Citation
Good guys and bad guys
By Jos van Oijen
In 2003, a delegation of the radical left-wing lawyers' association National Lawyers Guild
(NLG) visited North Korea. The delegation of four American lawyers, including former
chairman Peter Erlinder, was accompanied by the Canadian communist attorney Christopher
Black.
In The Netherlands, Black is known primarily for his denial of the genocide in Bosnia.
General Ratko Mladic, the butcher of Srebrenica, was, according to Black, "falsely accused
of crimes he did not commit". The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in
The Hague he described as "Fascist Justice".
Black was also involved in the creation of the International Committee for the Defence of
Slobodan Milosevic, a kind of fan club for the last president of Yugoslavia. Their website still
mentions that the Committee "honours and appreciates" the efforts of non-members such as
Sadam Hussein.
With kindred spirits like that, glorifying the Kim Dynasty is just a small step, the travel report
of the NLG delegation reveals. Peter Erlinder turned out to be no stranger to the North
Korean officers they met. He was embraced by a Major who greeted him with: "Welcome,
old friend".
It won’t come as a surprise that they concluded that not the delegation, but the American
people had been subjected to a grand deception.
According to Black and Erlinder we live in a simple world of good guys and bad guys. The
'bad guys' are the imperialists. The ones they perceive as socialist leaders, like Milosevic,
are the 'good guys' ... “whose only crime was to resist the dictates and imperialist ambitions
of the United States and its allies.”
They regard themselves as alternative missionaries with a duty to bring light in the darkness.
"I could not rest, if I did not attempt to prevent misleading of the many socialists, who I
consider friends and comrades," Erlinder wrote to the World Socialist Web Site in 2009.
The link
The motive for Erlinder's letter was an article about Theoneste Bagosora, one of the main
leaders of the genocide against the Tutsi, which he considered to be "misleading".
Christopher Black also sent an angry letter.
"Both correspondents deny that genocide took place in Rwanda", an appalled Chris Talbot
remarked in a detailed response. “Professor Erlinder refers to ‘the Rwandan Tragedy …
some call genocide.’ Mr. Black refers to ‘the myth of genocide’.”
Black and Erlinder didn’t get their opinions from strangers. They represented prominent
genocide suspects at the Rwanda Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania. As early as 1995, one year
after the genocide, Erlinder's client wrote that although it was true that massacres had
occurred, responsibility for "the tragedy" had to be shifted to Paul Kagame's Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF).
Black in turn received a three-day briefing from his client, who told him that there had been
no genocide against the Tutsi. He was next informed about the 'real' truth in great detail.
Black immediately noticed the similarities between "fascist" tribunals in The Hague and
Arusha: "At the Rwanda Tribunal", he said at a conference, "it’s even worse than The Hague
tribunal because in that instance the people that took apart Rwanda, the Rwanda Patriotic
Front, are a proxy for and backed by the United States and its allies."
Towards the end of 2009, Black published an extended version of his letter entitled: "The
Truth About Rwanda". In it he describes pre-genocide Rwanda as the Switzerland of Africa,
a socialist state and model for social development in which Hutu and Tutsi lived in harmony,
a fairy tale that was unilaterally ruined by the RPF.
Both Black and Erlinder gratefully exploit the extensive anti-Tutsi propaganda that was
produced in the 1990s by representatives of the Hutu Power movement, not only in court,
but also in popular publications. Their work has thus become a link between the
genocidaires and the various 'revelations' we are presented with today.
Revelations
A current example of such a 'revelation' is “In Praise of Blood”, a book by Canadian journalist
Judi Rever, which will be published in a Dutch translation in October 2018. The Dutch title
chosen by the publisher translates to: "The Truth About Rwanda". This is probably no
coincidence. Some passages have been duplicated almost literally from Black's article with
the same title.
In her book Rever thanks Black and Erlinder for providing access to important evidence. She
also acknowledges the research of some of their allies, such as Robin Philpot and Barrie
Collins. The first is a brother of genocide lawyer John Philpot. The latter we know from the
magazine Living Marxism (LM), which in the 1990s was questioning the genocides in Bosnia
and Rwanda.
Collins, then writing under the pseudonym Barry Crawford, also published articles on behalf
of the organization Africa Direct, such as: "Why the Rwandan war was not genocide", almost
entirely reproduced in LM under the title: "Rwanda, the great genocide debate".
According to that article, the Hutu rulers were simply unable to plan and carry out a
genocide. What happened was barbaric, according to Collins, but not genocide, rather a
matter of force majeure, after years of interference by the West had created an explosive
situation in Rwanda.
"The idea that the beleaguered Hutu government could plan and execute the deliberate
annihilation of an entire people," Collins wrote, "at a time when it could not even organise to
sell the coffee beans on which the economy depended, borders on the incredible.”
Judi Rever's 'truth' is a synthesis of all the narratives her informants, or rather the informants
of her informants, have produced over the years. Critical reflections or alternative
explanations for their information are absent. To give a few examples:
In 2009 Christopher Black wrote that the many corpses that floated in the Kagera River
during the genocide were not, like everyone thought, Tutsi victims of the Hutu militias, but
Hutu victims of the RPF. According to his explanation, RPF troops had taken control of the
area around the river fairly quickly. Rever writes something very similar in her book.
The allegation can also be found in a publication of the ousted regime from right after the
genocide. What all these authors conceal is that by the end of April 1994 the RPF only
controlled the river basin in eastern Rwanda. However, NGOs continued to report that
upstream, in government territory, up to five thousand Tutsi a day ended in the river.
Specialized research
Even scientific research is wasted on these authors. According to Rever and her sources,
the airplane of President Habyarimana was shot down by an RPF commando unit. This was
also the message of the former regime and some defected RPF members. The assault was
allegedly intended by the RPF to create chaos in order to seize power. Panic among the
population would then have caused the mass murder of the Tutsi.
But forensic investigations commissioned by a French Judge have shown that the
statements of Rever's sources cannot be true. The final report from 2012 ruled out the
location supposedly used for the assault. If the missiles had been fired from there, the
damage caused to the aircraft would have been different than what has been established
from the wreckage.
Witnesses near the airport during the assault would also have seen and heard something
else than they actually did. According to the experts, the most likely location of the assault
was a military camp near the airport, which points to a different scenario.
In her book, Rever does mention the report, but she contests its conclusions based on
criticism by Barrie Collins and a Belgian colonel, in spite of the fact that it’s not their area of
expertise. Collins' only technical training is in optometry.
Most contentions in "The Truth About Rwanda" are, just like these examples, easy to refute
with reliable documentation. Rever apparently got fixated on her one-sided sources and did
very little to check the veracity of their information.
On further inquiry it appears that the Dutch and Canadian publishers have also failed to do
so. The title thus becomes a wry ironic joke for the benefit of the real 'bad guys'.
This is a translated version of an article originally published in Dutch by VredesMagazine, a
quarterly from The Netherlands, Vol. 11, No 4, on 12 September 2018.
