She went to Fordham Law School and wasn't out and certified for more than a few weeks when she saw a notice for lawyers to work in Rwanda for the wrong side. They needed lawyers who could speak French. Natalie was raised in France and had her early education there. She was off to Rwanda. Her clients were these extremely short Hutu women who were obsessed with the taller Tutsi women. To even it up, the Hutus cut the legs off the Tutsi women. That was great. Now every woman was short. Natalie represented the leg-cutters. Her first instinct was to plea bargain. No matter what, escape the max. The women refused to plead. So did the men. They said that after pleading not guilty, if they changed their plea to guilty in order to get a lesser sentence, their community would say that they were liars and embarrassing their community. In Afghanistan, she said, a client was offered 100 lashes or 7 years in prison. He was an unmarried young man whose crime was having sex with a young woman who also wasn't married. The client wanted the lashes. Natalie was sick. Then an old Afghani, who understood the system, told her, "Let him have it. Don't worry." It turned out the lashes were merely brushes against his back and he was sent home. The lashes were a symbol. There will be none of this with Saddam. They want to kill him in Iraq. They want to kill him at the Hague. They want to kill him in the newspaper offices. Natalie says she would go over there in a flash to work on his defense. Does he have a defense? "I don't know. I know he should have a defense lawyer." Yesterday, she had to be more concerned with funding for the International Legal Foundation, which sends volunteer lawyers to Afghanistan and Pakistan and hopes to raise funds for lawyers in Sierra Leone. She works out of the Queens Legal Aid office, but her foundation is based in her breathtaking loft on Prince Street in SoHo. All funding now comes from the Soros Foundation, which does much more social work than anyone imagines. The International Legal Foundation gets young volunteers - Natalie says a volunteer is far better than a paid contract lawyer - who go into these countries far off and ask the first questions ever about illegally detained citizens. A warden in Afghanistan told a young defense lawyer that 98 percent of the people in his custody were detained with no proper cause - except payment to arresting officers, which they didn't have - but he didn't know what to do about it. Natalie has a personal emotion about terrorism. On 9/11, Natalie was in the basement of One World Trade Center, coming up from the subway and into this great noise overhead and she and everybody else looked up to see the first plane flying low and into the building. She thought it was an accident and ran for her office on Church Street. She never got there. The second plane hit. She ran home. Now she is in and out of Afghanistan on rotation and says that the result of the American invasion of Iraq is that the Taliban are returning. "They stop cars on the road between Khandahar and Kabul, and if people are listening to the radio, they cut their ears off."
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