innocence of the Serbian strongman and accused war criminal, Slobodan Milosevic; joined a team of Canadian lawyers laying war crimes charges against NATO leaders for bombing Yugoslavia in the Kosovo war; and attacked former international prosecutor Louise Arbour for halting a politically volatile inquiry into the downing of a plane that killed the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in 1994, triggering the Rwandan genocide.
It was the political content of Ndindiliyimana’s case that intrigued Black most.
“He asked me to do it as a political case. The genocide talk was so intense that at first I didn’t want to get involved. But the UN paid for one trip (to Tanzania) and over three days he told me what had happened. I was hooked.”
During years of reviewing thousands of documents and hearing dozens of witnesses, Black formed a different opinion on the Rwanda genocide from the accepted wisdom — that it was a preconceived plan by Hutus to eradicate the powerful Tutsi minority.
He believes the picture was more complex and less one-sided. And that the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front played a deadly role in the extent of the killing. When Black became legal counsel to Rwandan and Congolese groups who called for war crimes charges against Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, a former RPF militia leader, an outpouring of rage and threats followed.
“There was propaganda, death threats and threats from the CIA,” he said. “It was like a dogfight. You stopped relying on the law.”
Now his battle is over. He is packing up the house in Arusha where he has lived for several years, and preparing to return to Toronto. In some ways it feels like a pyrrhic victory. The past decade has taken a serious toll on his life and health.
The malaria has recurred and he has had debilitating typhus. His salary was a fraction of a Toronto lawyer’s pay. Divorced, and with a grown son, he admits his family relationships have suffered. And, he believes, the outlook for rebuilding his criminal law practice is bleak since the 2008 recession.
But, as ever, Black is ready to fight another day. Some international cases are hovering in the wings. And he’s begun a book on the Rwandan war that promises more controversy. It’s based on the voluminous evidence he has accumulated since 2000.
But he asks, “how do you compress these 14 years into one book?”
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