Victims, Saviors, and Suspects: Channeling Mobility in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Chapter 4

Victims, Saviors, and Suspects: Channeling

Mobility in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Simon Turner

Rwanda is a country that is most known to the outside world as the site ofone of the worst crimes against humanity of the twentieth century. The1994 genocide left around 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu dead in thecourse of three months. The present government has gone to great lengthsto distance itself from what it terms ‘‘genocidal mentalities’’ and to pro-mote unity and reconciliation among a population where no family wasuntouched by the killings that took place all over the country and oftenbetween family members and neighbors. Rather than explore whether theseattempts at creating national unity and reconciliation ‘‘work’’ in terms ofremoving genocide mentalities or creating a sense of justice and reconcilia-tion, ultimately preventing such a thing to happen again,1 I will explore thekind of statecraft that is at stake. More precisely, I explore how the govern-ment discourse of national unity creates categories of citizens and howthese categories of citizens are not only ethnicized and related to positionsduring the genocide but also linked to histories of mobility. While the post-genocide state is born out of diasporic return and promotes mobility interms of return, it also governs and channels mobility by linking specifictrajectories of mobility to specific groups that are perceived to be in needof specific modes of governing.

Official state policy is to welcome back the Hutu, who fled the countryafter the genocide, despite their complicity in the genocide. Likewise, theRwandan state is actively encouraging the Rwandan diaspora to be engaged

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80 Simon Turner

with the home country. The definition of the diaspora, and hence of whoqualifies as a member of the nation, is very broad, signaling an inclusivecitizenship definition. Meanwhile, I will show in this chapter that the statenarrative in post-genocide Rwanda rests on various categories of ‘‘actors’’that play different ‘‘roles’’ in relation to the project of creating a new post-genocide nation. First, there are the survivors of genocide who are por-trayed as victims. Second, there are the saviors who saved these victims andwho saved the nation. These are primarily Tutsi who had been in exile inUganda and who have been labeled the ‘‘59ers’’ because they left Rwandaafter the Hutu revolution of that year. Third, there are the perpetrators ofthe genocide and the potential perpetrators. This group is obviously slip-pery in terms of categorization, and I will argue that the sovereign powerof the state lies in the ambiguous task of defining this group. On the onehand, the group is to be included in the new nation that does not distin-guish between ethnic groups and is willing to forgive. On the other hand,the state is defined by its specifically antigenocidal ideology and its need todistance itself from any person or group that ‘‘harbors genocidal mentalit-ies.’’ The creation of the three categories is fundamental to the narrative ofa new Rwanda and relates to issues of ethnicity, territory, and mobility inthe sense that it is only individuals of a certain ethnicity and who were in acertain place at a certain time who fall within these categories and, hence,fit the national narrative. In this chapter, I demonstrate that state power isbased on the categorization of the citizenry into victims, saviors, and sus-pects. However, the categorization of the population (into us and them,citizens and subjects, polis and bare life) is not in itself what concerns theart of governmentality nor what creates the basis (and the potential down-fall) of sovereign power. I argue that it is in the careful management of theborderline and overlapping cases that sovereign power emerges. Concretely,this means that all Hutu are potentially part of the polis, while they are alsopotential genocidaires, or suspects. Likewise, there are a number of Tutsiwho are neither victims nor heroes and certainly not perpetrators. Theseare the majority of Tutsi who returned from Burundi and Congo after thegenocide and who could neither claim the victim position of those who hadremained in Rwanda nor the heroic position of the saviors from Uganda.In other words, while the state promotes mobility and while it attempts tochannel and, hence, govern mobility by creating the three categories, thereare patterns of mobility (and even immobility) that do not fall neatly intothe national script and evade governmentality.



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The genocide has become a ‘‘founding moment’’ for the post-genocideregime in Rwanda, and the ruling elite, strongly supported by a guilt-plagued international community, is concerned with creating a new nation,a new state, and, ultimately, a new people. Although the present govern-ment wants to distance itself from the genocide, the genocide remains afounding moment, not in the positive sense but more as a negative specterthat needs exorcising. Concretely this reveals itself in a national narrativewhere the population is defined in relation to the genocide as victims, sus-pects, or saviors. However, they are not just created through narrative butalso manifest themselves in very concrete governmental techniques such asthe Survivors Fund that gives financial support to relatives of Tutsi victimsof the genocide; the ingando solidarity camps that are meant to transformprisoners, refugees, and other outsiders into new citizens; and the Commis-sion for the Fight Against Genocide that seeks to eliminate any traces of‘‘genocidal mentalities’’ in the population. In other words, the genocideleaves an imprint on society in very concrete forms, creating new insiders,outsiders, and in-betweeners. Second, I argue that the newly created hierar-chies of belonging are managed according to mobility. Political and ethnictensions in Rwanda have historically caused displacements of large sectionsof the population, who, in turn, have had serious impacts on the politicaland ethnic tensions in the country. Hence, mobility and political strugglesof belonging and defining the nation have gone hand in hand for decades,which means that migration biographies are important signifiers of belong-ing. Belonging in this sense is not simply about belonging to a certain placebut rather about belonging to a certain political constellation of nation-hood. Third, I argue in this chapter that the governmental techniques thatgenerate these new mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are often quitebenevolent and mostly concerned with the well-being of the citizens of thenew, inclusive Rwanda. Although the responsible institutions often for-mally belong outside the state, they help create state effects2 and imagina-tions of the state.3 This is a state that rules through biopower, nurturing itscitizens, but it is also a state that is sovereign, deciding who belongs andwho does not.4

This chapter contributes to our theoretical understanding of the rela-tionship between state and mobility by exploring a case where large-scaleviolence has resulted in an attempt to create a new constellation of space,citizen, and state. Much has been written since the 1990s on the relationshipbetween nation, space, and identity and how mobility both challenges and



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strengthens this relationship.5 It is generally agreed that the constellation ofpeople, place, and identity,6 and similarly of citizen, state, and nation,7 pro-duces residual categories, what Bauman has termed the ‘‘stranger,’’8 a Der-ridaean supplement that both threatens and consolidates the order of things.Recent debates on sovereignty, inspired in particular by Agamben’s revivalof Schmitt9 have similarly shown how a (bio)political order relies on theexclusion of bare life or naked life and a violent founding moment of politi-cal order—the state of exception. In this chapter, I draw on these debateswhen exploring the ways in which the state emerges as sovereign through amixture of practices that at once create citizens through biopolitical careand through categorizations while also creating residual categories beyondthe reach of biopolitics. This chapter explores what happens after a trau-matic event such as the Rwandan genocide when the state attempts tocleanse itself of old exclusionary practices and explores what new exclusionsmay emerge. While the Rwandan case may seem extreme—in terms of boththe scale of the violence and the displacement and the radical break thenew regime is attempting to make—I argue that similar challenges of stateformation and reconfigurations of mobility practices exist across the conti-nent, in particular after war, massive violence, and radical change. In thissense, the study explores how the massive process of violent removal of apopulation entailed by genocide might not simply scatter populations anddisrupt enduring political relationships and institutional arrangements butcan become the cornerstone of an entirely new state-building enterprise.To phrase this observation in the terms proposed by the editors of thisvolume, the Rwandan case suggests that countergenocidal governance ofmobility may also make states.

Creating National Unity for Everyone

The Rwandan state has been characterized as a strange hybrid between adictatorship and a neoliberal, modern, and transparent system.10 Ratherthan simply critique the present regime for double standards or for windowdressing and for using the ‘‘genocide credit’’ to blackmail the internationalcommunity into supporting an increasingly despotic regime and turning ablind eye to the serious human rights violations taking place,11 I prefer toexplore the means by which the Rwandan state works on its own premises.How do these apparently contradictory aspects of the state go hand in




hand? I was myself puzzled by the Maoist style reeducation camps, theingando, that were established, first, to reeducate and reintegrate ex-combatants from the genocide and, later, to broader sections of society.12

How could the donor darling13 of Western democracies like the UK and theUnited States create such institutions? Much of the answer is to be foundin the role that the genocide plays in present-day Rwanda’s nationalist dis-course, since it may be argued that the Rwandan state defines the Rwandannation as the antithesis of the genocide. After the catastrophic events of1994, there was an urgent need to rebuild the infrastructure, the economy,and, first and foremost, the social fabric. For this to happen, it was neces-sary to rebuild the state. The new state should help get the country back ontrack in terms of development and economic growth, and it should helpthe population regain their trust in one another and in the state that hadso terribly let them down and broken their trust.14 Therefore, it becameimportant to create a state that was radically different from the one that hadled to genocide. There was a need to create a new nation and to redefine thecitizenry, a nation that was cleansed of the stain of genocide and cleansedof ethnicity. Emphasizing again and again a policy of national unity, theRwandan state tries to go beyond what are perceived as the destructiveforces of ethnicity.

The new Rwanda is defined as the opposite of the old Rwanda, the latterbeing defined as tribalist, ignorant, corrupt, and neocolonial. Hence, theproposed cure is, on the one hand, to rid the nation of everything relatedto the old Rwanda and, on the other, to create a modern, antitribal societythat is focused on development, education, information technology, andgood governance.15 This is confirmed in the foreword of the government’sdevelopment plan, the ‘‘Vision 2020’’16:

The Vision 2020 is a reflection of our aspiration and determinationas Rwandans, to construct a united, democratic and inclusive Rwan-dan identity, after so many years of authoritarian and exclusivistdispensation. We aim, through this Vision, to transform our countryinto a middle-income nation in which Rwandans are healthier, edu-cated and generally more prosperous. The Rwanda we seek is onethat is united and competitive both regionally and globally.17

However, the present government is also concerned with a revival of thecustomary,18 as has been the case in many African states since the 1990s.19



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The gacaca courts, itorero (informal education system to discuss nationalunity and social problems), imidugudu (villagization), umugando (commu-nity work), and ingando are examples of these attempts to revive modifiedforms of precolonial institutions in an attempt to revive an authenticnational identity as it was before it was affected by colonialism’s policies ofdivide and rule.

Central to the project of creating a new Rwanda is the National Unityand Reconciliation Commission (NURC), which was established in 1999,with the vision to strive for ‘‘a peaceful, united and prosperous nation.’’20

It is supported financially by the UK Department for Iinternational Devel-opment, UNDP, UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and EU,and it mainly tries to achieve its goals through various forms of civic educa-tion, as well as monitoring what is perceived as genocidal mentalities. In itsmission statement, it emphasizes, among other things,

Preparing and coordinating the national programs for the promo-tion of national unity and reconciliation; Educating and mobilizingthe population on matters relating to national unity and reconcilia-tion; Carrying out research, organizing debates, disseminating ideasand making publications relating to peace, national unity and recon-ciliation; Denouncing and fighting against acts, writings and utter-ances which are intended to promote any kind of discrimination,intolerance or xenophobia.21

We see here a balance between spreading information about unity and rec-onciliation, on the one hand, and monitoring and ‘‘combating’’ ideologiesand actions that go against unity, on the other.

The concluding chapter of a report by the NURC on ‘‘The Causes ofViolence After the 1994 Genocide’’ comments on what it calls ‘‘wickedness’’as a cause of violence, whether the violence is against genocide survivors ordomestic or sexual violence. This kind of wickedness is caused by igno-rance, the report claims, and continues:

It should be recognized however that this wickedness as well as theethnic hatred have been accentuated by the practices of the politicalpowers that ran the country since 1919 until 1994. They have beencunningly reinforced, instrumentalized, or even deep-rooted in theminds of some of Rwandans by colonization, history, education,




speeches, political actions and programs, media, religious confes-sions as well as by massive involvement in atrocities of the 1994genocide. All these facts contributed significantly in nothing butsocializing and spreading wickedness in Rwanda like an infectiousdisease. It has become a mentality, a sub culture peculiar to some ofRwandans. It cannot be uprooted at once, as by a stroke of magicwand. It requires for the long-term efforts that must be led to severalfights by very wide-ranging actors.22

In other words, NURC claims that the post-genocide violence is the contin-uation of a long history of violence and the result of a massive socializationprocess that has resulted in a specific mentality and subculture. The objec-tive for NURC then is to ‘‘uproot’’ this mentality bit by bit. The means todo so are primarily to re-educate the masses and to combat the divisiveideologies of the old regimes. Concretely, NURC has several so-called rec-onciliation tools to achieve these goals; prominent among them are itoreroand ingando.23

Officially, the post-genocide state is committed to including all Rwan-dans in the Rwandan nation—whatever their ethnicity and wherever theymay be. The state even has established a Diaspora Directorate Generalwithin the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to reach out to the diaspora in vari-ous ways,24 and the embassies are keen to establish good links with thediaspora.25 This inclusive approach does not just go for old caseload Tutsireturnees. The Rwandan state has gone out of its way to encourage thereturn of Hutu refugees who had fled in 1994, not only through coercion,as when the government attacked the refugee camps in Zaire in 1996 withthe purpose of forcing the Hutu refugees to return, but also through assist-ing in recuperating the land that had been occupied by 59ers while theywere abroad.26 As van Leeuwen observes in relation to a state program ofvillagization, ‘‘The program was thus in line with the reconciliation mes-sage, advocated by the new government, that the country had enoughresources to sustain all Rwandan people, and that every Rwandan livingabroad was welcome to repatriate.’’27 Such policies stand in stark contrastto the old regime’s signals to Rwandan exiles that the country could nottake more population pressure.

Despite the attempts to be inclusive, reconciliatory, and unified, variousgroups and categories emerge. Or rather, it is the national narrative of unityand reconciliation that inavertedly creates these groups.28 Other groups are



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not mentioned in the national narrative but are created, nevertheless, asde facto leftovers. As Buckley-Zistel mentions, different experiences of thegenocide create different groups.29 Nigel Eltringham and Saskia VanHoyweghen30 also show how what they term ‘‘the genocide framework’’has created categories of citizenship, distinguishing between rescapes, oldcaseload returnees,31 and new caseload returnees.32 These are the only offi-cially sanctioned categories in post-genocide Rwanda where mention ofethnic affiliation is not allowed. Helen Hintjens operates with the followinggroups as the only officially sanctioned groups: survivors, old caseload refu-gees, new caseload refugees, and suspected genocidaires.33 In practice, sheargues, new caseload refugees tend to overlap with the final category ‘‘sus-pected genocidaires.’’ As can be seen from these official categories, categori-zation is based no longer on ethnicity but on mobility history—old andnew caseload returnees—and on relation to the genocide: survivors andperpetrators. These seem to be the structuring principles of identity and ofcitizenship in the new state, and no other identity positions are officiallyavailable.

I have chosen three categories: genocide survivors, saviors, and suspects.They are the actors in a broader national narrative about the new unifiedRwanda that is the bedrock of state legitimacy. There is interdependencebetween the three categories; each category relies on the existence of theother, and there is no room to act outside this officially sanctioned script.In the following I explore how these categories are made and how theyrelate to the state. I also explore how they create whole populations whodo not fit into these categories and who might be forced into a category,such as suspected genocidaires, or simply left off the radar. I explore thisconcretely by investigating how the various programs and institutions thatare purposed to create national unity shape the population according todifferent positions in the genocide and, hence, according to mobility histor-ies. I will show how these governmental techniques emerge and categorize.Apart from this discursive analysis, I will briefly touch on the sociologicalconsequences of such classification and hint at those who are left outsidethe categorization—effectively leftovers in the new constellation of thenation-state—for instance, the Hutu who never left the country and whodid not take part in the genocide or the Tutsi who were victims of intera-hamwe (Hutu militia) violence but in Congo in 1997 rather than Rwandain 1994, and many other such anomalies in the official classification. Such




leftovers are essential for governmental techniques, as they become the rea-son for yet more refined classifications and state interventions into thehearts and minds of the citizens in the name of creating a new Rwanda. Inother words, a dialectic process is taking place; while the sovereignty ofthe state emerges through the governmental practices of categorizing thepopulation according to trajectories of mobility, certain groups slipbetween the categories. This, in turn, compels the state to refine its categori-zations, reifying state sovereignty.

Genocide Survivors

Very visible in state discourse are the so-called genocide survivors. Specialtribute is paid to these survivors at the countless genocide memorials,34 justas there are numerous survivor associations. In 2003, the government ofRwanda set up a survivor’s fund that accounts for 8 percent of the annualbudget.35 Being a survivor gives access to certain privileges, such as scholar-ships, just as a number of international development projects target thisspecific group. By creating this category, the state is giving recognition tosome of the people who have suffered most due to the genocide (althoughothers might have suffered similarly but at the ‘‘wrong’’ time).36 Since thestate is built on the genocide as its negative founding principle, along theinternational slogan of ‘‘never again,’’ it is extremely important to havegenocide survivors as the living evidence of the genocide. Similarly, memo-rials have become increasingly important over the past years because peo-ple’s memories of the genocide fade away, and, without the memories ofthe genocide, the present states’ claim to legitimacy may also fade. Despiteusing the term survivor rather than victim—very much in line with trendsin the international human rights consensus—the genocide survivors areobjectified as victims, as a category of people that need help, morally andmaterially, and the state emerges as able and willing to provide this support.

Technically there are clear limits to who merits the status of a genocidesurvivor. Tutsi who were inside Rwanda during the genocide and who lostrelatives qualify as survivors. This interpretation was confirmed in 2011when the government changed the official term for the genocide to ‘‘thegenocide against the Tutsi.’’ Hutu who did not take part in the genocideand who lost close relatives during the genocide do not qualify, despite the



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fact that it is widely acknowledged—also by the Rwandan state—that so-called moderate Hutu were explicitly targeted. The reason is that Hutu—asa group—were not targeted due to their ethnicity. Likewise, Tutsi who lostclose relatives outside Rwanda and/or before or after April–July 1994 can-not claim survivor status. This includes the large numbers of Tutsi targetedby the interahamwe and other Hutu groups during the war in Zaire/Congo,1996–99. During my fieldwork in 2009 and 2011–12 I found that theselimits were the cause of much concern among many Rwandans who foundthem to be unjust. However, I do not intend to criticize the governmentfor such ‘‘failures’’ as many other scholars have done.37 Rather, I want topoint to the fact that the very existence of such a group is fundamental tothe narrative of a new Rwanda and that it relates to issues of ethnicity,territory and mobility in the sense that it is only individuals of a certainethnicity and who were in a certain place at a certain time who fall withinthis category and hence fit the national narrative. The narrative thereforeunwittingly creates a number of leftover groups who do not fit the narra-tive, such as the Hutu who survived the genocide and the Tutsi who werein the ‘‘wrong place’’ at the ‘‘wrong time.’’

Genocide survivors are the objects of a caring state that provides themwith material and moral support in various ways. And while the state pro-duces them as objects of statecraft, the state itself comes into being in theprocess: namely, as the caring state that is concerned with the well-being ofits citizen-subjects.38 As has been argued in the literature on governmental-ity,39 governmentality does not necessarily have to be carried out by theinstitutions of the state itself. In Rwanda, the governmental state operatesthrough institutions such as Ibuka, an umbrella organization for survivororganizations in Rwanda. Although nominally a nongovernmental organi-zation, it operates in a manner that objectifies survivors as a certain cate-gory of citizen-subjects and that has state effects. The sovereignty of thestate relies therefore not only on the negative power of the law but equallyon the decision as to who are worthy targets of ‘‘care’’ and, hence, objectsof governance.

The question then is how survivors are objectified and what kind ofcitizenship is created. As victims of the genocide that is the foundingmoment of the new Rwandan nation, they are central to keeping the mem-ory of the genocide alive and therefore a cornerstone in the constructionof the new Rwanda. However, they are simultaneously construed in statediscourse as helpless victims that are in need of assistance. This assistance




may come from the benevolent state or from one of the organizations thatthe state has accepted as trustworthy.40 In this case, the state becomes theactive agent, while survivors are bereaved of agency. Furthermore, the sur-vivors play an ambiguous role in the new Rwanda, due to their links to thepast. On the one hand they provide the link to the founding moment ofthe genocide; on the other they also create a link to a past that the statewants to rid the new Rwandan nation of. This ambiguous relationship isalso traced in the official narrative that it was the advancing Rwandan Patri-otic Front (RPF) troops who stopped the genocide. In other words, thesurvivors were not able to defend themselves during the genocide and weredependent on the returnees from Uganda to save them from annihilation.In sum, the survivors are central to the myth of the new Rwanda becausethey embody the horrors of the genocide that is so central to the creationof the new Rwanda. However, rather than being perceived as active creatorsof this new nation, they are objectified through national narratives andthrough concrete governmental practices as helpless victims who need theassistance of others. According to this narrative, anyone who was inRwanda before and during the genocide is potentially responsible for thegenocide or at least perceived to have been too weak to prevent it. Seeingas no one who was inside the country was able to prevent it from happen-ing, an actor from outside—someone unstained by the past—was needed.This was the returning diaspora.

The Saviors

With the genocide as the founding moment of the present state, a specificgroup stands out as the ‘‘founding fathers’’ of the new nation. In the narra-tive of the new nation, they are the agents who caused the new Rwanda toemerge, and it is therefore also seen as their responsibility to preventRwanda from slipping back to what it was before the genocide.41 This groupI have chosen to call ‘‘the saviors’’ is thus bestowed—according to officialnarratives—with the ability to change history, an ability that entails aresponsibility toward the nation and toward those who are less endowed—such as the survivors—to administer this power justly. When interviewingTutsi who had returned from Uganda and Tanzania shortly after the geno-cide, I would often be told that ‘‘We were given a country’’ and that ‘‘Thiscountry was in ruins and we had a responsibility to rebuild it.’’ The core of



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this group is the RPF, who, according to their own accounts, put an end tothe genocide and liberated Rwanda. By association, it includes all the Tutsiwho returned from abroad. And although this, in principle, includes thehundreds of thousands who returned from Burundi and Zaire, in practice,it means those from Uganda, as it was the ‘‘Ugandans’’ who made up thecore of the RPF.42

As mentioned above, the survivors are objectified as victims who wereunable—even unwilling—to protect themselves and the nation, and it fellupon the diaspora to liberate the nation. It is common for diasporas andthose who remain to perceive of the diaspora as active agents of change,due to separation from the homeland, exposure to other kinds of knowl-edge, and to hardship.43 This may be in terms of business, development, orpolitics. Peter Hansen has, for instance, elegantly demonstrated the gen-dered nature of the diaspora–homeland relationship in Somaliland,44 thediaspora being associated with masculinity—strong, hard, active—while thehomeland is perceived as feminine—soft, fertile, passive. Return migrationand diaspora engagement are often, he argues, coined in gendered imagessuch as penetrating virgin soil.45 My interviews with Rwandan returneesconfirm this picture of active agents that are making use of virgin territory:that Rwanda has a great development potential, but it needs the courageand the knowledge of the returning diaspora for it to flourish and bearfruit. Similarly, the survivors are feminized as passive victims who are inneed of help from the active, masculinized returning ‘‘warrior-diaspora.’’ Itis not surprising in this context that most programs to help survivors targetwomen and children. Widows and orphans are defined by a lack; they lackthe father/husband, and through the survivor programs the state is able tofill this lack, symbolically taking the place of the caring and protective hus-band and father.46

Rwanda is an extreme case of diasporic influence. Only rarely has acountry been so thoroughly affected by an incoming diaspora group.47

Helen Hintjens uses Robin Cohen’s term ‘‘victim diasporic nationalism’’ todescribe Rwandan nationalism, claiming that it is based on the ‘‘myth ofdiasporic Tutsi victimhood.’’48 Eltringham and Van Hoyweghen argue thatthe present regime is claiming victimhood by creating continuity in historybetween 1959 and 1994.49 In that sense, the ‘‘old caseload returnees’’ canclaim to be victims of genocide by proxy,50 and a single category of victimsis created, namely, the Tutsi. In this sense, ethnicity is reintroduced, andHutu, as we shall see shortly, become suspects by default. Certainly, it may




be claimed that the ideology of the returning diaspora has its roots in theidea that the Tutsi have been victims of pogroms since 1959 that forcedthem into exile and, furthermore, that they experienced hostility as a groupin Uganda.51 However, I would argue that the claims to victimhood aremore complex because, while the Tutsi returning from the diaspora maydraw on the victim position to make claims to recognition, they also consti-tute themselves as willing and able to act. This is different to the pure victimposition of the survivors who are left without any public agency.52

The real life experiences of the two groups could hardly be farther apartfrom a sociological standpoint. They have grown up in different countries,one as an ethnic minority, the other as refugees. One never had politicalinfluence, while the other was very close to the political leadership inUganda for a short while. They have very different educational backgroundsand do not even speak the same languages.53 Finally, and most significantly,their experience of the genocide was as different as it could be. While thesurvivors experienced the genocide first hand at the receiving end and wereunable to escape the country, most of the 59ers were in Uganda during thewhole genocide, while a small faction of RPF soldiers experienced the geno-cide as the backdrop to their victorious battle against the government army.So, while the survivors need the saviors and the saviors certainly need thesurvivors, their only commonality is their ethnicity—which officially doesnot exist.

There is, in other words, a slippage between categories in official dis-course. On the one hand, survivors are elevated to a position where theyincarnate the new Rwandan nation, due to their victim position in thegenocide. Likewise, the returning diaspora also claims victimhood and asso-ciation with the survivors. On the other hand, I would argue that it isimportant to take note of the strong distinction that is drawn betweenthese two groups as passive victims of history and active agents of change,respectively.

It may be argued, following Purdekova, that the RPF nation- and state-building project in Rwanda ‘‘appears to be an ‘‘imported,’’ ‘‘brewed inexile’’ recipe for a permanent escape from the past and attainment of analternative future.’’54 In other words, the only Rwandans able to create anew Rwanda without any contamination from the past are those who wereoutside the country during the ‘‘dark years’’ of the Hutu republics. Thosewho had remained inside the country, whether victim, perpetrator, orbystander, are construed in this discourse as being stained by the past in



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one way or another, while those who had been in exile remained pure.55 ‘‘Itis the interstitial/liminal (Rwandan refugees in Uganda) that overcomes‘relations of dominance’ and comes to the center.’’56 First, it takes a move-ment from outside to break the internal relations of power and dominance.Second, in order to start from scratch, a radical break with the past isneeded. The Tutsi returning from Uganda were in the right position forboth these tasks and were adamant to pursue creating this new nationthrough a tightly controlled process of modernization and enlightenment.

This is indeed an enlightenment project where everything that is new inRwanda is juxtaposed with what was the ‘‘old Rwanda.’’ The old Rwandawas marred with ignorance, which explains—according to the presentnarrative—why so many ordinary Rwandans took part in the genocide.They were ignorant and uneducated and, hence, easily manipulated by acynical elite. According to government discourse, Rwandans are one peo-ple, and the terms Tutsi and Hutu are a colonial invention, which meansthose who killed in the name of ethnicity either were cynically manipulatingfalse identities or were the victims of such manipulation due to ignorance.Not only was Rwanda marked by ignorance and a belief in ethnicity, butthe population was generally superstitious and the government incompe-tent and corrupt. Therefore, it is the aim of the new state to bring enlight-enment in all straits of life.

The question then is where this enlightenment should come from, ifeveryone in Rwanda was either ignorant or malevolent. Who should be thebenevolent harbingers of light and progress? This is where the returningdiaspora enters the picture. Seeing as they had not been subjected to theindoctrinations of the first and second republics, they were able to seethrough the manipulation. Furthermore, they had achieved education andexperience while in exile.57 In this case, there is the added twist that theyactually stopped the genocide by defeating the Rwandan army on the battle-field in the months between April and July 1994.

Who belongs, then, to this group? In the course of six months in 1994,600,000 ‘‘old caseload’’ refugees, the new term for Tutsi who had fled inthe 1960s, returned from Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, and Zaire; in thefollowing years, the figure reached an amazing one million.58 It was fromthe ranks of the returnees from Uganda that the new elite would emerge,due to their positions in the RPF, and the trade and personal networks theyhad with the remaining Tutsi diaspora in Europe, North America, and EastAfrica.




The term ‘‘old caseload returnees’’ is misleading. There are great divi-sions in both the experience and the present position of the returnees interms of class and in terms of where they were refugees before 1994.Although there have been no serious studies of the numbers of returneesfrom different countries or what their position in society is today, it seemssure to say that the Anglophone returnees from Uganda dominate theupper echelons of society, whether in government or civil society. Thereare obviously also returnees from Uganda who do not occupy such posi-tions due to their class position. The leftover categories are, in particular,the Tutsi who returned from Tanzania, Zaire, and Burundi. A number ofTutsi had succeeded in getting high education and positions in Tanzania.When they returned, they joined the state elite while the majority simplymoved across the border with their significant herds of cattle. The twoother groups are more problematic, as many held high positions in exileand feel marginalized due, among other things, to the dominance of Englishand the marginalization of French and due to the fact that they did notcontribute to the war effort against the previous regime.59

Because the Anglophone returnees dominated the RPF rebel movement,they now dominate the upper echelons of the state, NGOs, and the privatesector. And because they won the war and stopped the genocide, they areable to position themselves morally and politically as the creators anddefenders of the new Rwanda and have become the incarnation of the newcitizenry upon whom state sovereignty rests.

Suspects

Another large group of people who have returned to Rwanda since thegenocide are the hundreds of thousands of Hutu who fled during andimmediately after the genocide and who returned only reluctantly whenforced in late 1996. These refugee returnees are not accused en masse ofbeing perpetrators of genocide, but they are all potentially perpetrators bydefault. I am not concerned with the usual critique of the government thatit is implicitly accusing innocent Hutu of being genocidaires. What concernsme more is the ways in which perpetrators are constructed as a category—not only of individuals who have committed crimes in the past but, moreimportantly, as a potential within every Hutu. While this potential is sus-pected to be latent in every Hutu, state discourse assumes that it takes



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indoctrination for it to come to the fore, and it is the task of the enlightenedand benevolent state to control and prevent ‘‘genocide mentalities’’ to pro-tect the population—Hutu as well as Tutsi—from ethnic violence.

A number of precautions have been taken by the Rwandan state tocombat genocide mentality. In 2001 a law against sectarianism was passed60;in 2003 a law was passed to prevent the spread of genocide mentalities,divisionism, and ethnic ideologies61; and in 2007 the National Commissionfor the Fight Against Genocide (CNLG) was established. This well-staffedinstitution, based in new buildings on the outskirts of Kigali, has the taskof monitoring what might be perceived as expressions of ‘‘genocide denial,’’‘‘revisionism,’’ ‘‘divisionism,’’ and ‘‘genocide ideology.’’ The assumption isthat ideologies circulate—often from sources in Europe—and may affectthe mentalities of vulnerable groups such as the Hutu youth. It is, therefore,also important to teach the youth the true history of the country and thereal causes behind the genocide.62 In the words of a young man, teachingschool children about the genocide at Kigali’s Gisozi Genocide Memorial,‘‘It is necessary to remove the bad mentalities of the youth and put somegood ones in instead.’’63

The most visible evidence of this concept of feeding the ignorant Hutuwith knowledge about the truth of the genocide is the ingando camps.When the NURC was established, it formally developed ingando as a toolto build coexistence within communities. The first beneficiaries were ex-combatants from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The program laterexpanded to include school-going youth and students at secondary andtertiary levels. By 2002, the training was extended to informal traders andother social groups, including survivors, prisoners, community leaders,women, and youth. Topics are covered under five central themes: analysisof Rwanda’s problems; history of Rwanda; political and socioeconomicissues in Rwanda and Africa; rights, obligations, and duties; and leader-ship.64 The camps are a mixture of boot camps with Boy Scout-like exercisesand Maoist reeducation camps where the participants are taught subjectslike history and conflict resolution. The ingando camps act as the ritualcamps of rites de passage, making sure the transformation from one statusto another happens in an orderly manner. They make sure that the nationalnarrative of the victorious group is disseminated to all sections of society.

Demographically and sociologically speaking, there are hundreds ofthousands, even millions, of people living in Rwanda today who do not fitinto the categories survivor, savior, or suspect. What is important here is




not whether the categories are relevant for the lived experiences of all andevery Rwandan, but how the categories become means of disciplining thepopulation and of creating citizens and, hence, the state. Ingandos are par-ticularly illuminating in this sense because they certainly are about nationbuilding through disseminating the hegemonic narrative about the newRwanda, while they also are tools through which the state is involved in themost intimate spheres of the individual: their mentalities.

The potential genocidaire exemplifies this process of categorization ofpopulations and the production of citizens very well in the sense that eventhe term ‘‘potential’’ reveals that this is a question not of classifying popula-tions according to what they are or what they do but according to what itis suspected they might do.65 Because the state is operating with potentialactions, it is necessary to reeducate and police large sections of the popula-tion. Concretely, the category of suspects leads the state to reeducate everlarger sections of the population through ingando and a number of otherreeducation schemes, such as itorero, in order to create proper citizens ofthe new state. Simultaneous with this mechanism of inclusion—or ratherproducing new citizens—is another mechanism that is driven by securityconcerns, where the state puts ever larger sections of the population undersurveillance. These surveillance mechanisms, exemplified by the CNLG,attempt to detect and remove tendencies that go against the new Rwanda.This is, in other words, an example of modern statecraft that, on the onehand, is based on what Foucault has termed ‘‘productive power,’’ wherethe exercise of power produces new categories and identities, while, on theother hand, the state relies on what he calls negative or sovereign power.And while Foucault saw these two types of power in a historical succes-sion,66 Agamben and others have argued that they are mutually constitu-tive.67 This balancing act between a caring biopower and more sovereignmeasures of surveillance and exclusion results in identifying citizens whilecreating groups that are excluded from the nation. More importantly, itcreates a state that has the power to make the decision on who belongs andwho does not. The fact that large segments of the population fall outsideeither category only strengthens the power of the decision. In particular,the threat of falling into the category of the enemy, namely, the genocidaire,allows the state to focus on security and control as a supplement to itsproject of creating an inclusive state of empowered citizens. The Rwandanstate is, in other words, not as hypocritical as many critics would argue.Rather, it seeks in the name of the people to protect the citizens from



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the dangers of genocide mentalities and therefore combines discourses ofbiopower and securitization.

From these analyses, we see that the Rwandan government is keen tocreate a new Rwanda that breaks radically with the past. We also see thatpast mobility biographies influence the position of Rwandans in the presentnation-state. In the following, I uncover the creation of the pre-genocideRwandan nation because it has implications for what the present nation istrying not to be. While the present state manages mobility through promot-ing certain types of migration and by carefully civilizing those whom itdeems in need before including them in the new Rwanda, the pre-genocidestate governed mobility through prevention where the relationship betweenstate and territory followed a more conventional autochthon/allochthonscript.

Creating the Hutu Nation

It is common knowledge that European missionaries and colonial adminis-tration exacerbated the existing ethnic divisions in Rwanda and Burundi,creating racialized identities and splitting the population in to what Mam-dani has termed natives and settlers.68 The 1959 Hutu or social revolution,where Hutu intellectuals, backed by Belgian officials and the CatholicChurch, was however, not just about a historically oppressed ethnic groupviolently seizing power from the ruling ethnic group. It was also aboutredefining the nation and its people. The events leading to the Hutu socialrevolution and the ideologies that it expressed have been analyzed exten-sively elsewhere, most notably in relation to attempts to explain the 1994genocide.69 I will focus here on the ways in which the state created insidersand outsiders—both in terms of belonging to the Rwandan nation and interms of territory and mobility. In other words, the 1959 Hutu revolutioncreated new ways of imagining the sovereign state and new perceptionsof belonging as either citizens or subjects, breaking radically with colonialconstructions of race, ethnicity, and belonging in some senses, while repro-ducing them in others.

The Hutu revolution and the First Republic (under Gregoire Kayiban-da’s presidency) were based on the idea that Hutu and Tutsi were differentraces and that the Hutu were the autochthonous race who had inhabited




the Great Lakes region since time immemorial, while the Tutsi were por-trayed as foreign invaders of an alien race, who had immigrated to theregion from the north only four centuries ago. In 1959, Kayibandaexpressed it thus: ‘‘Our movement aims at the Hutu group. It has beenoffended, humiliated and despised by the Tutsi invader. We must illuminatethe mass. We are here to return the country to its owners. It is the countryof the Bahutus. The small Mututsi came with the big.’’70

By an ironic twist of history, this vision of the racial composition of theGreat Lakes region dates back to the early European explorers and mission-aries who—preoccupied with modern theories of race—explained the factthat they encountered well-organized kingdoms in the middle of ‘‘savageAfrica’’ with a theory that the Tutsi were not really Bantu and that they hadmigrated to the region bringing civilization from the north. This theorywas coined the Hamitic thesis and used by the colonial administrators toprivilege the supposedly more intelligent Tutsi in education and govern-ment positions, while Hutu were expected to remain peasants. The colonialsystem of indirect rule backfired nastily in 1959 when disgruntled Hutuintellectuals, educated in missionary schools, not only expressed their dis-content with the social injustices of the colonial order but did so by usingthe Hamitic thesis—only turning it upside down and arguing for the rightsof the autochthons.

In the racialized ideology of the First Republic, the Hutu were thenation, which meant that the Tutsi were aliens. This ideology was accompa-nied by anti-Tutsi violence in 1959–61, 1963–64, and 1973. The violencecaused hundreds of thousands of Tutsi to leave the country.71 It is estimatedthat by 1990 between 400,000 and 600,000 Tutsi and their descendants livedin the Great Lakes region as refugees.72 According to UNHCR figures, thatcover only registered refugees and do not take account of the large numbersof self-settled refugees, the majority (266,000) lived in Burundi, while82,000 lived in Uganda, 22,000 in Tanzania, and 13000 in Zaire. It is esti-mated that the figure for Uganda is more like 200,000 refugees.73 Thesepopulations, who had been branded alien and stripped of their citizenship,would later play a central role in the emergence of Hutu power and thegenocide in 1994 and also in the post-genocide state.

This understanding of the nation and the people changed in 1973 whenJuvenal Habyarimana came to power and declared the Second Republic.His calls to reconcile the Hutu and Tutsi were not simply a question ofbeing more ‘‘moderate’’ or less nationalist than Kayibanda. They also



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reflected another understanding of state and citizenship. According toMamdani, ‘‘Habyarimana spoke of the Tutsi as an ethnic group, not a race,as a Rwandan, not an alien, minority.’’74 While the Hutu were the nationand the nation was the Hutu under the First Republic, Habyarimanaadopted the concept of ‘‘the democratic majority,’’ whereby the Hutu, dueto being the ethnic majority, also were the democratic majority.75 However,Tutsi were once again citizens of Rwanda rather than strangers76 and focuswas on development and progress for the masses, rather than on ethnicityand politics.77

However, while the state was reconciliatory toward the Tutsi inside thecountry, it was official policy to deny the refugees the right to return totheir home country.78 Coined in developmentalist and Malthusian terms,the government argued that population pressure and the resulting environ-mental degradation of the land did not permit return of Banyarwanda liv-ing outside the country’s borders.79 With one of the highest populationdensities in Africa, the government argued that the steep hills that alreadywere under agricultural pressure simply could not take any more.

Due to pressure from international agencies, from refugees in Ugandaand from neighboring governments, several commissions to solve the refu-gee problem were established, but these commissions never functioned inpractice.80 In other words, while the state had become more inclusive interms of granting citizenship to Tutsi, it relied on new forms of exclusion,now excluding those who had been forced across the border to neighboringstates. The criteria for belonging had shifted from race to territory. However,as the war from 1990 to the 1994 genocide would later prove, the territory-based exclusion of the Tutsi also affected the Tutsi inside the country who,by racial association, were classified as potential aliens and enemies of thestate.81 Hence, the principle of territorially based citizenship was stillaffected by—and continued to affect—citizenship based on blood and race.

The developmentalist discourse of the Second Republic constructed astate that was internally multiethnic while territorially sovereign, as it hadthe right to exclude mobile populations who might challenge the territorialintegrity of the state. While Habyarimana’s regime framed its position onexiled Tutsi in technical terms of economic development and ecologicalpressure, it may be argued that the discourse was never able completely toavoid ethnic and racial terms of blood and heritage. This is not to say thatit was simply ‘‘window dressing.’’ On the contrary, it would be difficult tounderstand the ethnopolitics of Rwanda at the time without understanding




the broader politics of progress, order, and modernity. In other words, thepolitics of ethnic exclusion were part and parcel of an attempt to create amodern, developmental state, which was able to liberate the masses fromprecolonial feudalism and colonial divide and rule. During the First Repub-lic, the racial categories of colonial rule were adopted and turned upsidedown in order to defend the Hutu nation against Tutsi feudalism. TheSecond Republic tried to break with the precolonial and colonial orders bymoving beyond race. In this case, the perceived threat of slipping back tothe old feudalist order came from exiles who not only were Tutsi but, inthe Ugandan case, often were of royal stock and had belonged to the colo-nial elite. The state was in other words no longer defending the Hutu racebut progress, liberation, and democracy against feudalism and neocolonial-ism. When the RPF attacked the northeastern part of Rwanda from basesin Uganda in October 1990, the state came under pressure to redefine itselfaway from ethnic reconciliation and economic progress toward a discourseabout existential threats to the nation itself. At this point, the Tutsi refugeestransgressed the limits of legal and technical discourses on developmentand threatened the state at the core of its values—territorial integrity—bycrossing the border and by breaking the state’s monopoly on violence. As aconsequence of this turn, the Tutsi outside the country were cast as theenemy, while the Tutsi inside the country were put in a precarious positionbecause they—by virtue of their ethnicity (and, hence, their blood)—wereassumed to be potential collaborators with the RPF. The RPF was formedas a reaction to being denied the right to become fully accepted as citizensof Uganda, despite being born in Uganda and having been pivotal in YoweriMuseveni’s National Resistance Movement and his rise to power.82 The RPFwas, in other words, created as an attempt to be recognized as citizens ofthe Rwandan state instead. However, rather than being accepted as Rwan-dans, they were treated as Tutsi who wanted to take over the country andreintroduce monarchy.

In sum then, the independent Rwandan state had been established onpreventing mobility. Mobility was perceived as the root of all evil in thefirst place because the Tutsi were perceived to be strangers who had invadedthe country centuries ago. There were, however, shifts in linking mobility,territory, and ethnicity from the 1960s to the 1970s and 1980s and backagain in the early 1990s. In the first period, Tutsi were generally treated asstrangers—whether inside the country or not. In the second period, thestate attempted to distinguish between Tutsi inside the country and those



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outside. The former were treated as a minority but not integrated, whilethe latter were simply denied access to the nation. Although race and eth-nicity were downplayed in this period, both categories still played a definingrole, and the state contained within itself an inherent tension betweendefining itself as one nation while maintaining ethnic quotas. When theRPF launched attacks from Uganda in 1990, this tension could no longerbe contained, and all Tutsi were immediately perceived as strangers—andin racial terms. It would be wrong to search for one cause behind the geno-cide in 1994. However, the positioning of the Tutsi—whether inside thecountry or not—as foreigners who did not belong to the Rwandan nationand actually threatened the stability between nation, state, and citizens cer-tainly played an important part in the process.

Conclusion

Statecraft is often about controlling borders,83 marking territory, and decid-ing who should be allowed to transgress these borders.84 However, statecraftis a never-ending process, and sometimes the internal tensions cannot takethe strain, which ultimately may lead to its collapse. The 1994 genocidedefinitely brought the old order to an end, and the massive movement ofpeople in and out of the country called for a reconception of state andcitizen. In 1994–96, the field stood open to new interpretations of state-hood and belonging. After 1996, a new order emerged, based very stronglyon being what the old order was not. It was an order that preached nationalinclusiveness and a move away from policies of race and ethnicity. How-ever, even such orders create insiders, outsiders, and leftovers.

In this chapter, I have explored how statecraft is exercised in a situationof radical rupture, when nation building, reconciliation, and defining a newbeginning for citizens become of great urgency. I have shown how, in theRwandan case, the genocide has become a founding moment, acting as apoint zero from where everything can be measured in positive terms andas a year zero from where the new Rwanda begins. This new Rwanda isdefined as everything that the old Rwanda was not. References to the geno-cide and to the old Rwanda that led to the genocide abound in the nation-building process undertaken by the present state because they confirm whatthe new nation is not. A central aim of this new Rwanda is to rid the nationof any remains—however small or hidden—of divisionism and ethnic




thinking in order to create a nation of unity and equality. However, despitethe rhetoric of inclusion, unity, and a common identity for all Rwandans,the nation is perceived to have enemies that want to prevent these objec-tives. This enemy is defined as genocidal mentalities that are supposedlyremains from the old regime and the genocide. They are assumed—innational discourse—to be hosted by Hutu in exile, while ignorant Hutuinside Rwanda are perceived to be vulnerable to such propaganda. The statesees it therefore as its duty to protect the nation and the people—of allethnic groups—against such mentalities through education and surveil-lance. Obviously, the most vulnerable group is the Hutu—in particular,those who returned from exile after the genocide—and special attention isgiven to reeducating these groups through ingando.

Another category that is believed to be vulnerable is the category ofsurvivors. Whereas the returning Hutu are vulnerable to adopting geno-cidal mentalities, the survivors are vulnerable in the sense that they werethe targets of genocidal violence and hence perceived to be in need of pro-tection from the effects of such mentalities. The survivors are made up ofthe Tutsi who remained in Rwanda throughout the genocide and areobjectified as victims who were not able to protect themselves and in needof protection now against a possible replay of the genocide. In terms ofnational identity, they are important because they link the present nationto the events of 1994 as pure victims—something that neither Hutu norreturning Tutsi can do.

Mobility plays into this script of nation building and statecraft in vari-ous ways. First, Hutu who have been abroad are positioned as potentialtraitors to the nation because they are suspected of being involved in thegenocide and allegedly have been exposed to divisionism and genocidedenial in exile. Second, the Tutsi who remained inside the country are por-trayed as weak because they were unable to see clearly and act appropriatelyduring the genocide. Finally, the Tutsi who returned from Uganda wereuntainted by the genocide as either victims or perpetrators and were ableto position themselves as the saviors of the nation. Their diasporic positionallows them to take the role as saviors of the nation, while they are depen-dent on the survivors as those who need protecting and on the suspects asthose who need controlling and educating. Mobility is, in other words, aresource according to the state script for the new Rwanda, but it is per-ceived as a Janus-faced resource: it may contribute equally to bringingenlightenment, development, and unity as it may contribute to bringing



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tribalism, divisionism, and violence, which means that the state has to care-fully govern the various types of mobility in order to harness the positiveresources and remove the negative ones. While the state in pre-genocideRwanda sought to control the destabilizing effects of mobility by preventingmobility, the present state more subtly channels mobility.

Where does this staging of the nation-building process leave the state,then? The state is pivotal in nation building, in particular in a case wherethe nation is constructed not around strong political ideologies of ethnicityand autochthony but rather around technocratic and managerial dreams ofdevelopment and progress. Through its concern with efficiency, education,and security, the Rwandan state creates citizens, defining what a good citi-zen is in terms of unity, reconciliation, and economic rationalities. And inthe process of defining these citizens, classifying them into survivors, sus-pects, and saviors, as well as taking care of them, surveilling them, educat-ing them, and punishing them, the state emerges through statecraft as stateeffects.

Although an explicit objective of the new Rwandan state is to break withthe old state’s narrow definition of citizenship and belonging, exclusionarypractices take place on a daily basis. These are not necessarily linked to raceor even to the borders of the national territory but to who is considered agood citizen and who is not, which, again, is defined in relation to the rolesmentioned above—survivor, suspect, savior. Because large segments of thepopulation fall outside these categories, the state becomes all the more pow-erful in its role of policing the categories and deciding who fits where. Statepractices of exclusion are rarely spectacular or violent and mostly take placethrough mundane, quotidian practices of care, control, and surveillance.State sovereignty emerges in its ability to decide who is worthy of careand who should be subject to control and surveillance. It is in this endlesscategorization that its sovereign power lies.

While the Rwandan case is an extreme one due to the scale of the geno-cide, many other states across the continent are also emerging from war,violence, and state failure, trying to clean the slate and start from scratch.Each of these states has to deal with reconciling victims and perpetratorsand most often deal with large populations living abroad. Questions of whobelongs to the nation and what constitutes a good citizen are central tothese processes of state formation. Most often, diasporas gain a new andpositive role in these new postconflict states while also posing a potentialthreat to status quo. The Rwandan case demonstrates the complexity of




relations between mobility and state formation in a postconflict situationand how mobility may be encouraged while being carefully governed, justas unity may be encouraged while creating new categories of differentiationamong the citizens. These processes of governing mobile and immobilesections of the population in relation to their positions during the genocidehave proved central to the sovereignty of the state in Rwanda, and, althoughhandled differently in other counties emerging from violent conflict, statesovereignty in these cases depends equally on the state’s ability to governmobility, whether through prevention, promotion, or channeling.



Victims, Saviors, and Suspects: Channeling Mobility in Post-Genocide Rwanda

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