Garner on Ghahraman

Duncan Garner writes:

Green MP and human rights lawyer Golriz Ghahraman and her party learned a tough lesson this week about truth, honesty and spin. 

Be upfront. Tell the truth. Don’t massage and carefully manipulate your image and public reputation when it ain’t entirely true. 

Yep that is the key issue. Honesty.

But when it counted, international war crimes prosecutor, putting dictators behind bars, sounded way better than a defender of murder, rape and pillage in a vile genocide. 

Yep. And even in the one case where she was on the prosecution team, she has massively over-hyped her role. She wrote how she put heads of state on trial as if she was the main prosecutor. In reality she appears to have been pretty junior (an assistant prosecutor, which is below the prosecutors, deputy prosecutors senior assistant prosecutors). She was a small cog in a big team.

Her CV she sent around the Green Party read: ”My work as a lawyer for the UN and in NZ have focused on enforcing human rights and holding governments to account. I have lived and worked in Africa, The Hague and Cambodia.”

No mention that in Africa and The Hague, she defended evil men when she wasn’t taking weird holiday snaps with them. Who takes photos with war criminals?  Poor judgment.

Had she been upfront from the start it would be no big deal. Defence lawyers are crucial. To get dragged into an argument about defence lawyers here is a waste of time. It’s a total diversion. This is not about defence lawyers. This is about battling the truth. 

Yep those defending her by saying we need defence lawyers are throwing red herrings at us.

No wonder her leader James Shaw said sorry this week for getting it wrong twice. Shaw, like the rest of us, assumed she was doing god’s work. You can’t blame him.

When he got it wrong, why didn’t Ghahraman fix it? Why didn’t she put The Guardian right three weeks ago when it made the same mistake? Why would she? 

Truth is Ghahraman looks embarrassed to be defending those responsible for genocide. She looks embarrassed to have been on the side of defending some of the most evil war criminals this world has seen. 

She wanted her role minimised because Rwanda was ugly. Up to 1 million Tutsi slaughtered. Raped, murdered and pillaged. Almost 1 million dead in just 100 days as the world sat hopelessly by. Want to see what powerless and useless looks like: Google the UN and Rwandan genocide. 

With all the ferrets and weasels trying to trip you up in Wellington it pays to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 

But, no, she should not resign as an MP. 

I agree she should not resign. I have never said she should. On a harsh political level, she does more damage to the Greens remaining as an MP. Whenever she talks about human rights in future people will recall the photo of her beaming away next to her client convicting of citing genocide.

Sadly she has shown a serious lack of contrition. She should have said sorry rather than been so offended by the expose. 

One emailer told me this week I was attacking her because she’s a “woman with lovely brown Persian skin”.

What? 

Telling the truth is colour blind. 

Yeah I have had the same. Various nutters have alleged I targeted her because she is a woman, because she is a refugee, because she is Persian etc etc. They live in a world where they think those attributes give you immunity.