The Rwandan Survivors in the UK and the Legacy of the Genocide

At the end of the genocide, aid organizations rushed all together to Rwanda. Many of them had no previous knowledge of the region and therefore, they focused their attention primarily on the Hutu refugees fleeing to Burundi and Zaire, who became the real victims of the genocide, simply because they had been ʻkicked out of Rwanda by the Tutsi minorityʼ.

As Blewitt (2010) points out, agencies failed to acknowledge the thousands of survivors in Rwanda were also in need of support. Nevertheless, 'agencies need[ed] a high profile to be able to raise funds back home. The media [were] not focusing on survivors but on refugees. They are the priority and that is where charities are visible. The competition between agencies for a media spot overtook the need to consider who it was they had come to support' (ibid., p.180). The government struggled to establish when the various agencies had arrived in the country and where they were operating, de facto not controlling them in the implementation of their programs.

However, despite the significant resources which were allocated for the interventions in the camps; aid organizations, journalists, politicians, peacekeepers and the international community in general did not listen to the voices of the refugees. Most of the media considered the refugees' stories as 'symptoms of hysteria, evidence of brainwashing, and echoes of superstitious, gullible Africa' (Binder, Toŝić, 2005, p.392). The main consequence of such an attitude was the passive acceptance of the Rwandan government's claim that the only solution for the refugee crisis was the immediate repatriation of all the displaced people to Rwanda.

The RPF told the refugees that they would be safer in Rwanda than in Zaire and the international community agreed with such a position. But the refugees 'consistently expressed grave misgivings about returning' (ibid., p.393). In fact, they were fearing retaliation from the new government as well as to be labelled – and consequently persecuted – as génocidaires, even if they had not committed a crime. The Rwandan society had changed and even if the Hutus houses and properties were still there, they knew they may not be welcomed back. But the entire world remained ignorant to the fact that it would not be possible for them to go back to Rwanda. And even when media acknowledged that the refugees were refusing to return to Rwanda, they said that the causes of such refusal were the intimidations of the Hutu political leaders who wanted to keep them in exile. Refugees were 'superstitious' and 'hysterical', while Rwanda was a 'safe and secure horn of plenty'.

'Journalists […] mostly echoed the position of the United Nations and several other relief agencies: it is necessary and desirable that the refugees should be repatriated' (ibid., p.394). Eventually, despite the fact that the UN did not have sufficient staff to oversee the situation in Rwanda, most of the refugees who had lived for months in the camps were repatriated. Meanwhile, as we have already pointed out, in Rwanda disappearances and summary killings (both of Hutus and Tutsis) were often reported. The return of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi exiles as well as approximately one million Hutus who were internally displaced this further exacerbated an already critical situation. As Steward (in Clark, Kaufman, 2008) highlights, 'since 1994 up to one million Rwandans returned to their highly destabilised motherland, after living in exile in nearby countries for up to 40 years' (p.172).

In fact, the victory of the RPF, whose leaders had lived in exile most of their life, persuaded thousands of Rwandan Tutsis who had never been allowed to live in their motherland to eventually move back to Rwanda. Furthermore, when at the end of 1996 the RPF decided to disperse refugee camps in Zaire, hundreds of thousands of Hutus were repatriated. But at their return to Rwanda, most of them found their houses occupied by the Tutsis who had returned from exile. 'By early March 1997, people who had lived far apart, and had often never met before, faced each other for the first time, sparking renewed competition for houses and land, and triggering memories of decades of bitter rivalries' (ibid.).

Moreover, it has to be taken into account (and this is related to the purposes of the present research) that many Rwandans chose to permanently resettle elsewhere. They emigrated to other African countries, which were considered safer than Rwanda and to Europe (especially Belgium and France) as well as to north America. This grouping of immigrants included génocidaires (both real and falsely accused), as well as the Tutsi diaspora. Many of them 'have given up on Rwanda and resettled permanently elsewhere, either to evade justice, to avoid the politics and social complexities of Rwandan society, or for other' (ibid., p.173).

In his analysis of the post-genocide Rwandan population, Steward (ibid.) talks of 'old caseload' refugees when referring to the Tutsis that returned to Rwanda in 1994 after decades of exile; and of 'new caseload' refugees when referring to those, mostly Hutu, who fled into Zaire, Tanzania and Burundi after the victory of the RPF, and went back to Rwanda only later on. Instead, Fusaschi (2009, p.27) divides the Rwandan population into three categories: the 'rescapés', those who survived the genocide; the old refugees, 'returnees', those Tutsis who had left Rwanda after the violence of 1959 and 1973 and who decided to return from their exile and occupy the lands abandoned by the fleeing Hutus; the Hutu refugees, the 'missing refugees', who fled Rwanda for fear of retaliation and then returned from the camps in Zaire and Burundi after the massacres perpetrated by the RPF troops in there.