Peter Erlinder Jailed by One of the Major Genocidaires of Our Era

[goodhue]

Peter Erlinder Jailed by One of the Major Genocidaires of Our Era

by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson1

The May 28 arrest of the U.S. attorney Peter Erlinder by the Paul Kagame dictatorship in Rwanda reveals much about this regime that is routinely sanitized in establishment U.S. and Western intellectual life and media coverage. But if we use Erlinder's arrest to call attention to some less well-known facts, a much grimmer scenario about Kagame than as a "man of the hour in modern Africa," who "offers such encouraging hope for the continent's future" (Stephen Kinzer),2 comes to light.

For one thing, Kagame does not like free elections, and he has avoided or emasculated them assiduously. Erlinder arrived in Kigali on May 23 to take up the legal representation of Victoire Ingabire, a Hutu expatriate who had spent the past 16 years in the Netherlands, but who immediately upon her return to Rwanda in January was regarded as the leading opposition figure, though her United Democratic Forces hadn't been able to register as an official party. The Kagame regime arrested her on April 21, and charged her with "association with a terrorist group; propagating genocide ideology; negationism and ethnic divisionism."3 As 2010 is an election year in Rwanda (now scheduled for August 9), this should help Kagame once again to avoid any meaningful electoral contest.

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http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/hp290510.html