Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Rwanda
- Great Lakes region
- Rwanda: refugees and displaced populations, 31 March 1995
- Introduction: information and disinformation in times of conflict
- 1 Build-up to war and genocide: society and economy in Rwanda and eastern Zaire
- 2 Mind the gap: how the international press reported on society, politics and history
- 3 For beginners, by beginners: knowledge construction under the Rwandese Patriotic Front
- 4 Labelling refugees: international aid and the discourse of genocide
- 5 Masterclass in surreal diplomacy: understanding the culture of ‘political correctness’
- 6 Land and social development: challenges, proposals and their imagery
- Conclusion: representation and destiny
- Appendix: Summary of key dates and events
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Titles in the series
4 - Labelling refugees: international aid and the discourse of genocide
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Rwanda
- Great Lakes region
- Rwanda: refugees and displaced populations, 31 March 1995
- Introduction: information and disinformation in times of conflict
- 1 Build-up to war and genocide: society and economy in Rwanda and eastern Zaire
- 2 Mind the gap: how the international press reported on society, politics and history
- 3 For beginners, by beginners: knowledge construction under the Rwandese Patriotic Front
- 4 Labelling refugees: international aid and the discourse of genocide
- 5 Masterclass in surreal diplomacy: understanding the culture of ‘political correctness’
- 6 Land and social development: challenges, proposals and their imagery
- Conclusion: representation and destiny
- Appendix: Summary of key dates and events
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Titles in the series
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.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Re-Imagining RwandaConflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century, pp. 130 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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