Re: We won’t let anyone take us back, MPs tell Dutch counterparts (The New Times, August 19). 

The Dutch MPs should know that by the time Victoire Ingabire and her cronies left Rwanda, she and some other people were allowed to say anything humiliating, dehumanizing against a certain section of the population and get away with it.

But today, we say a big NO. We are all Rwandans and we should be treated equally. For Ingabire, I say she messed up by deciding to come back to Rwanda with the old thinking.

By the way, thanks to the Dutch judicial authorities for sharing evidence against her with their Rwandan counterparts which I believe proved valuable for the prosecutors to successfully make their case against her.

Donna

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With regard to the so-called freedom of speech, it is important to note that in many European countries, it is simply illegal to question the Holocaust. (In The Netherlands, it would likely be deemed "spreading hatred", therefore constituting an offence.)

In 2009, Maurice Sinet, a long-time political cartoonist for French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, was fired for speech deemed offensive to Jews. I wonder whether any Dutch parliamentarians brought the matter up at the time with the French authorities.

Somehow, I don't think so. Genocide-denial laws, it would seem, only curtail freedom of speech in certain parts of the world.

Peter D.M