"For so long, I've lived injustice, and have had to struggle and fight for my freedom and my people's freedom," he says. "I think you tend to have more passion for freedom and for rights to exist, for you and for everyone. . . . With that kind of life, you don't take things for granted, you want to earn every step of your life. You want to work hard, you want to achieve, you want to reach where you have not been before. " These are the words the Rwandan Paul Kagame told Ann Jolis, a journalist with Wall Street Journal  Europe during an interview conducted in London and published on April 24, 2010 (see the article here).

    The Wall Street Journal journalist, although admitting charmed with the message, did not hesitate to doubt the sincerity of Paul Kagame, in the background of the on-going crackdown on the opposition and the world’s increasing wariness about Kagame’s poor record on the human rights front.

        “We believe in freedoms . . . we believe in democracy, not because anybody tells us to do so...  Our life has been that of a struggle against that, " Kagame insisted

    Ann Jolis concluded: “He [Kagame] insists that if and when a legitimate comer enters the race, he will not stand in his or her way... Many African leaders have been hailed as liberators in the past, only to later trash their term limits and install themselves permanently in power.”

    Ann Jolis’ predictions did not take look to come true. A month later, an American Lawyer, Professor Peter Erlinder was arrested while trying to provide legal counsel to one of the opposition leaders seeking to run against Paul Kagame in the August 2010 presidential elections. In fact President Kagame has been stifle any challenger.

One opposition leader has been under house arrest, another was expelled from his party by government mobs, and yet another was refused permission to hold any public meeting to get his party registered.

    Hence, in a opinion article published in Wall Street Journal on May 31, 2010 and titled “An American Lawyer in Rwanda”, the author comes back to the interview by Ann Jolis and concludes that if Kagame is serious, he needs to stand by his word:  “Therein lies the test of the free society: Tolerance of the foolish, the offensive, and even the unhelpful... Mr. Erlinder and Ms. Ingabire might be a threat to Rwandan stability. But denying their right to express them poses the greater threat.”

Although it might be arguable whether the statements by Peter Erlinder are foolish or offensive, in free societies people are free: free to express their opinions. Moreover, Peter Erlinder’s opinion on the events in Rwanda in 1994 are no longer isolated opinions. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has ruled on the matter that there "was no conspiracy or planning to commit genocide or other crime,” by Hutu in 1994.

Also, when was the fact of saying that Hutus were killed in 1994 a genocide denial?

©AfroAmerica Network, 2010