My Fax to Samantha Power on the arrest of Professor Peter Erlinder by Kagame.

My Fax to Samantha Power on the arrest of Professor Peter Erlinder by Kagame.
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Yesterday at 16:39
To the special attention of

Mrs. Samantha Power
Director of Multilateral Affairs
The White House
Phone: 1 202 456 1414
Fax: 1 202 456 2461

Object: The brutal arrest of Professor Erlinder by the rwandan regime.


Dear Mrs Power,

In his speech in Oslo at the Nobel Peace Prize Award ceremony, president Obama declared:

“The same principle applies to those who violate international laws by brutalizing their own people. When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, or repression in Burma, there must be consequences. And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression.”

Dear Mrs Power, by refusing to act upon the evidence of the genocide that was taking place in Rwanda, the United States of America created a disastrous logic of impunity in behalf of both the primary perpetrators of the killings and their counterparts.

As a matter of fact we now know, thanks to Professor Erlinder's documentary discoveries, that an internal memorandum for the eyes of then U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher reported that a UN team on the ground in Rwanda “concluded that a pattern of killing had emerged” there, the “[RPF]
and Tutsi civilian surrogates [killing] 10.000 or more Hutu civilians per month, with the [RPF] accounting for 95% of the Killing.”

Later this inaction by the United States constituted a terrible incitement to the Rwandan Patriotic Front of Paul Kagame to take the law on its own hands and commit unprecedented mass killings in the Great-Lakes region with a death toll of ten million.

Dear Mrs Power, such a sinister achievement not only is the result of the impunity created by the Clinton administration you condemned in your book “A Problem from Hell”, but it is also the consequence of a U.S continued active support of the rwandan regime, both politically and militarily.

Today dictator Paul Kagame of Rwanda, reassured by the support of your administration, is exhibiting an arrogance and a cruelty that challenge by any standard the values your country stand for.

Dear Mrs Power, as we learn that dictator Paul Kagame arrested a few days ago Professor Peter Erlinder - a U.S. citizen, lead defense counsel before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, for the legitimate views he has always presented in the exercise of his legal duties, which views are grossly mischaracterized by the rwandan regime through deceptive concocted rules - we would like to express our strongest disapproval to the support of the United States to the rwandan regime. A brutal and unpredictable regime that poses a serious problem to mankind, given its records.

We ask that your administration require this regime to immediately release Professor Erlinder who is reported to face serious health problems. We ask that the rwandan regime let him exercise freely the legal representation of Mrs Ingabire, first female presidential candidate in Rwanda, who is being brutalized and harassed by the Kagame regime.



Dear Mrs Power, as a matter of both consistency and legacy, we ask that your administration put an end to the support to the rwandan regime in full accordance with the statement made by president Obama in Accra, when he said that Africa does not need strong men but strong institutions. The kind of institutions Mrs Ingabire is willing to build and for which she is being oppressed along with people of good will like Professor Erlinder.

With our best regards,

Claude B. Ikok