Professor Peter Erlinder, a Defence attorney at the ICTR, and Professor of Law at William Mitchell College of Law in the United States , was arrested on 28 May in Kigali on the charge of "denying genocide".
Prior to his arrest, earlier on January 24, 2010, the Law Professor replied to Annie Garrison, San Francisco Bay View journal reporter on his disagreement with the onesided "victor's" history, in which the former Hutu government and military are said to have conspired to commit genocide against Tutsis, and in which only Tutsis, not Hutus, were mass murdered. The victorious, now ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front party has made this history not only sacrosanct, but also a legal requirement, by passing laws against "genocide ideology" ---meaning history that disagrees with their own.
He wrote:
"Ms. Garrison,
As Lead Defense Council at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) I have had a chance to closely examine the violence associated with the RPF takeover of Rwanda, and have concluded that the "victors" have told the story of the 4-year war, and its aftermath.
During the past 7 years the Prosecutor at the ICTR, with the help of the Kagame government, US and UK have been unable to marshall evidence that the former military or government planned or conspired to kill civilians, much less Tutsi civilians.
In Feb 2009, the Judgement in the Military I (Bagosora) case found that NONE of the top four officers (including Bagosora) were guilty to conspiracy before or after the assassination of Habyarimana.
In Feb 2009, the former ICTR Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte admitted in her memoirs that she had been ordered to bury evidence of RPF crimes, including Kagame's assassination of Habyarimana which had been known to her office in 1997 by the U.S. State Dept.
'The Great Rwanda Genocide-Coverup' is beginning to unravel but US, as you note, is deeply invested in maintaining a Prussian-style military presence in Central Africa. I have posted several articles and the - Rwanda Documents Project - has many of the contemporaneous confirming documents. -Peter Erlinder"
The Rwanda Documents Project was started by Professor Peter Erlinder of William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota as a result of his work as a defense attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The goal of the Project is to collect and make available primary source materials from international and national agencies, governments, and courts that relate to the political and social history of Rwanda from 1990 to the present.
"It's always been the guy that won the war who can tell the story," he said in a 2008 interview.
Peter Erlinder, lead defense counsel for former Major Aloys Ntabakuze in the Military 1 Trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and president of the UN-ICTR Defense Lawyers Association, says that recently-issued French and Spanish international war crimes warrants and new evidence at the UN Rwanda Tribunal have exposed current Rwandan President Paul Kagame as the man primarily responsible for the 1994 “Rwanda Genocide” and the beneficiary of a decades-long US-sponsored “cover-up” of Pentagon complicity in the massacres committed by his regime.
The damning “Gersony Report” included first-hand evidence of tens of thousands of civilians being massacred by Kagame’s troops in eastern Rwanda, later confirmed by similar reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The U.N. document (also in the ICTR record) says that Annan told the Foreign Minister that public knowledge of the Report would be “embarrassing to the UN” and the former U.S. Clinton administration diplomat, Brian Atwood, not only confirmed he was at the meeting, but explained that he had engaged Gersony, and that Gersony’s findings of war-crimes being committed by Kagame were “…an inconvenient truth” for both the United States and the UN.
According to Atwood, unbeknownst to the State Department, “the Pentagon had been supporting Kagame since before the 1990 invasion, when he was the head of Military Intelligence for the Museveni government of Uganda.” The “Gersony Report” tied the Pentagon to the crimes of Kagame’s invading, Pentagon-trained and funded forces. More UN documents in the ICTR record reveal that the State Department was negotiating for a peaceful settlement of the war at the same time the Pentagon was supporting Kagame’s invasion. The Clinton Administration sought to enlist Atwood and Kofi Annan in keeping evidence of Kagame’s crimes from ever seeing the light of day, to prevent Pentagon involvement in the “Rwandan Genocide” from ever coming to light.
The existence of a separate Pentagon foreign policy on Rwanda also tallies with the ICTR testimony of former Ambassador Robert Flaten, who testified that he seriously doubted that Habyarimana’s supporters planned to kill civilians on a massive scale because the CIA and other intelligence agencies would have reported it when he was in Rwanda from 1990 to late 93. He said that his requests for Pentagon-DIA spy satellite photographs showing the status of the war in the countryside were turned down because of “clouds over Rwanda,” during his entire 3-plus years in Rwanda.
Former Amb. Flaten also noted the obvious: Uganda’s military assistance for the 1990 Kagame invasion coincided with increased Ugandan military funding by the U.S./U.K. Most importantly, Flaten also testified that he personally warned Kagame that “he (Kagame) would be responsible for massacres like just happened in Burundi, if Kagame broke the cease-fire and re-started that war". Now the evidence in the ICTR record shows Kagame did exactly that!
In short, the evidence that is now in the public record shows that during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, the Pentagon could have stopped the carnage with a phone call, and the State Department apparently did not know enough about the Pentagon’s close ties to Kagame to ask them to do so, at least until USAID’s Atwood was informed of Pentagon panicked reaction to the “Gersony Report,” in the summer of 1994.
Other de-classified State Department documents show that it was the invading Kagame forces that were the aggressors, and were blocking the State Departments efforts to implement the Arusha Accords, peace agreement. The UN’s General Dallaire has testified that Kagame would not agree to a ceasefire to use troops to stop the massacres because “he was winning the war.” And, now we know what Dallaire may not have known, until later…Kagame was winning with the Pentagon’s help.
With U.S. and U.K. support, Kagame’s government is actively campaigning to have all ICTR matters transferred to Rwanda and has issued 40,000 warrants for Kagame’s Hutu and Tutsi opponents in the worldwide Rwandan diaspora (a movement that includes such figures as Paul Rusesabagina, the 'real hero' of Hotel Rwanda.
Erlinder had recently filed a lawsuit in Oklahoma against Rwandan president Paul Kagame, which likely angered the government in Rwanda.
Bar associations including the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) have condemned Erlinder's arrest. "There can be no justice for anyone if the state can silence lawyers for defendants whom it dislikes and a government that seeks to prevent lawyers from being vigorous advocates for their clients cannot be trusted," said NLG president David Gespass. "Government intimidation and interference with criminal defense lawyers is unacceptable in all its forms and it fundamentally undermines justice," according to an NACDL press release.
Erlinder should be released immediately. He should be given immediate access to counsel and the charges against him should be dismissed.
Tags: one_simple_thing, erlinder, kagame, rwanda, ictr
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