4 - Labelling refugees: international aid and the discourse of genocide

Summary

The last two chapters have shown how academics and journalists with strong RPF sympathies, but mostly without prior knowledge of the Great Lakes region, have embraced and spread the Front's idyllic, harmonising perspective on pre-colonial society and history. An important aspect of the discourse, however, is that the Front's claim regarding the social construction of ethnicity – or ‘the mistake’ of ethnicity – is easily combined with assertive, essentialist statements on identity: outsiders as well as insiders readily resort to ‘the Hutu’ or ‘the Tutsi’. The former are ‘perpetrators’ of genocide or, in the case of those who died in 1994, ‘victims of politicide’; the latter are ‘survivors’ or ‘victims of genocide’.

The present chapter continues the debate on contemporary representations of social identity with an analysis of how Rwandan refugees were perceived during the crisis of 1994–6. Using field data from 1995, I demonstrate how Western humanitarian practices reinforced the essentialist discourse on ethnicity and in doing so reinforced the notion of a collectively guilty refugee body. The profound horror of genocide, the data suggest, combined with the normal practice of labelling refugees, i.e. combined with the habitual denial of refugee identities and voices, in such a way that all were deemed guilty. This collective labelling has become an important cog in the mechanism that perpetuates violence in the Great Lakes.