Lawyers who get too close to their clients sometimes end up on the wrong side of the law themselves. That is what seems to have happened to Peter Erlinder, a professor from the William Mitchell College of Law, a frequent defender of political activists and one of the defenders of the alleged perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide. Erlinder came to believe his clients’ story that the Rwandan Genocide was all a conspiracy by the Tutsis. He has not yet alleged that the Tutsis deliberately hacked themselves to death, but he has come close.
In 2006 he wrote an open letter to the prime minister of Canada alleging that Rwandan president Paul Kagame had ordered the firing of the missile that assassinated President Habyarimana and precipitated the Rwandan killings, had committed crimes against humanity, and was the primary cause of the Rwandan killings. Erlinder’s allegations were consistent with his clients’ conspiracy theories but did not, as he impliedly claimed, represent the preponderance of evidence before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
In April, Erlinder filed a lawsuit against Kagame in the US on behalf of Habyarimana’s widow Agathe, who has herself been arrested in France for her role as one of the leaders in the genocide, in the hope of serving it on Kagame during a US visit. Now Erlinder has entered Rwanda to defend a jailed politician, although he is not registered to practise law in that country, and he has himself been arrested. The US has expressed its usual outrage that the barbaric Africans should have had the cheek to arrest a white man.