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(Marc Hofer)
(Marc Hofer)

The law society of Upper Canada and genocide denial in Rwanda Add to ...







A woman named Victoire Ingabire returns to Rwanda from many years living in Holland to run against President Paul Kagame in August's election. It's not clear who's financing her campaign. She has known ties to Kagame's ferocious enemies in Europe and possibly in the Congo. In Europe those foes include known genocide deniers, Rwandans accused of having participated in the 1994 genocide, and conservative European Catholics who have protected accused genocidaires for years. Is Ms. Ingabire linked to them?

Kagame's opposition in the Congo are a violent Hutu militia that rapes and kills Congolese citizens while fighting to return to Rwanda to finish the genocide. Is Ms. Ingabire connected to them?

Accusations fly, but nothing is yet proved.

Ms. Ingabire tours Gisozi, the main Rwandan memorial to the victims of the genocide, perhaps as many as a million Tutsi and thousands of moderate Hutu. While she is prepared to acknowledge the genocide against the Tutsi, she seems far more concerned about the Hutu dead. But she doesn't mean those killed by the Hutu genocidaires. She means those killed during the genocide and the simultaneous civil war by the Tutsi-led RPF, who stopped the genocide by driving the genocidaires out of the country and forming the new government. To the RPF government, this feels deliberately provocative. It seems aimed at stirring up old hatreds against the Tutsi among the majority Hutu citizens of the country.



Ms. Ingabire succeeds in enraging the government. They arrange for her and an assistant to be assaulted by a gang of young men. She is then imprisoned and charged with genocide denial and "spreading ethnic dissent" but she is released on bail. Her movements are monitored.

Into this scene suddenly appears her chosen lawyer, an American named Peter Erlinder. Erlinder's presence is like a sharp slap in the face to all survivors of the genocide. Ms. Ingabire is going out of her way to provoke again. There are no accidents: Erlinder is one of the world's leading deniers of the genocide against the Tutsi. For years he has noisily doubted that there was ever a plan by Hutu extremists to exterminate all the Tutsi, a truth embraced by the vast majority of those who have studied Rwanda.

As of this writing, the Kagame government seems determined to hold Erlinder prisoner.

Though he seems to have real health problems, he has been refused bail to return to the US to seek medical care. Everyone and their uncle condemns the Kagame government for its intransigence in the cases of both Ms. Ingabire and Mr. Erlinder. Both the American State Department and, yes, the Law Society of Upper Canada, demand that he be released and allowed to function freely as a lawyer (health permitting).

The Law Society's letter does not mention his views on the genocide. Whether he actually meets "high standards of learning, competence and professional conduct" is not raised.

Holocaust or genocide denial is now banned in Israel, Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Israel, Poland and Portugal. If you break the law you are punished by imprisonment or a fine. A number of Holocaust deniers have been jailed in these countries, including David Irving and Ernst Zundel in Germany. Why is it not acceptable for denial to be banned in Rwanda, of all places, and why shouldn't deniers be duly punished?

More questions: Mr. Erlinder is not registered to practice law in Rwanda; is that irrelevant to Kagame's critics? Is anyone from anywhere allowed to materialize in Canada or the US and begin practicing law? Does every non-citizen who lands at Kigali airport have a right to remain in Rwanda? That's certainly not true of Canada and the US.

If I were advising President Kagame, I would strongly recommend that he deport Erlinder and be done with it. I would also suggest that he can afford to be more tolerant of dissent (though not of denial).



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