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DECH dech12086 Dispatch: February 20, 2014 CE: N/A

Journal MSP No. No. of pages: 24 PE: Kirsten

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UNCORRECTEDPROOF

Performing Repatriation? The Role of Refugee Aidin Shaping New Beginnings in Mauritania

Marion Fresia

ABSTRACT

Academic work on transitional justice has tended to focus on the most ob-vious and institutionalized sites where ideas about justice and transition arediscussed or contested, such as truth commissions or international tribunals.Yet, they are many other sites where such ideas are framed, circulated orchallenged, including sites outside transitional countries. Drawing on thecase of Mauritania, where the repatriation of refugees has played a highlysymbolic role during the latest ‘democratic’ transition, this article exploresthe specific roles played by refugee aid and past experiences of refugee lifein shaping the terms of new beginnings in this country. As places of intensepoliticization of memory and appropriation of transnational discourses onhuman rights violations and transitional justice, refugee camps enhance theconstruction of new imagined communities based on a feeling of victimhoodand abnormality and the construction of hegemonic narratives over the ‘justorder’ to be aspired to for the future. The article outlines how such hege-monic ideas on justice and transition are shaped by humanitarian actors andthe refugee elite, while at the same time being contested by subaltern groupsthrough the production of alternative accounts of past injustices and throughmundane practices.

INTRODUCTION

In 2005, the Mauritanian President Ould Sid’ Ahmed Taya, who had been inpower since 1984, was overthrown by a military coup, ushering in a new eraof what was presented as a ‘democratic’ transition. This political transitionwas characterized by the official recognition, for the first time in twentyyears, of the massive human rights violations perpetrated against ‘Black’Mauritanians in 1989–1991, including the expulsion of 120,000 to Senegaland Mali and the execution of more than 500 others. This recognition wasfollowed, in 2008, by the official repatriation of Mauritanian refugees fromSenegal under the supervision of the United Nations High Commissioner for

The author would like to thank Olaf Zenker and Gerhard Anders, and the journal’s anonymousreferees, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Development and Change 00(0): 1–24. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12086C© 2014 International Institute of Social Studies.Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA

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2 Marion Fresia

Refugees (UNHCR). This major event was presented by many stakeholdersas symbolizing the end of a period of dictatorship in Mauritania and the be-ginning of a new era: it was constructed as both an act of transitional justicein its own right, undoing the human rights violation of displacement, and asa prerequisite for further transitional justice measures aiming at the recon-ciliation of the ‘Moorish’ and the ‘Black’ components of the Mauritanianpopulation.

Mauritania is not unique in this regard. Since the 1990s, the repatriationof displaced populations has been increasingly framed by the UN, Westerndonor institutions and African states as an essential component of new begin-nings in post-conflict countries (Allen and Morsink, 1994). It is intended tosymbolize the end of a ‘refugee cycle’ (Black and Koser, 1999), the return ofpeace, the end of discrimination and persecution, and the re-establishment ofa certain ‘national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995) whereby all citizens of acountry can live in and be protected by a nation state. The return of refugees,which is defined by international refugee law as one of the three ‘durablesolutions’ to the refugee plight (UNHCR, 1951: Art 1.C), has thus beenhighlighted as a return to normalcy and ordinary life; but it has also increas-ingly been framed as a first step towards restoring a ‘just order of things’which may, paradoxically, call for new exceptional measures such as theestablishment of specific transitional justice mechanisms. In Mauritania, asrefugees returned, intense debates over restitution of land and property andthe resolution of past human rights violations have indeed appeared on thepublic scene for the first time since the 1989 crisis, along with the notionof ‘transitional justice’. Debates over past human rights violations weretherefore closely related to and provoked by the return of refugees.

‘Transitional justice’ refers to the institutionalized attempt to deal withpast human rights violations in order to facilitate a transition towards greaterjustice in the future. It includes ‘both judicial and non-judicial mechanisms,with differing levels of international involvement (or none at all) and indi-vidual prosecutions, reparations, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vettingand dismissals or a combination thereof’(UN, 2004: 4). Such mechanismshave gained importance everywhere in the world, but in Africa they areoften part of larger military–humanitarian interventions which include therepatriation of refugees and peace-building interventions. As shown in theIntroduction to this special issue (Anders and Zenker, 2014), academic workon transitional justice has tended to focus on the most obvious and institu-tionalized sites in which ideas about justice are discussed or contested, suchas truth commissions or international tribunals, or neo-traditional institutionssuch as the gacaca in Rwanda. Yet, there are many other sites where ideasabout justice and transition circulate or are negotiated, including reparationsprogrammes (which may include land restitutions, financial compensation,etc.), security system reform, or memorialization efforts.1 Ideas about a ‘just

1. The International Center for Transitional Justice defines transitional justice as includingcriminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations programmes, gender justice,

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Performing Repatriation in Mauritania 3

order’ and ‘new beginnings’ may also be intensively discussed and framedoutside transitional countries, for instance within refugee camps, throughrefugee assistance programmes or within diaspora associations.

Transitional justice institutions such as truth commissions or criminalprosecutions may therefore be only one part of a much broader context inwhich new beginnings are framed, negotiated or contested. Mauritania isa clear example of this: since the transition of 2005, various transitionaljustice initiatives have been suggested or demanded as part of an effort todeal with past human rights violations. Even though — as of 2013 — mostof them have not been implemented, these initiatives were largely framedby transnational ideas about human rights violations, justice and transition,which had previously circulated in refugee camps outside the country.

Based on the Mauritanian case, this contribution explores the specificroles played by refugee camps, refugee aid and repatriation in shaping theterms of new beginnings in transitional countries and in building a dominantnarrative about past human rights violations and ways to overcome them. Itargues that taking account of the broader context in which ideas about jus-tice and transition take shape, including developments outside transitionalcountries, may contribute to a better understanding of when and how specifictransitional justice logics based on claims for exceptional measures — asopposed to or in articulation with other, more ordinary, logics — are mobi-lized by social actors. It shows that discourses and ideas about justice andnew beginnings in Mauritania have to be understood in the light of the polit-ical dynamics enhanced by humanitarian assistance and past experiences ofrefugee life in camps. Refugee camps are privileged spaces where narrativeson past injustices, representations of normality and exceptionality, claims forcompensation and the need for humanitarian aid are constructed through thelens of international humanitarian and refugee laws. They are places of in-tense politicization of memory and appropriation of the refugee label, whichenhance the construction of new imagined communities based on a feelingof victimhood and abnormality, which in turn influences representations ofjustice, transition and normality.

The analysis which follows will examine how certain transnational dis-courses on human rights violations and transitional justice were introducedby humanitarian actors and appropriated and reworked by the Mauritanianrefugee elite, until they became a hegemonic narrative drawing on the logicof the exception. It will also highlight how this dominant narrative over pastinjustices, and what should be a ‘just order’ in Mauritania, was at the sametime contested or transcended by subaltern groups through the productionof alternative accounts of past injustices and through mundane, daily prac-tices which activated sometimes very different imaginings of the appropriateforms of ‘justice’ and ‘transition’ to be aspired to in the future.

security system reform and memorialization efforts; see http://ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-Global-Transitional-Justice-2009-English.pdf

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4 Marion Fresia

To explore the linkages and continuities between refugee aid and new be-ginnings in Mauritania, I have revisited some ethnographic materials whichI collected in Mauritanian refugee camps in Senegal between 2001 and 2005for my doctoral research (see Fresia, 2009a), as well as more recent mate-rials collected within returnee sites in Mauritania just after the repatriationof refugees in 2008. The article is organized in three parts: the first sectionlooks back at the historical events that led to the expulsion of thousands ofMauritanians in 1989. The second section then explores the roles played byhumanitarian interventions, refugee political leaders and human rights orga-nizations in the social construction and circulation of a dominant narrativeover past injustices and a ‘just’ order for Mauritania. The last substantivesection will analyse the consequences of this dominant narrative for thenegotiation of the terms of the 2005 political transition in Mauritania.

NAMING PAST INJUSTICES: THE PASSIF HUMANITAIRE OF MAURITANIA

Naming past injustices in Mauritania has been a very sensitive issue. The1989–91 period remained taboo, given that the Ould Taya regime, in placesince 1984, was directly involved in the violence perpetrated against its owncitizens. Since the fall of the Ould Taya regime in 2005 and the subsequenttransitional and electoral period, the 1989–91 clashes have started to benamed, in the Mauritanian public and political debates, under the Frenchnotion of passif humanitaire,2 which translates as ‘humanitarian liability’in the accounting sense. This term, which was first mobilized by politicalopponents in exile and human rights organizations in the early 2000s,3 hadthe advantage of implying that Mauritania still had a burden to alleviatebefore it could truly enter a new era of peace and democratization, whilenot explicitly designating past injustices as ‘human rights violations’, as thetopic was still sensitive. Taking distance from the official terminology, I willmainly refer to this period as the 1989–91 violences. Before exploring howrefugees made sense of them in exile, I will provide a brief overview of whathappened in Mauritania at that time.

In spring 1989, within the context of an interstate conflict with Senegalthat led to the expulsion of hundreds of Senegalese living in Mauritania, theMauritanian authorities of the Ould Taya regime also expelled 120,000 of

2. On the Mauritanian main press information website (www.cridem.org), one can find 811press articles using this notion between 2005 and 2010.

3. The notion first appeared in the Memorandum of the FLAM (Forces de Liberation Africainede Mauritanie) political party in 2000. It was then mobilized by the RADDHO, the mainumbrella of human rights based NGOs in Senegal, and then by the International Federationof Human Rights in its paper on Mauritania (FIDH, 2006). Previously, most of the refugeesI had interviewed during my fieldwork in Senegal had referred to the 1989–91 violencesas the 1989–91 ‘events’, a depoliticized expression which was also used in the Senegalesemedia.

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Performing Repatriation in Mauritania 5

its own citizens, belonging to Wolof, Bambara, Soninke and Haalpulaaren4

ethnic groups. On the false pretext that they were Senegalese, they were sentto Senegal and Mali. Many of them were Haalpulaaren agro-pastoralists(FulBe) and (to a lesser extent) Haalpulaaren landlords (TorooBe) who oc-cupied the only fertile lands of the southern part of Mauritania (Santoir,1993). There was also a minority group consisting of government employ-ees (civil servants and soldiers), mainly Haalpulaaren and some Wolof, whobelonged to major landlord families of the middle Senegal River Valley.They were either leaders, or sympathetic to the political ideas, of a clan-destine political party — the Forces de Liberation Africaines de Mauritanie(FLAM) — which had repeatedly denounced the political, economic and cul-tural discrimination endured by an oppressed imagined community namedthe ‘Negro-Mauritanians’ (‘Black Mauritanians’).5 Herders, peasants andgovernment employees were all dispossessed of their identity cards, herdsand ancestral lands; many women were raped; some people lost their livesin the forced displacement; and 500 soldiers among them were arbitrarilyarrested and executed without trial in 1990–91. With the forced displace-ment of thousands of Mauritanians, the Ould Taya regime got rid of someof its major political opponents belonging to the FLAM movement, whileredistributing the land of refugees to political clients and private investorsbelonging to the president’s own tribe or allied tribes.

Various interpretations have been suggested by Mauritanian political lead-ers, NGOs and the media to explain the root causes of the 1989–91 violences,but a racial understanding of the tensions between opposing ‘Moorish’ and‘Black’ components of the Mauritanian population has often dominated.Academic work (e.g. Leservoisier, 1999; Magistro, 1993) has repeatedlystressed that races and ethnicities were socially constructed and manip-ulated to respond to other issues at stake, such as the rivalry, rooted inMauritania’s colonial heritage, between francophone and Arab-speakingelites over control of the nation state and the definition of the nationalidentity; the competition for scarce fertile land and resources in a country

4. Haalpulaaren literally means ‘people who speak pulaar’ in Fulani. This term has differentconnotations depending on the context. For Haalpulaaren living in the middle Senegal RiverValley (Fuuta Tooro), it includes all groups speaking Fulani in the region, including (butnot only) FulBe populations, who were historically semi-nomadic groups who held powerin the region until the end of the eighteenth century; and TorooBe, a muslim sedentary elitewhich took power from them and became important landlords in the region. FulBe groupsfrom southeast Mauritania, who called themselves FulaaBe, differentiate themselves fromthe ‘Haalpulaaren group’, whom they call FutankooBe, literally ‘people living in the FuutaTooro region’ (Ciavolella, 2010: 14).

5. Although the notion of ‘Black Mauritanians’ has been socially constructed over the yearsby a specific political group and was a contested term before the 1989–91 clashes, it is nowincreasingly mobilized by a majority of stakeholders within the public political arena inMauritania, and used by ordinary people. In this article, I will refer to this term in both itspolitical and its emic dimensions, and take it as a social construction, which has real-lifeconsequences as it contributes to the racialization of social relations.

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6 Marion Fresia

comprising 90 per cent desert, which was deeply affected by severe droughtsin the 1970s and the forced sedentarization of thousands of Moorish andFulBe nomads; and the land reform and large-scale irrigation projects in theSenegal River Valley which exacerbated conflicts over land tenure and landentitlements in the south of the country.

It is beyond the scope of this article to further discuss these interpretations;rather the rest of this contribution will analyse how the dominant narrativeover past injustices involving racial categories has been co-constructed byhumanitarian organizations and the refugee elite in exile, and how thisnarrative has influenced the terms of new beginnings in Mauritania.

MAKING SENSE OF PAST INJUSTICES IN REFUGEE CAMPS

In Senegal, the Mauritanian victims of the 1989–91 forced displacementswere recognized as refugees by the Senegalese government: they were es-tablished in small refugee camps and settlements of between 50 and 2,000inhabitants along the 500 km Senegal–Mauritania border, and received sig-nificant assistance from the UNHCR between 1989 and 1998. In Mali, thedestination of mainly FulBe, the refugees received far less attention and hu-manitarian aid. There were a number of reasons for this, including their long-standing marginalization in Mauritanian political processes, the absence ofwell-connected political leaders among them, and the ambiguous position ofthe Malian authorities, who did not want their presence to create tensions withhost communities (Ciavolella, 2010). My analysis focuses on the situation ofrefugees in Senegal where my research was conducted and where humanitar-ian aid and the categorization of Mauritanians as ‘refugees’ played a majorrole in the social construction of a dominant interpretation of past injustices.

Humanitarian Ideas over a ‘Just Order’: The Exceptionality of Refugee-hood

The refugee programme in Senegal has produced a specific way of under-standing the situation of displaced Mauritanians by framing their situationaccording to international human rights law and international refugee law.According to the latter, displaced persons are perceived in terms of ‘vic-timhood’ and ‘abnormality’ because they have faced persecution, lost theprotection of their nation state, and crossed a national border to seek protec-tion (Coulter, 2001). The 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugeesdefines a refugee as a person who:

owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality,membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of hisnationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protectionof that country; or who . . . is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.(UNHCR, 1951: Art 1.A.2).

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Performing Repatriation in Mauritania 7

The Convention defines only three ways or ‘durable solutions’ to restorenormality and find a solution to the refugee ‘problem’: repatriation (as themost preferable), local integration, or resettlement (ibid.: Art 1.C). All threesolutions aim at reintegrating refugees in a nation state that can protect them.International refugee law therefore conveys a perception of a just order asbeing a ‘national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995), in the sense that everyoneshould belong to and be protected by a nation state. It is thus embeddedin a sovereign and territorial vision of belonging, conveying an essentialistnotion of home and identities (Black and Koser, 1999). But this just ordershould also be a ‘human rights order of things’ as nation states are alsosupposed to ensure the security and basic rights of their citizens.

This way of understanding the situation of forcibly displaced populationshas greatly influenced the manner in which many stakeholders, includingrefugees themselves, have made sense of past injustices in Mauritania. InSenegal, one of the direct consequences of the implicit assumptions thatrefugees were in an abnormal situation was to legitimize the establishmentof refugee camps that were responsible for them until their situation could benormalized (i.e. until they could go home). For humanitarian actors, campsare indeed always presented and perceived as ‘exceptional’ and temporaryspaces, where refugees can be fed, taken care of and protected until they canbe reintegrated into a ‘national and human rights order of things’. The logic ofthe exception is therefore constantly evoked by humanitarian actors to justifytheir interventions. Yet many researchers have outlined how camps tend, inreality, to become long-term solutions for managing undesirable populations,thus legitimizing the permanence of the exceptional state (Agier, 2008;Turner, 2002). They have shown in particular that everyday practices ofcamp management and humanitarian assistance in all sectors (health, foodaid, shelter, etc.) transform camps into places of governance and controlover bodies, describing them through Agambian metaphors as spaces ofbiopolitics and power over ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1995) where refugeeshave only the right to survive.

In Senegal, refugee camps progressively turned into small towns similarto those surrounding Senegalese villages. They became a long-term ratherthan a temporary solution for Mauritanian refugees, as for nearly twentyyears neither the Mauritanian nor the Senegalese governments really wantedto clarify their legal position (Fresia, 2009b). Yet, far from being only placesof control over bare life, they also became places of contestation, resistanceand mobilization, where new forms of political expressions and claims, andnew identities, took shape at the interface of international, national andlocal dynamics (Fresia, 2009a). As with other camps in Africa (Horst, 2007;Malkki, 1995; Turner, 2002), they have, indeed, turned out to be extremelypoliticized arenas, in which making sense of past injustices and claiminggreater justice have been a constant preoccupation for their inhabitants.One of the unintended effects and indirect consequences of humanitarianaid was to turn the camps into a physical symbol of past injustices, and

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8 Marion Fresia

spaces of production and circulation of a dominant narrative over thoseinjustices, which drew on the same logic of the exception as that evoked byhumanitarian actors.

The Power of Labelling: The Construction of a Shared Sense of Victimhood

In Senegal, the labelling of Mauritanians as ‘refugees’ according to inter-national law and the subsequent intervention of the UNHCR contributedto new political and identity dynamics in the Senegal River Valley. Be-fore 1989, all ethnic groups in the region had moved freely back and forthacross the border: groups from both sides of the river were tied by closekin relationships, they had lands and herds on both sides of the river, andwere cultivating, transhuming and marrying across borders (Seck, 1991).Historically, this area formed a united political entity, that was divided byborders traced under French colonization. In 1989, Mauritanians expelledinto northern Senegal therefore became ‘refugees on their own ancestralterritory’ (Fresia, 2009a). Some Mauritanians were hosted by close kin inSenegalese towns and villages; other decided to join UNHCR camps, eitherbecause they wanted to remain independent from their Senegalese kin (as aresult of old antagonisms), or because they had no kin close to their place ofarrival, had lost everything and needed immediate humanitarian assistance.A minority group composed of government employees sympathetic to theFLAM movement also decided to join the camps, mainly in order to remainvisible and to assert that they were not Senegalese, as the Ould Taya gov-ernment claimed, but genuine Mauritanians. For them, joining humanitarianspaces therefore had a political meaning: camps and their inhabitants were tobecome a physical symbol of past injustices and a proof of their nationality.

French-speakers with good rhetorical and organizational skills, these for-mer government employees soon became the refugee representatives inSenegal and the principal intermediaries between refugees and external ac-tors. Although not always occupying leadership positions in Mauritaniabefore the explusions, the majority of them were part of the Haalpulaarensedentary elite (TorooBe), and their extended families had owned some ofthe most fertile land across the Senegal River Valley. In all the camps, theycreated refugee associations which were officially presented as non-politicalbut were actually extremely politicized. The majority of these associationswere affiliated to the FLAM movement, and a minority to FRUIDEM, an-other political party which was also opposed to the Ould Taya regime butwas part of the mainstream political opposition.6 Through these associa-tions, refugee leaders sought to sensitize other Mauritanians, mainly FulBe

6. FRUIDEM was affiliated to the authorized mainstream political opposition in Mauritania,the Mouvement National pour la Democratie. In the camps, the majority of FRUIDEMmembers were FulBe.

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Performing Repatriation in Mauritania 9

agro-pastoralists, about the need for the refugees to remain united and visiblein camps in order to claim justice for what they had suffered: dispossessionof their lands, goods and citizenship, and what they called ‘massive depor-tations’. The refugee associations thus contributed to turning the label of‘refugee’ from a source of stigma into a positive political identity endorsedwith rights (to obtain justice and compensation) and duties (to remain visiblein camps). They were also able to transcend the divisions among variousrefugee groups by putting them all into the same racial category: the ‘op-pressed Black Mauritanians’. Before 1989, this category was seldom used inMauritania by anyone apart from FLAM activists; many FulBe in particular— who were for a large part clients of the Ould Taya regime and historicallyopposed to the sedentary elite — were more inclined to perceive themselvesas Arabs than Black (Sall, 1999).

The refugee labelling process and the humanitarian intervention thus hadimportant consequences in terms of politicizing camps and enhancing newcategories of self-identification among Mauritanians based on race, victim-hood and a desire to restore specific rights. Although they were refugees onthe territory of their ancestors and had close kin among Senegalese, manyMauritanians appropriated the refugee label as a new element of complexidentities. It was invested by a strong idea that an entire community —now called the Black Mauritanians — had suffered from past injustices,discrimination and oppression and should obtain justice and compensation.

The Dominant Narrative on Past Injustices: Evoking the Logic of the Exception

While fostering the construction of a new imagined community around therefugee label, the politicization of refugee camps also enhanced the con-struction, legitimization and circulation of a dominant narrative over pastinjustices and on what should constitute a just order. I call this the ‘politico-humanitarian’ narrative as it took shape through the daily interactions be-tween the refugee political elite, NGOs and human rights organizations butalso because it was directly inspired by international refugee law, humanrights and transitional justice discourses and drew on the same logic of theexception as humanitarian actors.

The narrative was constructed by the refugee representatives from theFLAM political party established in Senegal. They had the legitimacy, therhetorical competence and the channels (through their associations) to dis-seminate among the rest of the refugees as well as among external actors(UNHCR, NGOs, journalists, etc.) a certain interpretation of past injustices.Extremely politicized and inscribed in the continuity of former FLAM dis-courses from the 1980s (FLAM, 1986), their narrative was embedded in aracial interpretation of the 1989–91 period, presented as an attempt by the‘Moorish State’, sometimes called the ‘fascist and ethno-genocidaire sys-tem’ or the ‘racist State’, to proceed to an ‘ethnic cleaning’ of the ‘Black’

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10 Marion Fresia

population in Mauritania through massive ‘deportations’ and ‘killings’, inaddition to long-term discrimination (see also Fresia, 2009a: 248–81).7 Inthis account, ethnic and racial categories were reified without any spaceto mention solidarities and alliances among the Moorish and other ethnicgroups, including within the state, during and before the 1989–91 period. Thepolitico-humanitarian narrative was also formulated to emphasize scenesof violence, humiliation and dispossession: all losses were systematicallyenumerated. The violence against the sedentary elite, be they governmentemployees or landlords, was also emphasized, to the detriment of the spe-cific acts of violence endured by other groups such as the FulBe, who wereactually the major target of the forced displacement.

The politico-humanitarian discourse conveyed strong claims over justiceand compensation built on an asserted intention to return home, to resistabsorption in the host society, and to restore a ‘lost dignity’. In various officialdeclarations between 2001 and 2004, these claims were listed as follow: (1)the recognition of the Mauritanian citizenship of refugees; (2) the repatriationof all refugees in dignity under the supervision of the UNHCR; (3) therestitution of land; (4) the reinsertion of all government employees in theMauritanian administration; (5) a compensation proportionate to the value ofall goods lost; and (6) the identification and trial of those responsible for the1989 crimes (see also FLAM, 2007). These claims were based on a concept ofa just order, which was clearly embedded in international refugee and humanrights laws (the right to return home and the right to regain citizenship) andtransnational ideas of transitional justice (the right to reparation and justice).The claims thus drew on the same logic of the exception as that invokedby humanitarian actors: they too were framing the forced exile in termsof an abnormal situation as compared to the ‘national order of things’ —a situation which had to be addressed through exceptional measures suchas repatriation, reparation and compensation under the supervision of UNorganizations. Invoking this logic of the exception was both the result of theinfluence humanitarian aid had on the refugee elite’s understanding of theirsituation, and a prerequisite to making their claims intelligible and heard bythe international community.

Yet, this politico-humanitarian narrative also drew on the local conceptof ‘dignity’ (dimaagu in Fulani), which the refugee elite mobilized togive their narrative resonance for the majority of the refugee population,including FulBe. The following official FLAM declaration, made in thecontext of World Refugee Day in 2002 in Senegal, demonstrates this use ofthe notion of dignity:

7. These quotes are based on the words spoken by FLAM leaders at the World RefugeeDays in Dakar between 2001 and 2004, official statements of FLAM delegates inthe refugee camp where I was staying (N’Dioum) and the party’s first online forum(www.membres.tripod.fr/flamnet) which was then replaced by the official website of theparty (www.flamnet.net). Since the official repatriation of the refugees and the transitionperiod, the party’s discourse has evolved and become less radical.

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The Mauritanian government continues to deny the very existence of deportees. Remainingattached to their nation, despite 13 years of exile, the Mauritanian refugees still claim for:the recognition of their citizenship, the organization of their return under the supervision ofUNHCR as a guarantee, the restitution of their land and assets or an appropriate financialcompensation for them, the rehabilitation of political refugees, the identification and judgmentof the perpetuators of the 1989 deportations and all genocidaires and the application ofinternational and national law to them . . . . For the dignity (dimaagu) and respect of refugees!Mauritanians we were, Mauritanians we will remain! 13 years of suffering, 12 years of beingforgotten, it is enough! For a return with our dignity (dimaagu)!8

The Fulani word dimaagu stems from a term for a free man, of noblestatus, as opposed to a slave (Mohamadou, 1991: 87). Mobilizing thenotion of dignity was a way to stress that the social status and the socialorigin of refugees, as noble and free men, had to be acknowledged andrespected by the Mauritanian government who had treated them like slavesby dispossessing them of their lands and goods and by denying theirorigins. Overcoming such humiliation thus required an official, formal andritualized process: it called for exceptional measures that could be fulfilled,for instance, through a ‘formal’ recognition of their citizenship and anofficial repatriation to be guaranteed by a UN organization.

This politico-humanitarian narrative became dominant not only becauseit was constructed by refugees belonging to the sedentary elite within thecamps and inspired by both transnational and local ideas about justice,but also because it was progressively institutionalized, legitimized anddisseminated by external actors such as human rights organizations and themedia. In the early 1990s, these actors tended to make regular visits to thesame camps — the most visible, accessible and politicized ones — and tokeep interviewing the same refugee leaders, those belonging to the FLAMmovement. Through that process, the refugee leaders’ narratives, whichwere based on a specific grid of interpretations of the 1989–91 violences andmainly reflected the human rights abuses that were perpetrated against themand their relatives, were gradually transformed into a ‘historical’ collectivememory of the past. Basing their written reports on these testimonies alone,NGOs have thus contributed to institutionalizing and widely circulatingthe politico-humanitarian narrative constructed by a specific politicizedsedentary elite. For instance, the Human Rights Watch report entitledMauritania’s Campaign of Terror: State-sponsored Repression of BlackAfricans (Fleischman, 1994), which constitutes a major institutional refer-ence for the 1989–91 violences, mainly focuses on human rights abuses per-petrated against government employees and cultivators, and interprets thesethrough the same racial categories as those mobilized by the refugee elite inSenegal.

Besides NGO reports, the politico-humanitarian narrative was also widelydisseminated through the lobbying, commemorative and sensitizationactivities undertaken by the refugee elite, which were unexpectedly

8. FLAM, official declaration for the World Refugee Day, Dakar, 2002.

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facilitated by UNHCR’s humanitarian interventions. The narrative wastransmitted to younger generations through refugee schools which were fi-nanced by UNHCR to ensure the ‘right to education’ for all refugee children.Most teachers were recruited among refugees themselves and many of thembelonged to the FLAM leadership: they saw refugee schools as a vehicle topass on to younger generations a certain memory of past injustices. Duringmy research, when asking the youth born after 1989 to account for the causesof their exile, they frequently answered that it was because a ‘genocide’ hadbeen attempted against ‘Black people’ by the ‘Moorish people’, or that ‘theMoorish have massacred and deported the Blacks and done everything thatcan humiliate a man in his life’.9 For these young people, it was not justthe state that was held responsible for past injustices, but the Moorish ingeneral.

The politico-humanitarian narrative over past injustices also circulatedwidely in Europe and the United States, not only through NGO reportsbut also because many refugee political leaders were resettled to Westerncountries in 2001 through UNHCR resettlement schemes. If their reset-tlement was first considered a way of moving them out of Senegal, wheretheir political activities were perceived as a threat to the stability of theregion, its unintended effect was actually to reinforce their capacity tolobby for their rights directly in Europe and the US. In their resettlementcountries, refugee leaders created a number of associations and organizedregular demonstrations, commemorative events and conferences, websitesand fora, not only to keep alive the memory of the past among theMauritanian diaspora, but also to claim their rights and to claim a justorder in Mauritania. The legitimacy of this narrative for the 1989–91 periodwas therefore to a great extent reinforced with the resettlement of refugeeleaders.

The humanitarian aid programme in Senegal, and the recognition ofMauritanians as refugees, therefore had significant, although often unin-tended, consequences in terms of producing, legitimizing and facilitatingthe circulation of a certain discourse over past injustices, which soonbecame hegemonic. This narrative was based on a specific racial grid ofinterpretation, on the social experiences of violence of one part of therefugee population only and on a strong sense that a deep humiliation hadto be repaired. In this discourse, the repatriation of refugees under thesupervision of UNHCR, the recognition of their Mauritanian citizenship,the restitution of lost assets and the criminal prosecution of the perpetratorsof violence appeared to be the only way to atone for this humiliation, toregain dignity and re-establish a just order.

9. I asked several teenagers to write an essay on the 1989 period; all of them used suchexpressions.

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Performing Repatriation in Mauritania 13

Counter-narratives and Pragmatic Attitudes among Subaltern Groups

The dominant narrative over past injustices and claims for compensationconveyed by the elite was appropriated by many refugees who were notas politicized as the former government employees, but who regularly par-ticipated in commemorative events and political meetings in the camps.Although this narrative did not represent the diversity and complexity ofindividual experiences of past injustices, it provided ordinary people witha rather simple frame to make sense of the 1989–91 violences. During myresearch, I collected many similar politico-humanitarian accounts of the pastamong ordinary people, as well as similar claims with regard to repatriation.Claims for compensation were also expressed in ways similar to the polit-ical formulations of leaders, although with greater insistence on the localconception of dimaagu and with more references to the situation of herders.This quotation, collected in 2004, is illustrative:

We want to return with our dignity. Because there, it is as if we are not important. If we goback home, the government will not respect us. Or the one who does not respect you and whodoes not recognize you for who you are can bring you some problems. This is what stops usfrom returning home. We want that the government knows who we are, we want to have ourplace and our rank in Mauritania. If your land was taken, it should be given back to you. Ifyour herds were taken, the value of what you lost should be given back to you. But the onewho thinks you do not have any importance and is not ready to welcome you back home ina proper way, will never give you back what you have lost.10

Yet, these discourses, mainly collected in a formal context of interviews,sharply contrasted with alternative narratives produced in other, more in-formal settings, which were based on different frames of understanding,different norms of what can and cannot be said, and different modes ofexpressing one’s emotions.

Among the alternative accounts of the past that I have identified, I willmention two here. The first, which I call the ‘Marxist narrative’, was con-veyed by FRUIDEM, the minority political party in the camps. According totheir representatives, the 1989–91 violences are to be explained in Marxistterms, as the result of the domination of a politico-commercial class willingto exploit the majority, be it Black or Moorish. Members of FRUIDEMrejected the racial interpretations proposed by the FLAM movement, anddenounced the tendency of FLAM leaders to ‘exploit’ the suffering of theFulBe majority for their own ends. FRUIDEM was in favour of claimingrights for compensation and justice from the ‘inside’ rather than the ‘out-side’, and without calling for specific external interventions. It was also infavour of returning home at the first opportunity rather than waiting for thegovernment to organize an official repatriation under UNHCR supervision.In that sense, they were not drawing on the logic of the exception, as inthe politico-humanitarian narrative, but rather on a logic of the ordinary,

10. Interview with Ousseyni, Ndioum, Senegal (2004).

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as class exploitation is not a deviation from a normal order of thingsbut rather the staple of ordinary injustice. The influence of this narrativewas, however, less far-reaching than that of the FLAM movement, espe-cially with regard to external actors; FRUIDEM members decided to returnto Mauritania soon after the Senegal–Mauritania border was reopened in1992, leaving the FLAM movement occupying the main political space inexile.

The other alternative account was the one adopted by many ordinary peo-ple, especially herders who constituted the majority of the refugees. I callthis the ‘epic narrative’ in the sense that it accounted for past injusticesnot in terms of humiliation and dispossession or of class exploitation, butrather in terms of courage, bravery and acts of resistance of herders in faceof the 1989 events. The epic narrative did not set racial groups in system-atic opposition, but offered a more nuanced interpretation of the conflict,mentioning allies among the enemies, traitors among the Black population(such as certain TorooBe), solidarities with certain Moorish, as well as theacts of (cross-border) vendetta organized by FulBe to preserve their honouragainst those who had stolen their herds and chased them off their land.This narrative did not directly invoke scenes of violence and was, in that re-spect, closer to the oral historical tradition of FulBe, which is more inclinedto celebrate heroic acts of the past rather than focus on humiliation anddispossession.

By contrast to the Marxist narrative, the epic narrative can therefore beinterpreted as another type of exceptional discourse, in which the extraor-dinary deeds of specific individuals or groups under extreme circumstancesare emphasized as a way to celebrate the honour of the group and restore itsdignity. This narrative thus did not include specific claims for justice or callsfor external actors to restore justice: justice had already or at least partlybeen restored through acts of vendetta and vengeance during or immediatelyafter the 1989 events. The will to return ‘home’ was also not as clear as inother narratives. Without denying their Mauritanian nationality, the authorsof the epic narrative indicated that they would rather become Senegalese.The 1989 events had brought them back to where their ancestors camefrom; furthermore, the pastoral lands belonging to their clan spanned bothMauritania and Senegal, and nationality was not such an important issue forthem. Other groups such as the youth insisted that they actually consideredthemselves Senegalese, Mauritanian and Haalpulaaren and that they wouldstay where their interests and social relations are. Many women (apart fromthose married to the political leaders) insisted that although past injusticeshave been hard to overcome, they were satisfied with life in Senegal wherethey have found peace, but also better access to basic infrastructure such aswater, schools and hospitals.

The hegemonic politico-humanitarian discourse on past injustices con-veyed in formal interview contexts not only contrasted with other alternativeaccounts. It also sharply contrasted with pragmatic attitudes and ordinary

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Performing Repatriation in Mauritania 15

practices I had observed in refugee settlements between 2001 and 2005. Af-ter fifteen years of exile, although many refugees were still living in campsin order to remain visible and to strengthen their claim for an official repatri-ation to be organized, most families were dispersed across several locations:elders, women and children remained in refugee sites for visibility, whilemen and youth either worked as small entrepreneurs in Senegalese citiesor elsewhere in West Africa, went back to Mauritania to work in majorcities, or stayed in Senegalese pastoral zones with their herds. As soon asthe Mauritania–Senegal border reopened in 1992, some refugees started tomove back and forth across the border again, as they had done before, makinguse of multiple identities according to the context. In 1995, when UNHCRinitiated a reinsertion programme in Mauritania to informally encouragerefugees to return outside of any official recognition from the government,many families divided themselves, one part staying in camps and the otherreturning to try to get their assets back. Apart from the political leaders, whomainly lived in camps where they were hired by UNHCR to manage refugeeinfrastructures, the coping strategies of the majority were thus organizedaccording to cross-border and transnational logics — an observation alreadymade in many other refugee contexts (e.g. Horst, 2007; Van Hear, 2003).Furthermore, to regain the legal protection of a nation state and be able tomove around and work more freely, most of them had also bought Sene-galese or Mauritanian identity papers, while officially keeping their refugeestatus.

Overall, therefore, there were important discrepancies between, on theone hand, the dominant political discourse over past injustices and claimsfor reparation for lost dignity (employed by almost all refugees in formalinterviewing contexts) as well as counter-narratives of subaltern groups suchas herders in informal conversations; and, on the other hand, the pragmaticattitudes of the majority of refugees, who had already rebuilt their lives orattempted to recover their rights through the mobilization of transnationalstrategies and multiple identities. An important disjuncture was thus revealedbetween the lofty ideals and the messy practical realities of seeking justice intransition. On the discursive level, each of the identified narratives activateddifferent imaginations of past injustices, people’s responses to them, aswell as the appropriate forms of transition or ‘just order’ to be aspired tofor the future. Yet, the dominant politico-humanitarian narrative, inspired bytransnational ideas about a just order and embedded in a nation state ideology,still had the strongest performative effects, because it was institutionalizedand disseminated at the international level by actors such as the UNHCR,the refugee elite, and NGOs who had the legitimacy to speak on behalfof the refugees. This narrative thus became hegemonic and contributed tosustaining the idea that the only way to overcome past injustices, and makegood what was presented as a loss of dignity, was to restore a national andhuman rights order of things, through a formal and ritualized process basedon the logic of the exception.

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16 Marion Fresia

RETURNING HOME AND CLAIMING JUSTICE: CONTINUITIES WITHTHE PAST

The consequences of the humanitarian intervention in Senegal are crucial tounderstanding how new beginnings have been shaped in Mauritania sincethe fall of the Ould Taya regime. This section therefore describes how thelabelling of Mauritanians as ‘refugees’, and the social construction of ahegemonic narrative on past injustices, have contributed to giving the returnof refugees a political and symbolic meaning in the Mauritanian transitionalcontext, while deeply influencing the dominant models of justice that havebeen mobilized by victim associations since 2005. It also outlines how thedominant meaning given to the repatriation process has erased alternativeand ordinary ways of making sense of new beginnings in Mauritania.

Going ‘Home’ as an Act of Transitional Justice

With the fall the Ould Taya regime in 2005, and the opening of a newtransitional period, the repatriation of refugees was to become the symbol ofnew beginnings in Mauritania. Although state officials and UNHCR knewvery well about the pragmatic attitudes of a majority of refugees and thefact that many of them had de facto repatriated and regained identity papers,the ‘performance’ of an official return movement under the supervision ofUNHCR within a legally bounded framework was perceived as essentialto re-establish a just order in Mauritania. It was constructed as both an actof transitional justice in its own right (undoing the human rights violationof displacement) and a prerequisite for further transitional justice measuressuch as the restoration of citizenship, the restitution of land, compensationsand reparations.

At the level of the new Mauritanian authorities, the need to perform anofficial repatriation had been directly influenced by the lobbying activitiesof the refugee political elite in exile: their claim for an official repatriation tobe organized under the supervision of UNHCR had made its way up to theEuropean Union and its fulfilment became one of the conditions imposedby the EU Council to support the new transitional authority (Council of theEuropean Union, 2006). In search of legitimacy, the newly elected govern-ment (in 2007) had therefore to respond to that condition to gain politicalsupport from donor countries. The logic of the exception, on which therefugee elite based its narrative of past injustices, thus eventually succeeded,in that the international community pressurized the new transitional regimeinto repatriation.

At UNHCR level, too, the organization of an official return of refugeeswas crucial: first, to restore credibility after the failure of its first attempt toencourage refugees to return home in 1995, when the Mauritanian authoritieswere not willing to recognize their citizenship; second, because it is part of

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the core mandate of UNHCR to find a ‘durable solution’ to the refugee‘problem’ and to ensure that displaced persons can be re-embedded in anation state able to protect their rights. Repatriating Mauritanian refugeesthrough a formal and official ritual therefore became an urgent matter forboth the Mauritanian authorities and UNHCR’s legitimacy: as a result, onlythree months after his investiture, the newly elected President Sidi Abdellahiofficially and solemnly invited all Mauritanian refugees to come back totheir country, asked the UNHCR to assist him in organizing their return, andannounced his intention to organize ‘national days of consultations’ on theresolution of the passif humanitaire. The return of refugees was presented asan act of transitional justice in itself as it implied the official recognition, bythe authorities, that hundreds of thousands of Mauritanians had been forciblydisplaced in 1989; this acknowledgement symbolized the end of the OuldTaya regime, associated with state violence, and the beginning of a new era,but it was also constructed as a first and necessary step towards a widerreconciliation of all Mauritanians.

On the side of refugees, the social meaning given to repatriation wasstrongly embedded in the dominant interpretation of past injustices framedby the refugee elite. The call by the newly elected President for refugeesto come back to their country was indeed perceived by many of them asa unique opportunity to ‘show to the world that we are Mauritanians andnot Senegalese’.11 This attitude was clearly influenced by the politiciza-tion of memory in camps, which led to the construction of a new imaginedcommunity (the oppressed Black Mauritanians) and hence reinforced thelink to the nation state. When I asked why they had finally decided to goback to Mauritania, the majority of returnees I interviewed in 2008 an-swered by insisting on their origins: ‘It is love towards our country thatmade us came back; we are all born in Mauritania, it is from here thatwe come from, here that we had grown up and where we were used to,here that we had found our parents and grand-parents; it is also here thatwe have a large part of our kin’.12 These words from a returnee repre-sentative were repeated in almost the same formulation by most of myrespondents.

The dominant discourse therefore presented repatriation as a way to re-assert their autochthony in Mauritania. Despite extremely harsh conditionsin returnee areas, which were deprived of basic infrastructure and access towater, and despite encouragement from state officials to establish themselvesclose to major cities, returnees were firm in wanting to rebuild their ownvillages in the same place as before. There was a clear political and identitystatement in this repatriation process. If it was ‘performed’ — in the sensethat many families had actually already gone back (or back and forth) toMauritania — it still had real-life consequences with the rebuilding of more

11. Interview with the returnee representative of Houdallaye returnee village, July 2008.12. Interview with the chief of the Bounguel Thille returnee village, June 2008.

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than 150 villages in the South of Mauritania. In parallel to this strong polit-ical statement, returning home was also presented by certain returnees as away of fulfilling their consistent position — to assert their will to go homeif certain conditions were satisfied, among which the official recognition ofthe 1989–91 violences by the government and the official involvement ofUNHCR in the repatriation. Refusing to repatriate when those conditionshad been met would have exposed them to the ridicule of their Senegalesekin,13 who had often suspected them of staying in camps only to take ad-vantage of humanitarian assistance and not because of a genuine attachmentto their country of origin. Repatriation was therefore also associated withthe will to maintain their reputation vis-a-vis their Senegalese kin and avoidshame.

Lastly, but just as importantly, returnee representatives have also appre-hended repatriation as a way to obtain restitution of their lands and compen-sation for what was lost in 1989. They perceived the official involvementof UNHCR in that process as an important opportunity to claim their rightswith the support of the international community. As a women’s representa-tive stated: ‘we came back because this time, we had UNHCR and big donorcountries behind us: we were not trusting the new governments, but wewere trusting the countries which were behind our country; if we don’t getour rights, at least, the entire world will know it’.14 For all stakeholders, theperformance of an official repatriation thus had a strong symbolic dimensionto which various meanings were attached: it could simultaneously reinforcethe legitimacy of the new authorities, save the credibility of UNHCR, andassert the refugees’ political and identity claims for citizenship recognition,land restitution and compensation.

Dominant Discourses on Justice among Victim Associations

Although it needed to be ‘performed’, the repatriation of refugees and thehigh expectations associated with it were far from being only symbolic; theyhave had major real-life consequences in Mauritania. With the recognition oftheir citizenship, the reconstruction of hundreds of villages in the south andthe revival of discourses over autochthony, Mauritanians are now legallyrooted again in Mauritania in terms of official residence, civil rights andproperty rights, but also in terms of rights for compensation and justice. Thisexplains why the official return of refugees has also enhanced a proliferationof victim associations: according to my research there are around ten suchassociations in Mauritania, in addition to the dozens of refugee and victimassociations already established by the refugee political elite in Senegal,Europe and the US. The model of justice they have adopted since 2005

13. Interview with Mayri, Bounguel Thille, June 2008.14. Interview with Djennaba, head of the women’s committee, Houdallaye, July 2008.

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is based on transnational ideas over transitional justice such as claims forjustice, truth and material compensations; this draws directly on the politico-humanitarian narrative framed in exile and is based on the same logic of theexception, calling for exceptional transitional measures to be taken. Theassociations emphasize the right for all victims of the 1989–91 violences toknow the truth, to have the perpetrators of violence — and particularly the1991 killings of military personnel — identified and prosecuted; they alsodemand the right for civil servants and the military to recover their placein the Mauritanian administration, for families (widows) to be financiallycompensated for the loss of their husbands, and for peasants to be given backtheir land.

While this proliferation of associations was positively perceived by theinternational community as a sign that civil society was flourishing, mostof them were either not known at the local level, or were criticized asbeing not representative. Most of them conveyed the views and interestsof the sedentary elite: former government employees, widows of the sol-diers killed in 1991, and landlords. Just as in the politico-humanitariannarrative over past injustices, claims for justice during the transitionalperiod seldom seemed to take into account the interests of the major-ity (agro-pastoralists FulBe), who had endured other types of violenceand destitution (such as the loss of their herds, pastoral lands, etc.) andwho needed other types of compensation than those listed by victimassociations.

As of 2013, the claims for justice conveyed by these associations, althoughdominant within public debates, were not fulfilled. In August 2008, the newtransitional authorities, which had promised to establish a truth commission,were overthrown by a new military coup as a part of the army which hadbeen involved in the former Taya regime was not willing to let that happen.The main author of the military coup, General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz,defended another model of justice drawing on the ordinary logic of theIslamic notion of forgiveness. On 25 March 2009, while visiting one of themain cities of the south of the country (Kaedi), he supervised a collectiveprayer, called the ‘prayer of the absent’ and dedicated to the memory ofthe victims of the Taya regime, in order to gain support from the returneepopulation. In a speech before the prayer, he called upon the Muslim cultureto overcome the pain of the past: ‘Today, I am both sad and fulfilled. Sadbecause there was human loss without any reason. But fulfilled because Allahhas given to the victims the courage to overcome their pain . . . , withoutany resentment’ (Radio France Internationale, 2009). He also agreed toestablish a financial compensation scheme for 244 people in exchange fortheir renouncing any claim for exceptional measures of truth telling or specialtrials. Far from being satisfied with these measures, victim associationshave continued to demand the establishment of ‘genuine’ transitional justiceinstitutions and to undertake a variety of lobbying activities inside andoutside the country.

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Alternative Discourses and Pragmatic Attitudes of the Majority

The dominant social meaning given to repatriation among returnees tendedto erase alternative views on new beginnings. Indeed, the ethnographicmaterials I have collected among returnees in 2008 show that it was notalways perceived, by ordinary people, as an act of transitional justice in itsown right. Many people I interviewed in returnee areas mentioned that theyhad been ‘pressurized’ to go home by their leaders, but also by Mauritanianauthorities, UNHCR or foreign diplomatic missions who promised themthat once at home, they would receive their land back as well as significantassistance to facilitate their reintegration. At the household level, the decisionwas generally made by men, leaving women with no other choice thanto follow them. Yet, apart from politicized women occupying leadershippositions within returnee villages, or spouses of political activists, many ofthe women I interviewed did not want to go back to Mauritania as returneeareas were lacking basic infrastructure, including access to water points.They said they would rather ‘forget’ about the 1989–91 period and enjoytheir lives in Senegal, than return to Mauritania where painful memories maycome back and where life conditions were so harsh. Many children and youthwere also not keen to go back, as they identified more with Senegal thanMauritania, had the perception that they would suffer discrimination back intheir own country, and did not want to integrate into the Mauritanian schoolsystem which included Arabic, which they did not speak. Some refugeesactually asserted that they wanted to be naturalized as Senegalese: Senegalwas for them a place where they had restored their ‘dignity’, built newsocial relationships and found ‘peace’, or had developed fruitful commercialactivities.

Furthermore, while the majority of refugees who were officially registeredfor repatriation did return to Mauritania and asserted their will to reaffirmtheir autochthony, in practice many of them resumed their former custom ofgoing back and forth across the Senegal–Mauritania border. After the officialrepatriation was performed, children at secondary school, for instance, weresent back to Senegal to finish their studies; those who had commercialactivities in Senegalese or Mauritanian cities went back to live there; whileherders went back to pastoral zones, including in Senegal, where they hadleft their herds. It is therefore mainly women, small children and elders thathave been left in returnee villages (in very harsh conditions) to assert politicalclaims over autochthony and justice, just as it was the women, childrenand elders who had previously been left in refugee camps to maintain thevisibility of refugees and past injustices. In that sense, these subaltern groupshave played a central but also instrumental role in the symbolic meaningthat was given to repatriation by the elite — often to the detriment of theirown interests and will. In addition, as in the past, there were still majordiscrepancies between the dominant narratives of returnees reaffirming theirstrong attachment to the nation state in transition and their will to obtain

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Performing Repatriation in Mauritania 21

justice, and the everyday practices which remained embedded in cross-border logics and multiple identities.

NEW BEGINNINGS OR NEW CHALLENGES?

Since the end of the Taya regime in 2005, discourses on and claims fortransitional justice in Mauritania have been at the centre of national politicaldebates and are increasingly relayed by the flourishing civil society withinthe country as well as by the media. Although, as of 2013, no transitionaljustice institutions have been established, ideas about a just order have madeprogress in a country where the subject of past and current human rightsviolations had, for a very long time, remained taboo. To understand howsuch ideas, which draw on the logic of the exception, have emerged on theMauritanian political scene we need to take into account the wider contextof negotiations of new beginnings in Mauritania and the ways in which thiswas influenced by a dominant narrative on justice and transition circulatingoutside the country, among refugees and human rights organizations.

The dominant interpretation of past injustices has, to a large extent, beenco-constructed by the political elite among refugees in exile and by hu-manitarian and human rights organizations, through the lens of refugee andhumanitarian law, itself derived from the ordinary logic of the internationallaw of sovereign states. By framing the situation of refugees in terms ofabnormality, exceptionality and victimhood, but also in terms of humilia-tion and loss of dignity, both refugee leaders and humanitarian actors havecontributed to constructing the need to perform an official repatriation ofrefugees as an essential part of new beginnings in Mauritania and as anact of transitional justice in itself. Interestingly, in Mali — to which manyMauritanians had also been forcibly displaced in 1989 — the lack of signifi-cant involvement of UNHCR and the lack of well-connected political leadersable to speak in the name of the refugees led to very different dynamics. Lesspoliticized, the situation of refugees there has been largely ignored by theinternational community and followed with less attention by the transitionalauthorities in Mauritania. This lack of visibility and international recognitionof their refugee status also means that their situation has not been framedas abnormal or as a problem to be resolved through exceptional measures.There has therefore been less interest in reintegrating these refugees into a‘national order of things’ and, as a result, no initiative has been taken by theMauritanian government to date to officially organize their repatriation.

Exploring the discrepancies between the ideals of transitional justice con-veyed by the dominant politico-humanitarian narrative about past injusticesand alternative narratives produced by subaltern groups has also enabledus to better understand how ideas about justice and transition may be moremessy and diverse than we expect. In that respect, it is interesting to observethat alternative ways of making sense of past injustices may trigger very

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22 Marion Fresia

different images of what has been endured in the past, but also differentforms of transition to be aspired to for the future; these may draw on otherexceptional logics (such as in the epic narrative) or be embedded in thelogic of the ordinary (such as in the Marxist narrative). The discrepanciesbetween the dominant narrative and the everyday, mundane practices ofrefugees and returnees have, at the same time, stressed that ordinary peopledo not wait for exceptional measures to be taken to try to re-establish a senseof order, normalcy and justice in their daily lives. This study clearly showsthat Mauritanian refugees have constantly transcended the ‘national order ofthings’ on which their identification as victims of forced displacement wasfounded, as they mobilized transnational logics and multiple identities on adaily basis. For the majority, it seemed clear that the just order they aspiredto was an order which allowed them to remain mobile, rather than an orderforcing them again into one single place.

This observation, which has also been made in other refugee and returneecontexts, has led some researchers to conclude that defining repatriation asa ‘durable solution’, undoing the human rights violation of displacement,is to a large extent illusory: it remains embedded in a sedentary view ofa just order, which does not reflect the complex patterns of movements ofordinary people (Bakewell, 2000; Van Hear, 2003: 14). Yet, this study alsoshows that this sedentarist view was conveyed not only by humanitarianorganizations, but also by certain refugee leaders who remained attached tolocalities and territorialities at the level of social representations, identityand political claims. Through their political activism in camps, these leadershave led many refugees to embrace the national categorization of ‘BlackMauritanians’ and the external label of ‘refugees’, creating the need toperform an official repatriation to regain dignity, including for those whohad already returned in Mauritania or whose families were spread out onboth sides of the border. Far from being solely symbolic, the performance ofthis repatriation had a number of concrete consequences on the ground, suchas the reconstitution of more than 100 villages in the south of the country, therevival of discourses of autochthony, the strengthening and affirmation of theBlack Mauritanians racial category on the public scene and the strong claimsfor transitional justice mechanisms conveyed by victim associations. Theseelements have deeply influenced the terms of the country’s new beginnings,not least by precipitating a new military coup in 2008, and they will continueto weigh heavily in its future.

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Marion Fresia is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Anthropology,Neuchatel, Switzerland (e-mail: marion.fresia@unine.ch). Her research in-terests include humanitarianism, forced migration and the institutional fab-ric of the refugee regime. She has published Les Mauritaniens refugies auSenegal. Une anthropologie de l’asile et de l’aide humanitaire. [MauritanianRefugees in Senegal: A Critical Anthropology of Asylum and HumanitarianAid] (L’Harmattan, 2009), and a number of articles on asylum in the contextof UNHCR.