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Column: Rwanda's genocide It is seven years since the Rwandan genocide of 1994 when 800,000 people in this small Central African country, mainly from the Tutsi minority, were slaughtered by the interahamwe, a government militia based among the country's Hutu majority, in the worst instance of genocide since Hitler. Some 17 trials are now underway in Arusha, Tanzania under the auspices of the United Nations International Tribunal for Rwanda. One of those on trial is a Seventh-Day Adventist minister, Elizaphan Ntakirutama. According to numerous eyewitnesses, Ntakirutama helped the interahamwe surround some 5,000 people who had taken refuge in his church, and then joined in the killing. One would think that an American lawyer with liberal or left credentials would find other things to do than represent a man like Ntakirutama-defending Mumia Abu-Jamal, for example. But that is what Ramsey Clark has done over the past five years. Clark managed to delay extradition from the U.S. through the Texas courts for five years, after Ntakirutama took refuge there. (Texas judges opposed international jurisdiction in any case.) Why is Clark not being exposed in the liberal or left press as a former progressive who now spends his time trying to help perpetrators of genocide escape their fate? Is the Left's vision of freedom really that narrow, or does it simply not care about Africa? |
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