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 of one of the worst crimes against humanity of the twentieth century. The 1994 genocide left around 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu dead in the course of three months. The present government has gone to great lengths to distance itself from what it terms ‘‘genocidal mentalities’’ and to pro- mote unity and reconciliation among a population where no family was untouched by the killings that took place all over the country and often between family members and neighbors. Rather than explore whether these attempts at creating national unity and reconciliation ‘‘work’’ in terms of removing genocide mentalities or creating a sense of justice and reconcilia- tion, ultimately preventing such a thing to happen again, 1 I will explore the kind of statecraft that is at stake. More precisely, I explore how the govern- ment discourse of national unity creates categories of citizens and how these categories of citizens are not only ethnicized and related to positions during the genocide but also linked to histories of mobility. While the post- genocide state is born out of diasporic return and promotes mobility in terms of return, it also governs and channels mobility by linking specific trajectories of mobility to specific groups that are perceived to be in need of specific modes of governing. Official state policy is to welcome back the Hutu, who fled the country after the genocide, despite their complicity in the genocide. Likewise, the Rwandan state is actively encouraging the Rwandan diaspora to be engaged Brought to you by | Copenhagen University Library (Det Kongelige Bibliot