By Norman W Miwambo
A U.S. human rights lawyer who served time in a Kigali prison in 2010 after being arrested on the orders of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, has revealed that the Rwandan ruler has support from “elements of all US agencies when needed”.
In an interview with The London Evening Post about the assassination of Col Patrick Karegeya in a Johannesburg hotel on New Year’s day, Prof Peter Erlinder, a lecturer at the William Mitchell College of Law in St Paul, Minnesota, said: “Order from Kagame in October 2010 meant [that this type of things] will not end until he is deposed.”
Prof. Erlinder, who also worked as a defense counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), in Arusha Tanzania, was in April 2010 arrested on charges of ‘genocide denial’ by the Kagame regime in Kigali. The professor had gone to Kigali to represent Ms Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza the leader of United Democratic Forces (UDF), now incapacitated in a Rwandan jail.
He said the “conspiracy and planning” acquittals exposed his [Paul Kagame] US-supported responsibility for the genocide. In a direct reference to a recent series of kidnaps, illegal renditions, attempted murders and successful assassinations of exiled Rwandese allegedly coordinated by Kigali regime, Prof. Erlinder, said: “The US approved my assassination…as it must have others in U.S. allies recently such as South Africa and Uganda.”
Asked whether he was still fearful of what happened to him in Kigali, Prof. Erlinder, said: “If I was not conscious of this danger, I would not be aware of reality.” Having served at the ICTR and dug into piles and piles of documents, regarding Rwanda’s conflict and the person of Kagame, the law professor said he cannot risk anything of his household anymore. “I have advised relatives not to travel to Africa for this reason.” He added: “Kagame’s Ambassadors have in the past approached UN diplomats with VIP trips to Kigali for my family members to meet President Kagame.”
Prof. Erlinder consciously wondered why President Kagame would offer a trip for his family to Africa, saying: “Whether the purpose is propaganda or hostage taking, I don’t know.” He added: “Most family and friends still don’t comprehend as you do what [it means to be] wanted dead or alive.”
The law don believes that Rwandan President Kagame is a ‘kind of small god’ in Africa. He also believes that Kagame has sustenance of portions of all US agencies when needed. “As UN Prosecutor Carla del Ponte confirms in her 2011 Memoir “Madam Prosecutor,” the threat is not from Kagame alone…. he has powerful friends, who created him and now must cover-up their own responsibility for the “genocide”.
“Please, read the Accidental Genocide…, which is the evidence in the Tribunal (ICTR)…Not my opinions,” said Prof. Erlinder in reference to his recent published book, ‘The Accidental Genocide’, which details the 1994 Rwanda genocide and the little known 6,000,000 Congolese and Hutu refugees killed as a result of what Prof. Erlinder calls the UK’s battle for the control of the Africa’s Great Lakes Region. The Accidental Genocide, which is available on Amazon provides another dimension that the mass violence did not take place as described by the RPF victors in the Rwanda War. The book also uncovers the US and UK’s roles in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Commenting on Col. Karegeya’s interview with RFI five months before he was assassinated which many now believe precipitated his murder, Prof. Erlinder, said: “These continuing threats exist in the U.S. too. Traffic-accidents, robberies, etc. etc. Please read The Accidental Genocide.”
Source: The London Evening Post