Continuing the Story: How the Dominant Story of the Rwanda Genocide Is Unraveling

Continuing the Story: How the Dominant Story of the Rwanda Genocide Is Unraveling by Steve Clemens. October 31, 2010

Who is the real pariah: The Professor or the President of Rwanda?

Peter Erlinder, the William Mitchell Law School Professor and noted human rights attorney addressed a small but attentive group at the law school Thursday afternoon. While attempting to update people about his recent arrest and imprisonment in Rwanda late this spring, he also used the opportunity to describe his role in how the story history will record is changing dramatically in the past year.

He began with a startling announcement: two days before the top prosecutor of Rwanda said he will file charges against Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of Hotel Rwanda. (In the movie Don Cheadle played the role). Erlinder said that the Kagame regime is now lashing out in all directions as a sign of desperation. It also arrested Victoire Ingabire, the Hutu opposition candidate who tried to run against Kagame for President, this month on similar charges of supporting a “terrorist group”. Certainly their relationships with Professor Erlinder didn’t help them, especially since he is the one who has “documented” that the well-known story of the Rwandan genocide is at best a half-truth if not an outright fabrication to hide the real perpetrators.

Of the four year civil war in Rwanda from 1990-1994 most of us, if we know anything at all, know only what the victors claim happened: the Hutus carefully planned to slaughter the Tutsis and only the intervention of Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels ended it. Erlinder reminded us of Robert McNamara’s stark admission at the beginning of the documentary The Fog of War where he confesses in one of his last interviews before his death that if the US hadn’t won the war against Japan in 1945, “we would have been prosecuted for war crimes” [for the fire-bombing of Tokyo where 250,000 civilians were killed].

Up until now, there has been very little questioning of the predominate story of the Rwandan genocide. In the past 15 years, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has prosecuted only those who lost the war. “Either this was the only war in history where the crimes occurred on only one side or this Tribunal is like Nuremberg where there was only ‘victor’s justice’”, Erlinder stated. It was either a strange war or a strange tribunal, he quipped.

Fortunately, Erlinder continued, Carla Del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICTR, wrote her memoirs that were published in early 2009. In it, she describes her work for both the Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals and claims that she had enough evidence to prosecute Paul Kagame, the leader of the RPF and now the President of Rwanda, for his central role in the assassination of the Presidents of both Burundi and Rwanda on April 6, 1994, the event everyone considers to be the triggering factor in the ensuing genocide/mass slaughter. (Erlinder is very careful, as a lawyer, to remind his audience that it is not technically genocide if there is no planning or conspiracy. No one doubts there were mass killings throughout the countryside but Erlinder points out it was predominately in the areas where all semblance of law and order had broken down due to the civil war initiated by the RPF. More recent evidence shows that much of the killing occurred in the areas controlled by the RPF.)

Del Ponte also claimed that she had evidence of RPF troops killing “tens of thousands” of civilians during this period but she was ordered not to prosecute those cases by US War Crimes Ambassador Pierre Prosper. When she told him, “I work for the UN, not the US”, Prosper replied according to the memoir, “That’s what you think”. She was replaced within 6 weeks at the insistence of the US by the UN Security Council. “If you want to keep a UN career, you learn from what happened to Carla Del Ponte,” Erlinder continued.

Del Ponte’s firing caused very little media attention even though Kagame called for her resignation because of the timing: all the world was focusing on the search for WMDs in Iraq in 2003. But despite all the attention paid to Iraq, US Secretary of State Colin Powell went out of his way in a press conference to agree that she should be removed. All the outcomes have been manipulated in these cases when only one side is prosecuted. (Does this remind anybody of the aftermath of the Republican National Convention in 2008 when only the demonstrators and not the police were prosecuted?)

Erlinder described how he first got involved in the Rwanda case: while in Kenya in 2003, he was approached and asked to serve as defense counsel for General Bagosora, one of four Hutu military leaders charged with the most serious crimes of conspiring to commit genocide. Seven years later, the three Judges hearing the case against these “leaders of the genocide” rendered their judgment: a unanimous verdict of not guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide. [They were convicted of significantly lesser charges for actions of soldiers under their command for which they might not have even known about.]

With this verdict on February 8, 2009, for the first time in the public record was a significant chink in that wall erected of the dominant story of the genocide. If these 4 military leaders had not planned and conspired to commit the genocide, maybe there were other parts of the Kagame-is-a-hero story that were not true either. The second shoe to drop was the leaking of the draft of the United Nation’s Report from the High Commissioner for Human Rights (otherwise known as the Mapping Report), a 600-page report that had been held in secret for almost a year while Kagame was given a copy allowing him to comment on it before it was officially released. This act of civil disobedience by UN staffers in leaking it is reflective of the disgust and frustration that is growing for allowing Kagame to continue to act with impunity.

Part of that growing awareness of something seriously wrong with the glowing praise of Kagame’s “economic miracle” and his hero-status was his administration’s thuggish arrests of his political opponents – anyone who dared to challenge him. It was one thing to arrest Victoire Ingabire; after all, she is Rwandan. But when Kagame’s government overreached to arrest Peter Erlinder, a westerner with a strong network of legal and activist colleagues, much more attention came to bear on what was going on in Kigali.

The leak of the draft of the Mapping Report forced the hand of the UN officials and the final report was issued this month. Although the focus of the report was on what happened in Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from 1993-2003, it showed a clear pattern that completely negated the narrative that Kagame has spun: the killings of civilians in the Congo (and the genocide in Rwanda) were the work of the Hutu. The UN Report states that the RPF, Kagame’s military force, is responsible for many of the 6 million killed to date in the Congo. The primary victims? : Hutu civilians from Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo.

As Erlinder was preparing his defense in front of the ICTR, he noticed that virtually all the “evidence” against his defendants was “apocryphal”. There didn’t seem to be any documentation, just statements or stories by others claiming, “I saw this” or “I heard that”. When questioning UN peacekeeping force leader, General Dallaire, a Canadian, the ICTR prosecutor asked about his telegram to NY on January 11, 1994, four months before the mass killings. Dallaire said “folks in New York didn’t respond to my warnings.” On cross-examination by Erlinder, he was asked if he had “any documents” and he mentioned statements by informers in his “personal files”.

So Erlinder asked for any documents the UN had relevant to the case. Told he was allowed to “inspect” UN files at the UN headquarters, he was escorted to a room that had a wall of documents arranged like a library. He was told he couldn’t take in his computer, camera, or even a notepad and pen or pencil. But he was instructed that if he put a “Post-It” note on any pages he needed a copy of, it would be given to him and the UN legal department staff would review it to see if it could be released to him. The professor told us he went downstairs “and bought a whole gross of Post-It Note packets” and literally spent a week putting a sticky note on every page. He said the UN staff are good bureaucrats and just followed orders. He received copies of thousands of documents by the end of 2004.

He also stumbled on “the archives”, a warehouse in NJ that also had relevant documents that he could use. Included in them were declassified documents from the Pentagon, US State Department, and the CIA. After arranging all the documents into chronological order, he converted them into PDF format and placed them on a website he created so they would be available to other researchers and the public. At the site, www.rwandadocumentsproject.net, Erlinder has assembled UN documents, US documents, evidence used in the Tribunal trial of his defendants, the Defense brief, articles about Rwanda, documents about Erlinder’s arrest, and a copy of the UN Mapping Report. The documents allowed him to assemble close to a minute-by-minute account of what happened during the 100-days of the genocide. It created a completely different narrative of what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Erlinder claims what he has put together is what historians will ultimately report once the dominant narrative is exposed as fraudulent. The documents are now in the public record –exposure will come.

Erlinder then proceeded to give us a brief outline of the events as they unfolded. Explaining that Rwanda was about the size of the State of Maryland and that historically the richer, minority Tutsi raised cattle and the majority, poorer Hutus grew crops. The Tutsis had the spears, they were the warriors in that society.

Between 1980-1990, Paul Kagame was the Ugandan rebel leader Museveni’s Military Intelligence Chief and then part of the Ugandan Army when Museveni became head of state with US assistance. Kagame himself received training at Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas. In 1990 he took about 25% of the Ugandan Army, renamed them The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and led a guerilla-style terrorism campaign to destabilize Rwanda.

His forces grew tenfold from 2,500 to 25,000 fully armed troops in those three years, obviously with outside help at a time when the Soviet empire was collapsing and the US was “concerned” about the socialist leanings of the Hutu President in Rwanda. In February 1993 the RFP attacked and advanced close to Kigali, the capital city. One-sixth of the population (1.2 million people) was displaced during this attack. A power-sharing agreement was reached in July that included the RPF because of their military superiority even though the Tutsi were only about 15% of the population. Pressure in the UN led to the removal of French and Belgian UN Peacekeepers who had helped keep the RFP out of Kigali and less-trained UN forces replaced them. An election for President was scheduled for the following August. Meanwhile neighboring Burundi elected a Hutu president by a landslide.

That Burundi president was assassinated by his own army consisting primarily of Tutsis in league with the RPF. The Burundi Army proceeded to kill between 100,000-250,000 predominately Hutus and another 300,000-500,000 refugees fled north to Rwanda. In November of 1993, US Ambassador Bob Flaten (now a resident of Northfield, MN) warned Kagame and the Rwandan president that if either side renewed the civil war there would be massive bloodshed. On April 6, 1994, RPF forces shot down the airplane carrying the Rwandan President and the new Burundi President and within two hours the RPF made a blitzkrieg assault to control much of the country. By July 19 they declared victory.

By September and October some reports of RPF crimes began to surface. Robert Gersony spent six weeks investigating the massive killings and his oral report to the UN claimed “systematic and sustained killing and persecution of the Hutu civilian population by the [RPF]” between April and August. His report was treated as “confidential” and suppressed. To this day (but hopefully not too much longer) the dominant narrative claims virtually all the victims were Tutsi and “moderate Hutu” although none of the statues or memorials today in Rwanda depict Hutu victims. And the “crime of genocide denial” was put into law by the victorious Kagame regime to prevent any other account from being raised.

From Erlinder’s account, it appears to me that most of the Tutsi-on-Hutu killing was done by the RPF military forces in the areas they controlled while the Hutu-on-Tutsi killing happened in the ensuing chaos of a complete breakdown of the society rather than as a military-led strategy. The killings on both sides must be condemned and be a part of the history. There are crimes on both sides in any war. But, in all likelihood, only one of those sides received US military aid and it was not the Hutu government which was overthrown.

For the US government to continue to allow Kagame’s false narrative to be dominant dishonors all the victims of the war. US foreign policy has aligned us with some really reprehensible leaders for political and economic reasons. Our support for Mobutu in Zaire was shameful and embarrassing. A few years from now the world will have a similar perspective about Paul Kagame. Hopefully our foreign policy will prioritize human rights over the resources we covet in the eastern Congo which Kagame has profited from. Time will tell. Meanwhile, the Professor, while a pariah to some in power in Kigali, is a prophetic voice calling us to do the right thing.

For a video of Peter Erlinder’s talk soon after being released from prison: http://ourworldindepth.org/archives/311

To view actual documents from the UN files on Rwanda: http://www.rwandadocumentsproject.net/gsdl/cgi-bin/library

The International Criminal Court and the "Black Hole"

The International Criminal Court and the “Black Hole” by Steve Clemens. October 28, 2010

Professor/Lawyer Peter Erlinder sat in front of us with his eyeglasses perched on his upper forehead very reminiscent of another lawyer of the recent past who also blazed a path for justice in defending the unpopular and marginalized: William Kunstler. While Kunstler actually defended the Chicago 8 after the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Erlinder was not part of the recent RNC 8 case protesting another American war of imperialism – but many of his friends and colleagues were. Instead, Erlinder was sitting in a jail cell in Rwanda as the result of his attempts to defend a candidate for President of that nation from charges of “genocide denial”.

It’s been only four months since his release for “health reasons” (and significant pressure from the U.S. State Department and the world community) and Erlinder’s talk at the Mad Hatter’s Coffeehouse on Tuesday evening was designed to give the 20 or so of us in attendance a broader context to understand what is happening in east-central Africa.

Before addressing the International Criminal Court (ICC), Professor Erlinder gave us a quick update on Rwanda. After his arrest and imprisonment and the attention of the world placed on this small African nation sandwiched between The Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda, a Green Party candidate for President was beheaded, a prominent journalist was killed, and there was an assassination attempt on the life of a former Rwandan General who had fled to South Africa. On August 26^th, a 600-page report from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (aka The Mapping Report) very critical of the Kagame regime’s actions in the DRC (Congo) was leaked. This was only weeks after Kagame’s reelection with more than 90% of the vote – often a telltale sign of a rigged election.

With the release of the leaked UN report, Erlinder said, “the story is starting to unravel” – meaning that for the first time the world media is beginning to seriously reexamine the dominant story-line about the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s and the role Kagame and his Tutsi rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front or RPF, may have played in it. The U.S. White House recently issued their first-ever critical statement about the Rwandan administration. Kagame just signed a military agreement with the Chinese. And Victoire Ingabire, Erlinder’s former client and Presidential candidate, was rearrested - this time for “material support of terrorism” and jailed in the same cell where Erlinder had been held. She has just been denied bail and was shipped to one of Rwanda’s notorious prisons.

With the recent FBI raids in Minneapolis, it seems like Rwanda is learning quickly to imitate its imperial masters with phony charges meant to intimidate others.

To understand the role and history of the International Criminal Court, Erlinder told us to look at the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals after World War II if we really want to explore how the ICC reinforces American foreign policy. Both of these post-war Tribunals were designed to condemn the vanquished; they weren’t designed to be even-handed in looking at war crimes, they were legitimated by military victory and provided only “victor’s justice”.

When the United Nations Charter was established, there was no vehicle within it to hold individuals accountable for war crimes or egregious human rights violations, just those of nation-states through the vehicle of the World Court. Erlinder claimed that it was Stalin rather than Churchill or FDR/Truman who pushed for trials of Germans and Japanese in order to delegitimize the vanquished. With the Security Council’s veto power held by the five “permanent members”, the US and the UK held the Soviets at bay – and visa-versa - for much of the next 40 years.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, the US and UK had much freer rein because the Soviets were too weak and China was just becoming an economic and military power. Within this vacuum, the US and UK initiated an International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993 and a similar tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 1994. They were justified under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter that allows for peacekeeping forces but Erlinder contended that the US/UK wanted to have “peacemaking” powers as well – thus the Tribunals. However, these tribunals were designed on the adversarial system and clearly limited in scope of which crimes to prosecute – only those by “them”, NOT by NATO or other allies of the US like Kagame.

By the end of the 1990s, the UN sought to establish a more permanent vehicle to prosecute individuals and the Treaty of Rome in 2000 established the International Criminal Court. However, once again with the initiation of the US/UK domination, the ICC severely restricted who could initiate cases: only nation-state signatories or the UN Security Council, NOT non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. Erlinder claims it was set up to prosecute rebel groups but not state forces.

Although President Clinton signed the Treaty before leaving office, he did not submit it for ratification with the US Senate. After George W. Bush succeeded him, he “unsigned” the Treaty to prevent any Americans from being prosecuted by a world body. Even though the US cannot bring cases before the ICC as a non-signatory, as a powerful permanent member of the Security Council, it carries the ability to initiate cases against those with whom we wish to oppose. So, through the Security Council, the US can refer cases to the ICC without risking any prosecution themselves!

Erlinder described the power of the US in the world community by using the language initiated by physicist Stephen Hawking: a “black hole” which sucks everything within its gravitational pull into its orbit, eventually absorbing it with its power. Like the black cylinder at the Science Museum where kids roll a coin around and around until it is “swallowed up” at the center, The US uses its role as “the world’s only superpower” to dominate anything within its ever-expanding sphere. Everyone is aware of its power and influence even as the empire is collapsing. Still it sucks everything into its gravitational pull. What a great metaphor!

A perfect example of this occurred when Carla Del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor for ICTY and later ICTR chose to broaden her investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity to include the actions of Kagame and his rebel forces. She developed evidence that Kagame should be indicted for his role in the assassinations of Rwanda’s and Burundi’s Presidents in April of 1994 which triggered much of the genocide which followed but was summarily dismissed from her position soon after she visited Washington, DC and was told to drop the investigation. She said she “worked for the UN, not the US” but soon found out otherwise when she refused to stop her investigation, mistakenly thinking that the Tribunal was after the “truth” rather than just to persecute political enemies. Erlinder pointed out that “everyone” connected with the Tribunals or the ICC know what happened to Del Ponte - and why - and thus won’t try to challenge the limits the US tries to place against prosecution of those who do our bidding. In fact, the prosecutor who replaced her in 2003 has only prosecuted members of the defeated group of Hutus.

We know about Carla Del Ponte because her memoir, Madame Prosecutor, was published in February 2009. However, she has since been appointed as the Swiss Ambassador to Argentina and her government has ordered her not to talk about what she wrote in her book.

To date, every defendant charged by the ICC is African – and all of them find themselves on the “other side” from US interests. After the US pressured the ICC (through the Security Council) to indict the leader of Sudan (another country that refused to sign or ratify the Treaty), all the African presidents unanimously voted not to cooperate with the ICC.

The struggle to restrain power through law can be traced back to the Magna Carta forced on King John by those he was oppressing. This process has had fits and starts. In war, Erlinder observed, there are always cases of crimes on both sides. When a Tribunal or Court only looks to one side of the ledger, one can’t get justice. There is an imbalance built into the ICC that gives more power to nation-state actors than others.

While leaving much of the detailed story of Rwanda’s genocide for another talk to be given two nights later at William Mitchell Law School where he is a Professor, Erlinder did observe that most Americans know about Rwanda through the camera lens of the movie “Hotel Rwanda”. (Erlinder is friends with Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the movie that features actor Don Cheadle in that role and he is a member of the nonprofit board Rusesabagina established.) As “good a story” as the movie is, the law professor said, “ ‘Hotel Rwanda’ is as accurate about the Rwandan civil war as ‘Gone With the Wind’ is about the US Civil War.” If you only see the latter movie, you come to think “the damn Yankees” and General Sherman are the real villains and slavery wasn’t all that bad.

Erlinder concluded with the observation: if you ultimate goal is to learn the truth of what happened and to work to heal the nation, going the route of a Tribunal will not get you there. Tribunals are just good for condemnation and retribution. Instead, take the path modeled by South Africa – a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But there is a trade-off – it will often mean that the perpetrator will not be punished (even though he/she will probably be shamed). But, Erlinder continued, “righteous indignation” will almost never get the whole story right. Erlinder didn’t say it but the thought came to my mind: in order for that to work, one also needs a Mandela-type to order it and a Bishop Tutu-type of leader to run it. Now that they are both retired, the world could use a few more like them.

Shades of Gray

Shades of Gray: Listening To the Infamous “Genocide Denier” by Steve Clemens. June 30, 2010

There were only a dozen or so of us gathered at the May Day Bookstore basement at 3PM on Monday afternoon. The hastily-scheduled event left little time to get out the word that the recently returned political prisoner/law professor Peter Erlinder was speaking about his arrest and imprisonment in Rwanda. The professor quickly explained as he began his presentation: he wanted to thank some of his supporters who wrote/called/demonstrated on his behalf during his recent ordeal – and he brought along with him the “real hero”, one of his Kenyan attorneys who risked his own freedom and life to stand up on Erlinder’s behalf.

Erlinder explained: “Before I traveled to Rwanda, an attorney representing [one of the many political prisoners in Rwanda] was safe. After I was arrested and imprisoned, any attorney coming in knew they might also suffer the same fate.” Thus, Gershon Otachi, one of two defense attorneys under the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, showed special courage in standing up to represent Erlinder in his time of need.

I had heard Peter Erlinder about three years ago when he spoke at May Day about his work defending one of the Hutu military generals who was charged with genocide and conspiracy to commit genocide. It was my first exposure to hearing any variation on the theme of “what happened in Rwanda?” The dominant (and only story) given coverage by the US media was that of victimization of the Tutsi peoples by the Hutus –almost out of the blue – despite their living side-by-side for years.

In that previous presentation the William Mitchell law professor served as a historian. Erlinder patiently explained about the colonial history of central Africa and described the role of the Belgian, German, French, and English colonizers in the area and the practice of selecting a small group of local people to become the ruling elites under their overall control. He explained the way the Belgian colonizers gave educational and employment benefits to people they defined as Tutsi using artificial designations such as those who owned 10 cows or more rather than traditional tribal identities. What counted was not one’s birth heritage but rather the “tribal” identity given to one on their identification card or by the type of work they did. Understanding the “divide and conquer” strategy behind the colonial history helped me better understand some of underlying reasons behind the bottled-up violence and resentment that was orchestrated by both sides.

The missing piece for me was about President Kagame’s own background in all of this. In Erlinder’s current presentation, complete with maps of Africa and the specific areas of Rwanda, he explained how Kagame’s rebel army, the RPF, invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, failing to capture the capital in Kigali primarily because of the government’s support from several European nations. (The government was headed by a Hutu, the majority group.) After that failure, Kagame retreated back into Uganda, receiving at least three huge shipments of arms and munitions and increasing his armed forces from 2,500 to 25,000 over the next three years.

It is believed that Kagame’s forces shot down the airplane carrying the Presidents of both Burundi and Rwanda in 1993 that, in turn, triggered much of the killing now identified as genocide. Erlinder does not deny the massive killing which occurred – he only says it is not black and white, the “good guys” vs the “bad guys”. The dominant storyline we’ve been told through the media and governmental sources paint the Hutus as perpetrators and the Tutsi as victims. A variation of this story says that some “moderate” Hutus were also killed yet Erlinder claims there are no monuments in the present Kagame-run Rwanda to any Hutu victims. Erlinder says his research shows only shades of gray. There was killing on both sides, depending on which group was dominant within certain areas. It is a complicated story but until or unless the truth comes out about complicity on both sides, there will be no healing there, Erlinder contends.

But, so far, only Hutus have been prosecuted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). However, Erlinder claims that Carla del Ponte, the chief UN Prosecutor for ICTR, told him that she was in the room when US officials passed on instructions that Kagame was NOT to be prosecuted for his role in the assassinations of the two Heads of State. The clue as to why, Erlinder contends, lies in the geopolitical struggle for regional and resource dominance.

During the post-colonial period between 1960 and 1990 with the rise of a generation of “independent” African leaders, there was an ideological battle reflective of the Cold War between “the West” and the Soviets. Elites jockeyed for power by aligning with one side over the other. The US remained stupefyingly silent to the dictatorial abuses of leaders like Mobutu (Zaire/Congo) and Mugabe (Zimbabwe) because they were steadfast “allies” against “the communists”. With the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, some of that competition shifted to between various western powers.

Now, with the rise of Chinese wealth and power, the struggle has resumed – primarily between the US empire (in decline) and the ascendency of that of China’s influence. How else can one explain the inordinate attention paid to the tragic deaths in Darfur (in Sudan) while ignoring the vastly greater numbers of rapes and murders by gangs and military forces in eastern Congo? Erlinder said more are killed “every four months” in the conflicts raging in eastern and central Congo than have died in the past number of years in Darfur.

So we protect Kagame, hoping that he will side with US interests over those of China. If only the need for truth didn’t get in the way – and the desire of human rights lawyers like Peter Erlinder and Gershon Otachi to offer a defense for those facing predominately political charges. According to Erlinder, the US is clearly complicit in the massive killings that occurred in 1994 having learned “the lesson” from the failed intervention in Somalia just prior to these new killing fields not to intervene directly in these “civil war”-type struggles. That didn’t prevent our supplying hundreds of tons of arms to Kagame’s RPF forces just months before all the killings occurred.

It was six years ago when Erlinder, in preparing the defense of one of his Rwandan clients, discovered the collection of UN documents which helped him piece together a narrative quite different than the one put forth by the media and many governments. He has collected them and made them available for others to read at the website www.rwandadocumentsproject.net. It is hard to change the dominate storyline which has been established in our minds for the past 30 years but Erlinder is hopeful in seeing signs that it is beginning to crack and change.

And, as part of a Foundation started by the hero of the Hotel Rwanda story (The Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation), Erlinder and others are pushing for a Truth and Reconciliation Process similar to what happened in the post-apartheid period in South Africa. But for Erlinder, no reconciliation will be forthcoming until there is mutual acceptance of responsibility on all sides. Otherwise, each side continues to demonize each other that will lead only toward more violence.

Despite the shock and injustice of his arrest and subsequent jailing, Erlinder told us “I was treated better than Guantanamo prisoners – I wasn’t waterboarded or had a bag over my head. I wasn’t held for six years in solitary waiting for trial like one of my clients here in Minneapolis.” Although conditions in the first jail were brutal for this lawyer in his late 50s, he said the second Rwandan jail he was held in was “better than the conditions some of my clients experience in Hennepin County or other US lockups.”

So lets look and listen for stories that challenge the dominant narrative about genocide and who is responsible as well as who is complicit – but let’s especially focus on what role our own foreign and military policies contribute to these horrors – and then work for change here at home, not just “over there”.