Dr. Léopold Munyakazi was deported to Rwanda early this morning. Immigration attorney Ofelia Calderón defended the gentle professor pro bono from the time of his arrest in 2009 to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, where she gave oral argument earlier this year.
The linguist, scholar and former French professor at Goucher College was arrested shortly after giving several lectures at Northeastern University college campuses in which he said that the Rwandan war of the 1990s was a class conflict, not an ethnic conflict, and that it was therefore incorrectly characterized as genocide. Hutus and Tutsis, he said, are not properly understood as ethnicities, but as historical social classes. They share the same language and culture, eat the same food, and marry each other, and the vast majority are Christian. FULL STORY
