Know Your Place by Golriz Ghahraman

Author:Golriz Ghahraman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

After my first internship, I did another two stints with defence teams. I was in The Hague working on the Yugoslavia Tribunal, when I was offered a paying contract job back in Arusha, this time to work on the appeal of Simon Bikindi.

Bikindi had been one of the most famous pop singers in Rwanda at the time of the genocide. His case had been novel in law because he had been charged with inciting ethnic violence through his nationalistic songs. It was argued that the songs were either overtly provoking ethnic conflict or that, in the context of high tensions, singing songs promoting Hutu nationalist politicians amounted to incitement. He was acquitted of all but one count of direct and public incitement. Bikindi refuted that allegation vehemently, and I was on his appeal team.

Years later back in New Zealand, I was questioned about having acted in Bikindi’s defence and been in a photograph taken within a series of our team members with Bikindi before the hearing. I understood the uproar. It is difficult to look past accusations of inciting genocide. Most people view the work of human rights lawyers as fighting for a clearly oppressed group, when it is in fact to uphold a system of justice based in human rights. That will always involve applying the law equally to those accused of any crime. It is hard to communicate that ideal to those outside of the bubble of rights-engaged professionals and activists, but I think when faced with the choice — to either empower defence lawyers in the same way we do prosecutors and judges, or the alternative, presumably to take people out back to disappear into dungeons without trials — almost all of us do see the point.

But I was surprised by the way one reporter opened my Facebook page in an interview and went through every photo I had taken with a black person to ask if he or she was a criminal. These were lawyers, tour guides, other interns, and people studying with me at Oxford. I realised the articles were all printing the full indictment of charges against Bikindi, all the charges he had been acquitted of. You would never get away with that in the context of a Western defendant. What makes a journalist set aside those objective rules? What makes them look at one of those photos and see anything but an accused person and their lawyer? What would make them then look at photos of other persons of colour with a UN lawyer, and seek confirmation that they too were not criminals?

The Bikindi case is also fascinating in the context of the conversations happening right now about free speech. Everyone who has studied atrocity has come up against the kind of language that inspires mass hate and violence. It starts early, with political opportunism in peacetime. Terms like ‘vampires’ and ‘ragdolls’ that Hitler used to describe the Jewish community are well known. In Rwanda, it was ‘cockroaches’. The Khmer Rouge called their victims ‘enemies of the people’.

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