Goucher College has suspended, without pay, a visiting professor accused of participating in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Leopold Munyakazi, 59, was hired to teach in the Modern Languages and Literatures department at the Baltimore liberal arts college for two semesters beginning September of last year. College officials suspended him in December after a Rwandan prosecutor approached them with an indictment calling for Munyakazi's arrest.
In a Jan. 31 letter to the Goucher community, President Sanford Ungar wrote, "Evidence that would either convict or exonerate Dr. Munyakazi beyond a reasonable doubt simply does not exist at this time." He added that the former French professor, who is a member of the Hutu tribe, "vehemently denies any involvement in committing genocide, and in fact has presented evidence that he assisted numerous Tutsis in fleeing Hutu killers."
Munyakazi's appointment at Goucher was arranged by the Scholar Rescue Fund, a division of the Institute of International Education, which aids academics who face persecution in their home countries. According to the Balitmore Sun, he was imprisoned in Rwanda during the 1990s but was released in 1999 without any pending accusations.
But the Web site of the international police organization Interpol lists Munyakazi as wanted for genocide. In his letter, Ungar claimed he was "not personally aware" of the Interpol advisory until recently.
Munyakazi stirred controversy in a 2006 speech at the University of Delaware, which he delivered while he was an assistant professor of French at Montclair State University in New Jersey. In the speech, Munyakazi said the genocide in Rwanda - which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives - was a civil war between social classes rather than an ethnic cleansing.
Ungar wrote that he decided to disclose details of the case before an upcoming NBC News documentary about international war criminals that includes Munyakazi airs this spring. In the meantime, Goucher "will continue to provide modest off-campus housing for Dr. Munyakazi and his family through the end of this semester, but he will not a have a presence on campus," Ungar wrote.
