Credit: Luke
Barry Soper sniffs something whiffy:
The Greens have circled their wagons around their latest MP to land herself in the fudge factory.
It seems the deeper the hole being dug for our first refugee MP, Golriz Ghahraman, the more she keeps digging.
It was the same with Metiria Turei when she admitted to benefit fraud and went on to fudge the facts that, like an attack of borer, had the little bugs coming out of the woodwork.
That is the problem. It is obfuscation, justification, without actually addressing the isssue, which was the hiding or at the very least economical versions of the truth that existed out there.
Few would take issue with Ghahraman, as a lawyer, joining a defence team representing those accused of genocide in Rwanda where around 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered.
But most would take exception to how the Greens represented her on their website, describing her as putting on trial world leaders for abusing their power and restoring communities after war and human rights atrocities. In reality she was a bit player.
In her interview with the Herald that stirred up the hornets’ nest she said she met a defence lawyer working for the Rwandan Tribunal and he invited her over saying they needed a lawyer at the coalface. She volunteered as an intern and now conveniently can’t remember whether she was assigned to one side or the other!
In the latest batch of fudge delivered she was asked whether she’d ever posed with a war criminal, she stammered before saying, no, but admitting to a defence photo with her team in court, saying everybody did. She said it’d be bizarre to say you’d go off as an intern and refuse to sit with you team in a photo.
How could she deny the photo, it was on her private Facebook page, and strangely it has now disappeared. Too late we harvested the lot.
Well a series of photos have been sent to me, one showing her posing alone with a former pop singer called Simon Bikindi who was convicted in 2008 and sentenced to 15 years in jail for incitement to commit genocide. He was found guilty after exhorting, over a public address system, his fellow Hutus to exterminate all the Tutsis whom he referred to as snakes.
Confronted with the photo she now says her commitment’s innocent until proven guilty but she can understand how the photo could be seen by some as jarring. But being involved in the process, she insisted, she wasn’t going to go down the rabbit hole and treat him as a lesser human being and he deserved a fair trial.
That is just too trite. Never before have I seen lowly clerks pose for selfies with their scumbag clients.
Other photos showed her on a United Nations private jet, another sitting with a UN investigator and a prosecution intern at a cafe, extolling the virtues of the Guinness brewed in Rwanda.
Trying to get her to discuss the photos wasn’t easy. She initially agreed, before the lead Greens wagon occupied by a spin doctor intervened insisting on the information being flicked though to her first. When the offer was declined she simply said, okay, we’ll just leave it then.
But a few hours later they had a change of heart, at least that’s a step in the right direction.
There is plenty more to come.