Editor, RE: “Government seeks appeal in UK Genocide fugitives’ case” (The New Times, December 24). The UK, like many of their fellow western governments, has just given the definitive lie to their incessant claims of wanting to fight genocide and their claims of concern for mass atrocities and commitment to the responsibility to protect. Any moral standing they might have had – very tenuous at best – given their pattern of international lawbreaking in support of empire has just been exploded and buried in the detritus of this verdict which shields these Rwandan genocidaires from their deserved rendezvous with justice. The pattern of British actions (BBC and its attempts at the revision of the history of the Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, the Karenzi Karake arrest on risible grounds, the previous refusal to extradite these same suspects on the same ridiculous grounds, their Keystone Kops claims of faux Rwandan hit men coming to Britain whom they then expelled to mainland Europe without even interrogating them, etc.) seem to be evidence of dark forces at work in the depths of Whitehall. I would frankly be very surprised if any appeal resulted in anything positive. By all means let our judicial authorities go through the motions, but expect the same outcome. As Mr Henderson notes, the people who decide such things seem totally amoral and shameless, not caring one bit how hypocritical they make their country look given their noisy lectures to other governments about human rights and the doctrine of the much abused responsibility to protect (R2P). It looks increasingly clear it is a R2P programme for the genocidaires of course; they mean R2P for genocidaires, at the expense of justice for their multitudes of their victims. This is not the kind of R2P we should subscribe to. Mwene Kalinda
