Hutu Rebels - Penn Press

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HUTU REBELS Exile Warriors in the Eastern Congo

Anna Hedlund

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

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CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations Preface

vii

ix

Introduction. Conflict and Violence in the Congo 1 Chapter 1. Rwandan Rebels in the Congo War: Power, Politics, and Exile 40 Chapter 2. Rainbow Brigade: Life in a Rebel Camp 66 Chapter 3. Politics in the Forest: Retelling History in Exile 102 Chapter 4. Captivity and Commitment 135 Chapter 5. The Forest of Volcanoes: Rebel-Civilian Interactions 161 Chapter 6. From Bare Life to Bare Violence 191 References

209

Notes 221 Index

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Acknowledgments 000

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INTRODUCTION

Conflict and Violence in the Congo

In 1961 Hannah Arendt, a German philosopher, traveled to Jerusalem to witness the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Holocaust. Eichmann faced a court in Israel, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes. During the Nazi period, Eichmann had been in charge of logistics for the mass deportations that sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their death (Stearns 2012a:6). The Eichmann trial received widespread attention. Journalists, academics, and the public all around the world closely followed the trial, waiting for Eichmann to explain the evil acts he had committed. During the proceedings, Eichmann showed little remorse for his crimes. He believed he had done nothing wrong and that he was acting morally by honoring the oath that he had signed with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. Eichmann argued that he was just a paper shuffler; he had only been following orders from his superiors. Eichmann’s refusal to take responsibility led to tense reactions among those witnessing the trial. They argued that Eichmann was a coldhearted man, the personification of evil. Why would he regret his actions?

Hannah Arendt, observing the trial, argued that indeed, the crimes committed by Eichmann were evil and the consequences of his deeds were devastating. However, contrary to what other commentators said, Arendt claimed that Eichmann had none of the typical characteristics that made a personality evil or diabolic. She argued instead that Eichmann was a somewhat dull, conventional bureaucrat who lacked the ability to reflect on his own thoughts and actions. He was certainly not a passionate anti-Semite but an ordinary man who signed papers and followed orders without question. According to Arendt, the fact that Eichmann sanctioned his own actions as though they were quite normal was a demonstration of what she

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called the “banality of evil.” Evil, she said, is not radical but intrinsically banal. Many Nazis, just like Eichmann, did not willfully become evil.

Rather, Arendt claimed, through a process of dehumanization, which during the Holocaust was made possible by bureaucratization, personal principles can be readily suspended. Obedience becomes the supreme virtue.

Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964), which was first published as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963, was controversial at the time. Her ideas were provocative simply because she argued that there are no clear distinctions between “us” and “them” or “good” and “evil.” In her book, Arendt looked beyond personal acts of brutality and tried to understand mass violence by exploring the political structures, and the bureaucratic duties assigned to ordinary individuals, that made the atrocities possible. Since the publication of her articles on the Eichmann trial, Arendt’s banality of evil theory has become widely cited in commentary on human behavior in conditions of war.1 Her theory has helped to show that when military power is consolidated and distributed among the masses, when a top-down administrative process coordinates duties, and when the victims become anonymous and dehumanized, any “ordinary” person’s ethics and morals might be set aside in favor of compliance—thus he or she may become an accessory to murder in the wider orchestration of war (see, for example, Bauman 2001; Browning 1992; Goldhagen 1997).

While the conditions and political formation governing the war in the eastern Congo are very different from those that prevailed in Nazi Germany, the essential question provoked my interest: why do ordinary people commit brutal acts of violence, or, more precisely, how do ordinary people get caught up in extraordinary situations and structures that shape and reproduce an everyday routine of violence?

Fieldwork in the Congo A few days before I began my fieldwork in the volatile eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I was in Kigali, the capital of neighboring Rwanda. While there I visited one of the places where massacres had taken place during the genocide in 1994. It was a hot day and the sun was beating down. I followed a shady path leading to a church at the Ntarama memorial site. Almost 23 years previously, a group of Hutu

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Conflict and Violence in the Congo 3

extremists’ called the Interahamwe (those who attack together) had attacked a church in which hundreds of civilians were hiding when the rebels entered the village. Following orders from high-ranking military commanders and bombarded with radio propaganda, the rebels’ goal was to eliminate the ethnic Tutsi population. Throwing grenades into the overcrowded church, the Interahamwe rebels massacred hundreds of the people seeking shelter there from the relentless mass slaughter. I went inside the remains of the church. It took a few seconds before my eyes adjusted to the dark, and then, by the light from a broken window, I saw the skulls and bones of victims who had been so brutally massacred there two decades ago. Hundreds of skulls had been set aside and arranged on shelves next to the walls. I walked across the church. The victims’ clothes and personal belongings—pots, pans, shoes—had not been removed from the floor but were left as they had been found the day after the attack.

There were still bloodstains on the wall, and a damp and moldy smell filled the room.

A few months later, I thought about the visit to the memorial site as I sat beside Colonel Frank, one of the senior rebel officers in a forest military camp of predominantly Hutu fighters belonging to the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), that was currently engaged in the Congo conflict. We were sheltering in the colonel’s bamboo hut in a rebel camp called Rainbow Brigade, which was located on a mountain peak deep in the Itombwe Forest of the South Kivu province of the eastern Congo, about five days’ trek from the nearest town. Colonel Frank was a Rwandan of ethnic Hutu origin. Like most of the fighters in the camp, he had arrived in the Congo in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He was also a known génocidaire, a term used by the Rwandan government to identify the people responsible for organizing and perpetrating the genocide. As an Interahamwe rebel and member of the former Hutu army, the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), Colonel Frank and others in this group are held responsible for the mass killings of the genocide, a period of three months during which almost one million people were killed. After the establishment of the new Tutsi regime under its current president Paul Kagame, these Hutu extremists fled across the border from Rwanda and made the DRC their base of operations with the goal of recapturing power in Rwanda.

More than 23 years have passed since the Rwandan genocide took place, yet for these Hutu fighters living in the Congo mountains, the Rwandan war is not over.

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By day the landscape surrounding the rebel camp was stunning, overlooking misty mountains, hilltops, and miles of thick forests. But now it was pouring with rain and water leaked in through the roof of leaves, bamboo, and grass. It was getting increasingly dark and chilly, and the only light we had came from our flashlights and from the fireplace in the middle of the hut. Colonel Frank wore a yellow jacket, a pair of blue jeans, and military boots. His personal belongings—a razor blade, a toothbrush, and a mirror—were hanging askew on the wall next to the small bamboo bench where he sat. On the wooden table in front of him were a Bible and a satellite phone. His Kalashnikov was propped against the wall next to him.

From his vantage point, he reminded me, he could spot any approaching intruders. The colonel’s face was friendly and his body language vivid. He said that he had returned earlier that afternoon from a military operation and, on his way back, he had prayed in the bamboo church further down the slope where he served as one of the pastors for the military camp.

Although he said he was tired, we continued to talk about his life as a rebel leader in the forest. When he spoke about his childhood memories of Rwanda, his face lit up and he talked with longing of his dream to return to his country of origin. Colonel Frank’s personal bodyguard, a young combatant, entered the hut carrying firewood. He said that his name was Gérome and that he was 29 years old. He wore a camouflage-colored military uniform, and a gold watch gleamed on his wrist; his boots were covered with mud. Kneeling down, he blew onto the embers of the fire. The flames came to life, crackled, and lit up the hut. Gérome went out again returning shortly carrying plastic cups filled with warm tea made of roots and sugar.

Working quickly and efficiently, he served us the tea and then disappeared once more into the rain.

The camp at which I was based is one of a number established by Hutu fighters who still circulate between the military camps and battlefields in the provinces of the eastern Congo. These rebels move from place to place in the remote and inaccessible mountainous regions together with their civilian dependents, many of them refugees from Rwanda. In the eastern Congo, the Hutu fighters have a long and complex history of violence. For over 20 years they have been a military force in the ongoing conflict, accused of attacking, raping, and killing the local civilian population (see, for example, Human Rights Watch 2009). They have fought alongside the Congolese army, known by the French acronym FARDC (Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo) but have fought against them

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as well; they have captured young boys and trained them to be soldiers; they have abducted and violated Congolese civilians; and they are accused of plundering entire communities in the North and South Kivu provinces.

For many years, the Hutu fighters have been regarded as one of the most harmful groups operating in the eastern Congo (Human Rights Watch 2009; International Crisis Group 2009:1; Rodriguez 2011:176).

While Adolf Eichmann was a functionary in the impersonal machinery of industrial warfare, the Hutu fighters have often killed their enemies and innocent civilians in more intimate fashion: using their bare hands, knives, machetes, or rifles to torture and maim them. The fighters have demonstrated a wide variety of violent means to attack, loot, and plunder. Numerous reports dating from the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 until today, and conducted by humanitarian agencies and scholars, have provided unequivocal evidence of the extremely brutal violence carried out partly, but not only, by the FDLR in the eastern Congo (UN OHCHR 2010). As I listened to Colonel Frank it was difficult to imagine him leading his soldiers in a relentless campaign of killing, rape, torture, and plunder in the Congolese villages and communities. On the face of it, Colonel Frank was a pleasant, cordial man. I was intrigued by his way of consciously reflecting on and analyzing his situation and the surrounding conflict. Why did he participate in atrocities? What made him, and the other FDLR fighters, persist in fighting and killing? What motivated them to participate in brutal acts of violence?

When I first arrived in the Congo, these were the questions that drove my research, and they continued to do so throughout the whole process.

However, the multiple stories and explanations I was given (including propaganda, denials, and deceit) were not always easy to make sense of. My road to understanding turned out to be difficult. Many pieces of history, memory, political, and cultural practices, and individual life strategies had to be included in the analysis to grasp the whole phenomenon of violence.

While I could see the evidence of violence in Rwandan memorials, in settlements and villages, and on the bodies and in the experiences of refugees and civilians in Congolese society, as I stepped into the rebel camp it felt almost eerily calm and peaceful and everything seemed ordered, rational, and disciplined. There was little evidence of a fighting spirit. Over time I found the rebel camp to be a place where ordinary people explained how they were caught up in an extraordinary situation of refuge and displacement, where everyone spoke incessantly about returning home to Rwanda.

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Looked at from this vantage point it was hard to equate the lived experience of the camp with the reality of war, violence, and displacement in the forests of the Congo, the world’s largest refugee camp. And how best was one able to comprehend the banality, the everyday routines, and the relentless boredom of a rebel camp?

In order to understand how violence is expressed in the most brutal and violent of actions, I would argue that we need to move beyond the stage of compiling catalogues of atrocities and start to explore the “ordinary life” and ideologies of the combatants. For theirs is an ordinary life in an extraordinary situation of war. While so many human rights reports, and so much media coverage, have documented violence in the Congo, and while this violence has persisted over several decades, we still have a poor political and cultural understanding of the perpetrators themselves—we know very little about their lives. We need to know much more about how these individuals themselves speak about the conditions governing their lives and about how they respond to questions about violence. By moving our focus beyond the narrative of atrocity toward an ethnographic approach that gives close attention to the daily life experience and narrative of the fighters and their family members, I believe that we can cast light on some of these perplexing questions.

More broadly, I am convinced that further research on war, and specifically on those who operate actively in war, is crucial for understanding the various ways in which people deal with conflict and violence in times of pervasive instability and insecurity. As we all know, the world is an increasingly uncertain place. On an everyday basis, we read and hear stories about terror attacks, war, and violence. Recently we have seen a refugee crisis in Europe following civil wars in Syria. There have been terror attacks in France, Sweden, UK, and Belgium; suicide bombings in Afghanistan; killings of hundreds of civilians in Burundi, South Sudan, Iraq, and Yemen; drone strikes in Pakistan; continuing attacks by Al Qaida terrorists and the so-called Islamic State; and continuums of rebel and military violence in the eastern Congo.

While these events have their own historical, political, and cultural complexities, they all typify the violence of our time through new forms of global warfare. Characteristically the strategic goals are often unclear or unfulfilled, or they could have been realized through less violent means; in most cases it is not easy to draw the line between a perpetrator, a victim, or a civilian. In today’s wars, violence is being perpetrated on many levels:

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not only by trained soldiers, militias, rebels, and paramilitaries but also by foreign mercenaries, and civilian populations drawn into conflicts. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that by the end of 2014 over 59.5 million people had been forcibly displaced around the world (an increase of 8.3 million persons since 2013), many of them because of war, and over 10 million people were refugees under the UNHCR mandate (UNHCR 2014). This situation increasingly raises new and difficult questions about economic insecurity, territory, citizenship, identity, belonging, and politics.

A war zone is also a gray area. There is little regulation or border control, allowing for a boom in organized smuggling and illegal trade and for easy penetration by international criminal networks seeking lucrative business. At the same time, war zones are attractive spots for journalism and as workplaces for humanitarian organizations, peacekeeping operations, and private security firms. In this regard, the eastern Congo war zone is typical. The war in the DRC is not a local phenomenon; it is an international, even a global, one. While many rebel groups operate mostly in the outlying areas, far from the provincial towns such as Goma and Bukavu, they do not operate in isolation. They are part and parcel of a global capitalist world and global trade, and some armed groups work closely with the illegal traders living in luxury villas in these towns. The crises in the DRC demonstrate dynamics similar to many other conflict settings in the world.

Conflicts are related to marginalization, exclusion, political competition, identity, ethnicity, unemployment, power relations, and access to basic resources. Hence, while the ethnographic descriptions in this book will tell us something about how a community of Rwandan rebel fighters mobilizes and responds to conflict and violence, the experience of “bare life” (Agamben 1998) in a community of Hutu fighters is also something larger. The Hutu rebel camp is just one scenario of violence in our time. It is bare violence as part of bare life. And as with so many war zones, the origins of conflict in the Congo and its neighbors can be traced back to the history of the region, rooted as it is in colonialism, early cultural destabilization, and fragmentation followed by decades of political turmoil.

War in the Congo: A Heritage of Exploitation and Violence The DRC is located in the heart of central Africa, with a population of roughly 70 million people. Although it is the second-largest country in

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Africa, the conflicts in the DRC are mainly confined to a relatively small area in the eastern provinces, also known as the Great Lakes region, that straddle the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. The epicenter of war lies in the two provinces of the Kivu territory—North Kivu and South Kivu—and these, along with the region of North Katanga and the district of Ituri, have been wracked by war for over two decades.

The conflicts in the eastern Congo have generated one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises since the Second World War (Beneduce et al. 2006). While the exact number of deaths cannot be established, Prunier (2009) estimates that over four million people have lost their lives through the war and its consequences. All levels of society have been badly affected.

There has been devastating economic and social destruction, and in the absence of investment to rebuild the collapsed infrastructure, people in most parts of the region are without access to clean water, electricity, and basic healthcare. The wars have forced millions of people to evacuate their homes and the UNHCR estimates that over 2.7 million people were internally displaced in 2015 and that more than 460,000 Congolese refugees live in neighboring countries. One of the world’s largest refugee camps is situated in the eastern Congo; here people who were forced to leave the local communities and villages subsist together with a large number of refugees from neighboring Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi.

The Congo has a long history of political instability, state fragmentation, and violence.2 Rich in natural resources, the DRC has been a target for exploitation since the first years of European global exploration and expansion (see, for example, Hochschild 1999; Wolf 1982:225–230). In the 1880s, King Leopold II of Belgium joined the Scramble for Africa and created the borders of what he named the Congo Free State, declaring the land to be his own property and establishing it as a fiefdom; he is notorious, even by the standards of nineteenth-century imperialism, for his particularly ruthless and inhumane treatment of the population. King Leopold and his colonial administrators implemented a system of rule based on torture, slavery, and mutilation. It is widely documented that, for example, a rebellious “native” could have his or her hands or ears cut off; women were used as sex slaves, and numerous forms of torture were deployed to instill terror in the local population (Anstey 1966:2–22). King Leopold’s regime was responsible for the death of about 10 million people; it also destroyed the old political, social, and cultural structures in the region (see, for example, Hochschild 1999), After a sustained intervention by the world’s first

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humanitarian campaign, the Congo Reform Association (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002:5), Leopold was forced to relinquish control of the country to Belgian administration in 1908; however, the colony, renamed the Belgian Congo, continued to suffer under tyrannical political control and from oppression and forced labor as a means to secure its valuable rubber, ivory, gold, timber and diamonds for Belgium in the lucrative European market (Anstey 1966).

In 1960, the Congo finally achieved its independence from Belgium.

But the near-century of colonial disruption had taken its toll; the resulting fragmentation together with continuing outside interference ensured that the years following independence were marked by political and civil unrest (see Young 1965 for a detailed description). After heading up a coup to depose and execute the first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961, Mobutu Sese Seko took power as president in 1965.

Mobutu endeared himself to the West, particularly to the United States, becoming a US anti-communist ally during the Cold War (Gondola 2002:20). Renaming it Zaire, Mobutu established the country as a centralized bureaucratic state, governed by a one-party system and suffering under continued economic repression and high-level corruption (see, for example, MacGaffey 1987). Under Mobutu’s rule the country became embroiled in what later became known as the first and second Congo wars, also referred to as Africa’s World War (Prunier 2009).

Although the two Congo wars (1996–1997 and 1998–2003) have formally been concluded, the eastern Congo region has remained a battle zone. More than 50 separate armed groups composed of government forces and various rebel factions are currently active in the contested area. Some of these armed groups are loosely linked to the current government under Joseph Kabila (the political landscape may change following the elections in 2018), while others are linked to political opposition groups, to the neighboring foreign powers of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, or to local territorial armed groups and warlords. In this setting, armed groups compete for territorial sovereignty over populations of villages and even small towns. In addition to the ethnic, local, and foreign armed groups, as well as the Congolese army, the territory is peppered with other “enclaves,” or “clusters,” of commercial agencies that have implanted themselves throughout the region and that, in an abstract sense, form part of the war zone (Beneduce et al. 2006:33). These enclaves are platforms for both local and global actors who, with varying political goals and seeking new and lucrative markets and resources, act within an

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environment of uncertainty, ruthless competition, conflict, and violence and enter into complex and unstable alliances with the armed groups. Alongside these international traders and commercial actors—such as Lebanese businessmen, Chinese entrepreneurs, foreign diamond smugglers, and others— there is a plethora of additional players: the staff of local and international aid and humanitarian organizations, Western and African journalists, and multinational UN peacekeeping forces from around the world. Armed groups, therefore, do not act in isolation but rather within a complex field of Congolese and external actors’ agencies representing a multitude of different interests.

As a territory located in the midst of the Great Lakes region, the eastern Congo further experiences the impact of violence originating in wars in neighboring Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi, where refugees, goods, weapons, soldiers, and illegal trade have spilled over the borders for centuries.

Officially, the eastern Congo is at peace.3 But despite attempts to establish accords between warring groups in eastern Congo, these have not succeeded in resolving the conflicts; political relations within the Congo and with neighboring countries remain tense. Rather than peace, a broad and general public insecurity of “neither-peace-nor-war” (Richards 2005; Sluka 2009) has remapped the region. Armed attacks continue to erupt in a climate now characterized by wide disorder, and physical violence is widespread, including sexual violence against women, girls, and boys (Amnesty International 1996, 2003, 2008; Dolan 2010).

Some of the conflicts in the eastern Congo can be explained as a struggle for control over minerals and natural resources. Coltan, in particular, an important component in modern digital electronic devices like mobile phones and computers, is currently the foremost mineral of interest on the global market (Mantz 2008). Other highly sought-after natural resources of the eastern Congo include timber, gold, uranium, diamonds, and copper. Although the struggle for access to these resources is one important factor in the conflicts between the different interest groups based near the resource-rich areas, the conflict in the region cannot be traced to one unique explanation.

Conflict in the eastern Congo is also related to struggles over political inclusion, ethnic identity, land, territory, and citizenship. And one of the most evident factors driving the small-scale conflicts is the widespread corruption in the economy and the consequent hardship that communities face on an everyday basis. In order to survive, many people are dependent on informal economic systems and sometimes illegal activities.

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Although many local and foreign actors benefit greatly from the “second economy” (MacGaffey 1987) of conflict and trade (see also, for example, Laudati 2013 for a longer discussion on war economy), decades of war, perpetuated by both local and global actors, have caused a severe and ongoing economic and social crisis for the majority of the local population. The UN Human Development Index in 2018 reports that the income per capita in the Congo remains the lowest in the world (UNDP 2018). Despite its wealth of natural resources, the Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world, and the majority of the population lives below the poverty line on less than one dollar a day (UNDP 2018). The war and its ensuing chaos have resulted in a lack of schools and health care—for most people, meeting even the most basic needs is difficult. Because of the war, farming activities are curtailed, leading to reduced production in agriculture and poor economic growth. The ravages of corruption and the rise of food prices are creating pressure on already scarce food resources, especially in areas where refugees seek shelter and in small towns. The socioeconomic situation is strained, the government weak, and the prevailing physical insecurity and massive displacement of populations has created an even more difficult situation for the majority of the people. As a result, many small-scale communities have established their own community grassroots militias, leading to the further militarization of a society in which many villagers are armed to defend their villages from surrounding groups.

A “Dirty” War for Our Times The conflict in the eastern DRC has much in common with other contemporary wars dating from the end of the Cold War. Since then, and from the start of the twenty-first century in particular, the world has witnessed a series of genocides and internecine wars: in Cambodia in 1975, in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, in Rwanda in 1994, and more recently, in Syria, to name a few. These wars are characteristically messy and chaotic and are generally played out between people who know each other relatively well.

The mass killings in these wars have taken place inside communities and between neighbors and families, and the distinction between victims and perpetrators is blurred. The violence takes place in the absence of an identifiable leadership; there is no clear consensus on who is responsible for the atrocities. Furthermore, these conflicts and violence take place in clear sight

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of the world. In Rwanda and Syria, for example, the international community has been able to observe the killings but, because of diplomatic or political relations or issues of UN mandates, can (or will) do little to intervene to protect the victims from ongoing atrocities. One consequence of these wars is the worldwide dramatic increase in the number of civilian casualties and refugees. The movement of refugees itself often creates new problems in the form of local hostility and struggles over identity, land, security, and access to resources in the host country.

New types of conflicts rely not just on tactics and territorial gains but also on intimate physical violence, which uses small arms and physical confrontation (see for example Kaldor 1999). This can be partly explained as a feature of a wider societal breakdown and disorder (see, for example, Linke & Smith 2009). While many armed groups need the support of civilian communities and local populations to survive, the civilian population is also the main target of war in the twenty-first century. Direct personal violence becomes a military strategy with the objective of instilling fear among the people in the surrounding civilian landscape (Münkler 2005:81– 82). Civilians become primary targets. Intimidation and the spread of fear among local populations through random terror attacks, torture, rape, or sexual violence may be more effective than actual killing (Skjelsbaek 2001:69; Linke & Smith 2009).

Scholars have adopted the concept of “dirty wars,” or “warscapes” (Nordstrom 1997) to identify the common traits of wars in the twenty-first century. C. Stephen Lubkemann also reminds us that in contexts where violence has spanned several generations, war and violence have come to modify the very fabric of social relations as a “social condition,” violence is always embedded in people’s lives, an integral part of their everyday existence, and it becomes just one project among other projects in life (Lubkemann 2008:13; Richards 2005:5). In this type of setting, violence has become the normal state of affairs.

While typical of other wars of our time, the war in the DRC, however, has particular features of its own. There are not two interest groups at war with each other, there are multiple objectives at stake, and the assumptions that people have about the war differ between the state and the different political parties and fractions; between communities, ethnic groups, rebel groups, militias, movements; and between the various international players.

The issues driving the conflicts in the Congo are “gray” rather than clearcut; it is not a war between forces that are identifiably bad or identifiably

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good. It is chaotic, involving multiple actors—local, regional, and international. Independent groups are fighting each other with shifting and conflicting alliances and tend to have different assumptions, methods, motives, and aims for their actions. They ascribe to different ideological, political, economic, and social interests. They interpret the situation differently from each other and apply different military strategies. When fighting occurs, it often takes place in very remote and inaccessible landscapes beyond a clearly defined battlefield, often hidden from the kind of media attention that would highlight atrocities, as, for example, in the terror attacks in Paris or Istanbul or the killing of civilians in Aleppo.

The war in the Congo has to be understood from a long, historical and structural perspective involving political crises, refugee crises, spillover violence from neighboring countries, and the fragmentation of society.

Equally, it cannot be understood in isolation from surrounding global, political, and economic processes in a world where global markets, including the market for war, penetrate the deepest forests of the country. However, this macroperspective comprises a multitude of individual actors, of small groups as well as large, who together form the tapestry of interests, concerns, and ideologies that create the wide experience of the Congolese war. Convinced that the subjective experience of the combatants is as relevant as that of the victim groupings, I made the decision to undertake a detailed empirical study of a particular local setting of war and violence: a rebel camp of Rwandan Hutu exiles living and fighting in the eastern Congo.

Approaching Violence I often have to answer the question of why I, a young white European woman, decided to conduct research among perpetrators of violence in a conflict area like the Congo, and how I became interested in questions of war and violence. Prior to my fieldwork in the eastern Congo, I worked as a research assistant for a UN project in the Pacific. At the time, I was part of a research team investigating warfare rape in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, and the Solomon Islands. Over several months, I collected hundreds of stories from rape victims. In the study, we provided detailed accounts of how victims perceived their own situation and dealt with their trauma (Gustafsson et al.

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2009). While this kind of documentation is very necessary, the study lacked the perspective of the perpetrators. We could not grasp the total phenomenon of violence unless we understood the motivations, strategies, and decisions—the voices—of those who carried out the violence. Throughout my period of work on the study, I often thought about the eastern Congo war zone as a site of comparison. Even though the setting in Africa is very different from that of the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the two areas are similar in the sense that conflicts have become rampant in society and violence has become commonplace in people’s everyday lives.

When I began my research in social anthropology in 2009, I chose to conduct fieldwork in the eastern Congo with the explicit goal of enhancing our understanding of how perpetrators perceive their own situations and motives in conditions of war. I undertook to investigate the various mechanisms behind war and violence and to attempt to comprehend how and why ordinary civilians may become perpetrators. When I began my research, I initially traveled to the Congo to conduct research on warfare rape from the perspective of the perpetrators. After only a few weeks in the field, I could see that the approach was too narrow because it would tend to bypass the wider complexity of violence. In line with what Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern (2008, 2009, 2010) have argued, I found that a single-minded focus on rape could easily lead me to overlook the many other types of violence that occur simultaneously. I did not travel to the Congo with the intention of carrying out fieldwork inside the rebel military camps. I thought that such an undertaking would be too dangerous, even naı̈ve. However, when the opportunity arose, I decided to do so. For the past 10 years I have been interested in the DRC and I have made several fieldwork trips to the country. Between 2010 and 2012, I carried out 15 months of fieldwork in the eastern Congo, of which several months were spent inside an isolated Hutu rebel camp and surrounding territories in the South Kivu province. A couple of years later, in 2016, I returned to the eastern Congo for a further few months to carry out additional research.

Now, after the fieldwork, I realize that some pieces are still missing to fully comprehend the diversity of human actions in situations of war. The social, political, and military reality in the DRC is still fragmented and the conflicts are still ongoing. Thus, for those I interviewed, there has been no break to allow for reflection and deeper thought; daily life is still predicated on continual conflict and struggle in the midst of an unpredictable region.

Conducting fieldwork in such an environment was often confusing and

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full of contradictions, not only because of the constantly changing political situation and shifting alliances, but also because the history of the war was still in the making. The people I interviewed, like the rest of us, must function in a world that is insecure and uncertain. But for them, unlike most of us, insecurity and uncertainty could have fatal consequences. The wrong decision or assessment of their situation could lead to death and we need to understand their predicament. Violence is one way to respond to uncertainty and insecurity. I have therefore tried to document the realities experienced by a group of active fighters during the time that I conducted the research. I have tried my best to contextualize their narratives into a written text, even though I am aware that conflicts, military alliances, and personal narratives can quickly change and vary over time and space. My goal is to contribute to a deeper understanding of how fighters who are fighting a prolonged, asymmetrical war balance their life situations, and why, for them, violence has become both a resource and an integral part of everyday survival.

There is, of course, no military or moral justification for the atrocities that my informants committed against the civilian population in Rwanda or in the eastern Congo. By any criteria, those who participated in these brutal actions are guilty of war crimes, even although those I interviewed firmly believed that they had been driven to violence by the structural and political circumstances of the war that were disempowering and unfair to them and their families. Extreme violence can never be justified, because the structural circumstances are disempowering for the actors. The situation of inhumanity in the Congo is a state of emergency; violence is extreme and pervasive and the civilian population lives under the most trying conditions. Yet this is even more reason to approach the issues and questions of violence and perpetrators as objectively as possible. It is vitally important to highlight the atrocities that the rebels have undoubtedly committed so that we can determine human rights violations and war crimes and to bring war criminals to justice. However, as social scientists, our task is to analyze the narratives and acts of violence as social practice and not simply to view them through the lens of criminal accountability or as legal frameworks.

During my first months in the field, I confess that I was not always at ease with the situation. I was often insecure and afraid of all the things that could go wrong in the context of war. But the more time I spent in the region and in the rebel camps, the more confidence I gained in myself and the more trust I obtained from the fighters. Throughout the period of the

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fieldwork, I had a keen interest in the fighters’ lives, and I was truly interested in understanding their life conditions and their motivations from an anthropological perspective. As many anthropologists do, I also engaged with my informants’ lives and situations at a personal level. But it is also true that there were times when I found it difficult to trust the rebels and when I shied away from establishing close relationships. I always made it clear to my informants that under no circumstances would I find violence or brutality legitimate or acceptable. In turn, they never judged my approach. However, they did often try to convince me differently, and they tried to impose their political project and propaganda onto my research and to persuade me to choose sides. For my part I tried to listen seriously to their stories and to observe their daily life with care. My goal in treating the combatants as legitimate social actors has been to enhance our understanding of human conditions of violence in zones of social disorder.

The Need for an Ethnographic Perspective While anthropologists have a long history of researching the powerless, including the victims of personal and structural violence, there has been comparably less focus on researching the perpetrators of violence. Although there exist excellent ethnographies on violent groups and conflict and the lived experiences of violence by scholars such as Jeffery Sluka, Carolyn Nordstrom, Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, and Joseba Zuliaka, there are still few ethnographic studies based on direct encounters with active fighters.

We do not lack information on the lived realities of conflict and violence, and recent studies by anthropologists such as, for example, Alcinda Honwana, Danny Hoffman, Mats Utas, and Henrik Vigh have provided knowledge of former soldiers, ex-combatants, and child soldiers, as well as insightful analysis of forced recruitment processes, socialization in armed groups, individual experiences of violence, motives for fighting, coping mechanisms, and reintegration processes. However, the discipline still lacks ethnographic studies on the actors directly implicated in making war.

Although the number of studies on ex-combatants and violence is growing, it is the case, at least in the eastern Congo, that research on violence is often carried out by humanitarian agencies whose aim is bring about peace or to assist victims (cf. Utas 2003:49). Their methodological approach is often quantitative and consequently the existing literature lacks

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ethnographic perspective, usually reducing the question of violence to one of sheer numbers: the tally of people killed, raped, or wounded. One of the major problems of conducting research into the perpetrators of violence is, of course, the simple logistical difficulty of participant observation and of personal security in violent environments, as well as the reluctance of military groups to allow the presence of nonpartisan observers in their midst.

As a result we have very few reliable ethnographic accounts of violence from active fighters living in rebel camps. As Paul Richards (2005) contends, experiences of violence are often mediated through the post facto commentary of victims or former combatants, and as a result we lack an adequate understanding of how people make war on a daily basis.

This book tries to fill at least some of the gaps in our understanding of those who make war and of how those directly involved in war attempt to balance their lives in the midst of enduring conflicts. Its overall goal is to cast light on how a group of rebel fighters, caught up in the war together with their civilian dependents, operate and perceive their living conditions in a war zone. It also deals with the ordinary disciplinary routines and coping mechanisms of everyday life inside a rebel community and with how exile and identity construction, historical narrative, and religious practice go hand in hand with mundane routines of violence. The book explores how fighters, their military leaders, and their civilian dependents experience their life situations in the heart of one of the world’s most long-standing war zones. I also look at how a conflict zone and a rebel camp can become a “prison” to some combatants while at the same time opening fields of strategic benefit to others, and, more broadly, how brutal violence might be understood within a complex of multiple historical and cultural events and strategies emanating from the most insecure of circumstances.

To understand how violence operates in the eastern Congo war, I made the decision to focus on one political-military rebel group that at the time was active in the war, the FDLR. These rebels are majority ethnic Hutus, which are originally from Rwanda. The group’s leadership has a history of genocide in Rwanda but has also been active in the Congolese conflict for more than 20 years, fighting both with and against Congolese forces and committing violent acts against local communities of various ethnic origins.

It is important to point out here that this account does not purport to be reflective of the FDLR as a whole, given the long time the group has been active in the eastern Congo conflict and the diverse backgrounds and political and military positions among its members. My fieldwork was carried

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out among a relative small community of fighters and their family members, and the individual accounts and narratives that I documented do not necessarily represent the ideology of the group as a whole. For example, while those fighters I had contact with generally said that their goal was to recapture political power in capital Kigali in Rwanda, it is possible that not all members of the group necessarily share this position.

The FDLR holds a specific role and place in the Congo conflict, and on many levels it is different from the Congolese armed groups. While many Congolese groups are grassroots community militias, the FDLR sees itself as an international organization, with some members still based outside of the Congo. As a group that fled the new regime in Rwanda and made the Congo its new base for operations, its history also makes it different, a “refugee rebel group” that moves from place to place together with a large population of refugees who are both civilians and former soldiers. The Hutu rebels are thus both a community and a military force. A large number of the group’s young members have grown up in the forest, disconnected from any kind of “normal” community, and the rebel camps in the forest are their home. While the leadership of FDLR may have changed, and its military strength weakened over the years, the group has persisted as a coherent military unit for nearly two decades. In contrast, many other local Congolese and foreign armed groups have been unstable with respect to leadership, ideology, and political intention. The FDLR has a clear political agenda, it controls several territories in the Congo interior, and its members perceive themselves as a full-time military organization rather than as “villagers with guns.” The group is currently in conflict with the government in Rwanda, and it fights both Congolese government troops and other armed groups, changing alliances constantly. In some areas in the Kivu territories, the fighters live together with Congolese civilians; in others, they occasionally carry out raids on civilians for supplies and to recruit new members. The FDLR is also active in smuggling as well as in other informal and illegal economic activities, as will be discussed in Chapter 1.

While many Congolese groups could, in theory, disarm, repatriate, and return to a home community, the Hutu fighters I interviewed perceive themselves as an exiled group caught up in a political limbo between two governments. Many group members believe that they cannot return to Rwanda because they face charges for war crimes they have committed; at the same time, they are without refugee status or Congolese citizenship.

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Thus, they are more or less pushed to the margins. Here they try to hide but also, under certain circumstances, will carry out attacks; for example, to maintain control over surrounding villages and communities, to repel or engage with enemy forces in the region, or simply to obtain supplies.

Against this background, the situation of the FDLR fighters resonates with many questions in ways that can help us to understand wartime violence: How is violence reproduced, remembered, dealt with, embodied, and strategically exercised? And how is it politically motivated and financed?

Trajectories of Violence It is essential to bear in mind that violence exists in many forms. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (2005:1) have written, violence is “productive, destructive and reproductive.” To understand wartime violence in the eastern Congo, we must move away from the concept of violence a priori and look beyond the experience of physical violence. Research on violence now defines the term more broadly: it exists in physical and psychological forms; it can be embedded in state, political, and social structures; and it can be deeply rooted in the culture of society. To make sense of conflict-related violence, I align myself with scholars applying a structural approach to violence, that is, violence that arises from institutionalized forms of systematic inequality that are perpetrated by unequal power relations, political structures, and economic deprivation (Galtung 1969). From this perspective, structural violence and physical violence are interdependent. James Scott, for example, has shown how peasants in a Malaysian village revolted against a larger structure of capitalism imposed on their local economy as a response to injustice (Scott 1976; the example is cited in Löfving 2005:78).

Conflict and conflict-related violence in the Congo do not just occur out of spontaneous rage: acts of violence are the outcome of a long process.

Violence in the Congo today is the product of prolonged historical and political crises. Violence occurs in the shadow of a dysfunctional state and in the absence of law and order and is related to social exclusion of certain groups, political competition, marginalization, and unequal access to resources and supplies. The conflicts are the result of a long process of fragmentation of society, militarization of villages and communities, and an overall general political and economic insecurity and uncertainty. In this

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setting of “bad surroundings” (Finnström 2008)—that is, a lack of peace and stability—structural violence can be seen to be rooted in the environment in the form of widespread corruption, illegal roadblocks, and illegal taxation of villages by rebel warlords or militias. Violence fills a vacuum when there are no schools, health care, or social institutions and where there is economic deprivation. On the other hand, many more people in the DRC die of disease than of bullets. In the context of political and structural violence, we can adopt the term “everyday violence.” As Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2005:21) emphasize, “Everyday violence . . . encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formation.” Violence in the DRC exists on many levels. It is visible in dead and wounded bodies and in the experiences of refugees and civilians, and it is visible in symbolic form: in military barracks, in uniformed soldiers patrolling the streets, and in the widespread use of weapons. Structural and symbolic violence interact with more brutal, physical violence in special ways; violence lurks below the surface and is brought into the open in different contexts and for various reasons, including military maneuvers, raiding, and looting. This is not to say that individuals do not have the capacity to act independently. Throughout this book, I will deploy Honwana’s definition of “tactical agency” to emphasize “a specific type of agency, that is devised to cope with the concrete, immediate conditions of their lives in order to maximize the circumstances created by their military and violent environment” (Honwana, in Honwana & De Boeck 2005:49).4 In the case of the FDLR, some are individuals who act from a position of weakness while others act from a position of power and dominance. Furthermore, we could talk about a trajectory of violence in which there are various peak periods of physical violence, such as the genocide in 1994, which was followed by periods of revenge and reciprocal violence, and then by periods of more peaceful structural violence, only to erupt again in the form of further physical attacks on civilians by military units.

Legitimating Violence: Competing Narratives Violence can be rationalized and justified through political ideology, historical memory, or religion or as a means of self-defense, to give only a few examples. In conflict areas, where there has been mass reciprocal violence

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for centuries and where there are multiple conflicting and competing narratives, violence is often a subjective experience that will be interpreted differently depending on whose version we hear. A child soldier will tell one story, an adult soldier will tell another, a warlord will tell the story differently, and all narratives and experiences will vary according to age, gender, social status, ethnicity, and so on (Nordstrom 1997). Some actors will find violence legitimate under certain circumstances—for example, for revenge or as protection—whereas others will find it illegitimate. David Riches’ (1986:8) definition of violence as “an act of physical hurt deemed legitimate by the performer and illegitimate by (some) witnesses” is useful to apply in this study, because, as the ethnographic chapters will show, that from the perspective of the fighters in the Congo forests the war against Rwanda is often held to be perfectly legitimate. Riches has developed a model he calls the “triangle of violence,” in which he distinguishes between the viewpoints of the performer, the victim, and the witness. He points out that the definition of an act of violence might also vary between viewpoints and can be contested. On the one hand, the performer, he contends, might find violence justified and right; the victim, on the other hand, will find violence unjust, and the observer or witness might have different viewpoints depending on his or her relation with either the performer or the victim (Riches 1986). My witnessing as an anthropologist, for example, is quite different from that of someone investigating war crimes. Riches’ model allows us to understand that violence is interpreted differently depending on whose narrative we have in mind. However, following Andrew Strathern and Pamela Stewart (2002), what it does not explain is that the relations between victims and perpetrators, and assumptions about who is which, are discursive and that the victim-perpetrator designation can also change over time. They develop Riches’ model further, expanding from subjective perspectives to plural perspectives and broadening the experience of violence from subjective understandings to collective actions. They argue that the categories are always more complex, and the role of a witness, a performer, or a victim might change over time: those who were victims can turn into performers and vice versa (2002:4) Further, they note that all performing sides in a conflict may regard themselves as victims of, for example, injustice or marginalization (ibid.). Such an approach allows us to understand that in the case of the FDLR, violence does not occur in a vacuum. It is a product of a long and complicated history and of political and social construction. In long-standing conflicts, the various sides in the conflict

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have their own versions and narratives of history and their own personal viewpoints of what is going on. Riches’ definition of violence as a subjective matter, legitimate from the viewpoint of those who carry out violence, leads us beyond a simplistic understanding of wars and violence in preconceived terms of “victims” and “perpetrators.”

Victims and Perpetrators—Beyond the Terminology At the start of my analysis of violence in the Congo, I habitually used the concept “perpetrator” to refer to the use of physical violence by the Hutu rebels. However, I soon found that such a term was unproductive. Contemporary wars are often described as “an ensemble” of victims and perpetrators in which the victims are those who suffer violence, perpetrators are those who carry out violence, and civilians are logically understood to be those who stand apart from battle (Shaw 2003:147–148). In the eastern Congo, using clear-cut designations such as “victims” and “perpetrators” is inadequate to describe a multi-actor conflict where there are more than just two counterparts. Chris Coulter (2009), for example, in her book, which is set in Sierra Leone, discusses how analyzing wars as if they were divisible into definitive categories tends to overlook other types of violence. For example, her female informants were the victims of violent incidents, such as rape and abduction, but such victimization should not obscure other roles that women had during war, such as their domestic work in rebel camps. By becoming a fighter, for example, Coulter argues, one also escapes falling victim to the violence of others (Coulter 2009:148, 2008; see also Utas 2005a and 2005b for a similar argument). In a critique of the global structures of human rights and the politics of “naming” social roles in war, Lubkemann points out in his study on the enduring war in Mozambique (2008), that although civilians, victims, and combatants perform a number of social roles, as, for example, neighbors, elders, or workers, the sole task for researchers and outside observers has become to write about how the inhabitants of a war zone are coping with violence, as if that was the only social role people have. He writes that those in war zones are often reduced to single categories; for example, “combatants” are those who perpetuate violence, “victims” suffer violence, and “refugees” flee violence. (Lubkemann 2008:12). Such categorization is particularly true of how the FDLR is

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portrayed in public debate and in the discourse of human rights as génocidaires—as perpetrators and evildoers.

Following Ivana Maček, I take the approach that people caught up in war can be both victims and perpetrators at the same time and that, as similarly pointed out by Strathern and Stewart (2002), roles are likely to change over time (Maček 2009:71). The conflict in the eastern Congo is confused and ambiguous, relations between “us” and “them” are blurred, and the civilian population is likely to be drawn into the politics of war or to be politically or violently exploited. Hence, while it may be unavoidable in a court of law, to use the label “perpetrator” is analytically unproductive if we seek to gain a more coherent anthropological understanding of war and violence. Furthermore, the term “perpetrator” was never used by those I spoke with themselves, which presented me with a major dilemma of representation. In order to understand how my informants perceived the world subjectively, I had to forget and ban (at least for a moment) the moral and legal framework. By adopting a local understanding of violence, I found that the fighters’ interpretation of the conflict was radically different from that of the international community or the Rwandan government, who regard them purely and simply as perpetrators.

Neil Whitehead (2004, 2007) gives a telling example when he argues that violence must be explored from the local and cultural context in which it is carried out. For example, he writes, while a suicide bomber is often considered a religious fanatic and evildoer in the Western context, in another context the same suicide bomber who blows himself or herself up, often killing innocent victims, will find his or her position regarded as an act of sacrifice, and he or she will be acclaimed as a hero or a martyr (2007:48). Analogously, many Hutu fighters I spoke with rejected any claims of being perpetrators; they considered themselves the victims of a long history of violence in Rwanda and of being “pushed into exile” in the aftermath of genocide, forced to spend a lifetime in the forest. Hence their own subjective experience is that they suffer violence and are victims of a long history of marginalization by the Tutsis in Rwanda. To achieve the cultural and local understanding of the violence of the rebels, by moving outside of the framework of human rights and the discourse of peace enforcers on violence in the Congo, I would argue that exploring the rebels’ vision of themselves as exiles (alternatively as rebels, liberators, freedom fighters, or “saviors”) can provide a window for understanding other processes and experiences. These include their sense of exclusion and being

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pushed from their own country and how that led to feelings of marginalization, as well as to ways of understanding their identity and ethnicity as “Hutu rebels” who fight for “justice” rather than as “perpetrators” doing bad.

Instead of defining the fighters as simply perpetrators, I would choose to analyze the FDLR as an exile military community, or as a “moving military base.” In this context, some of the members are identifiably war criminals—and hence are indeed perpetrators—but others are simply survivors in the forest. Women and children in this context are truly liminal.

Using the rebels’ definition of themselves as “exiles” opens up an understanding of the diversity within the rebel group. While this study explores one rebel group and how they lead their lives through war, I want to emphasize that my informants were not simply a fighting force dedicated to the achievement of clear military goals. Rather, the rebel camp in which I carried out the fieldwork was a much more complex social space. The camp was formally a barracks for soldiers who had fought in the Rwandan war in 1994 and then in the Congo wars during the 1990s and who continued to fight. However, the camp was also a community of uprooted and displaced families, people who left their homes as refugees in the 1990s, women who married soldiers, teenagers who grew up in an armed rebel camp, and newborn babies. In the forests of the South Kivu province, this group formed an isolated enclave on a mountaintop. This disparate mix of kin groups and military organization had subsisted together in the Congolese mountains for over 20 years. While the hardliners of the military movement were (in their own words) connected to the genocide in Rwanda, the majority of the fighters were either very young or not even born when the genocide was carried out. They were essentially diasporic Hutus living in the Congo and fighting for justice in another country.

Rejecting simplistic designations of perpetrators as evil by nature, I have sought to understand the lives of those I interviewed through their own self-definition as exiles trapped in political limbo. To examine violence through a lens of dislocation, displacement, and exclusion can help us to appreciate how the construction of identity and historical memory produce and reproduce shared understandings of meanings, including violence, in a liminal space. Inspired by Liisa Malkki (1992, 1995), Pamela Ballinger (2002), Paul Connerton (1989) and other scholars on identity, displacement, and collective memory, I explored how the rebel fighters and their families tried to erase their history completely and to build a new, shared,

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memory and commonly assimilated narrative of “what actually happened” during the genocide. By burrowing into such narratives more deeply, it became possible for me to develop a more nuanced perspective of how violence is constructed and lived inside the rebel camp. Although the Hutu fighters were one of the strongest and most powerful rebel groups currently operating in the eastern Congo during the time I carried out fieldwork, the majority of the soldiers believe that they cannot leave the region and that they are being hunted down as outlaws. Violence in this case is not only an expression of power or dominance, it is also a defensive response to a political reality.

Exile in the State of Exception This analysis has taken particular inspiration from the work of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, specifically from his ideas of “the state of exception” and “bare life.’ In his book, Homo Sacer (1998), Agamben recalls a metaphorical figure of Roman law from the ancient Roman Empire. This figure, homo sacer, is used as a metaphor to describe the relationship between power, law, and life. During the Roman Empire, homo sacer was a symbol or a figure of a man who had committed a crime. Anyone who had committed a crime lost legal rights as a citizen and was banned from society and as such, excluded from the law. Homo sacer could not be sacrificed in any kind of religious ceremony or ritual—he or she could be killed but not sacrificed (Agamben 1998:88; Sarat et al. 2007:158). Agamben uses the concepts zoe (life) and bios (political life) to describe the separation between animal life and political life. Agamben uses this figure to explore the sovereign power (belonging, in Roman times, to any ruler) of the Bush administration after the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2005:86). Agamben built a theory of the state of exception—a state of emergency in which the law can be suspended under legal and juridical orders. A state of exception in Agamben’s terms is a modern institution, a “paradigmatic form of governance” (Humphreys 2006:678). In this space, the law can be suspended for the preservation of the juridical order. Following Agamben, a state of exception is an extension of power, or “secrets of power” (Agamben 2005:86) at the cost of human and civil rights. He writes that “what is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual thus producing a legally un-namable and unclassifiable being”

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(Agamben 2005:3). For example, the USA could intervene in Afghanistan and capture any civilian “terrorist,” bring him to Guantanamo Bay, and strip him of legal rights and individual agency. Agamben argues that prisoners in Guantanamo Bay become figures, like homo sacer, who are excluded from the law (political life, bios) and reduced to a bare life (zoe).

Prisoners have lost all legal rights; they can be killed under the suspension of the law. In his book State of Exception, he writes: “A theory of a state of exception is the preliminary condition for any definition of the relation that binds and, at the same time, abandons the living being to law. It is this ‘no-mans’-land between public law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life” (Agamben 2005:1).

While Agamben explores in detail the relationship between political life, sovereignty, and global discourses of human rights, he uses the example of the refugee as a category. He argues that refugees entering refugee camp are reduced to a bare life within bio-political and legal structures; they enter a state of exception, in the sense that they fall out of juridical norms of society, and have no legal rights. As another example of this ambiguous zone, he cites the Nazi concentration camps as a “symbol of modernity” in order to argue that prisoners could be killed by German authorities because the law could be suspended under the preservation of the juridical order (Agamben 1998). In other words, a state of exception is a space where boundaries are blurred and there is no distinction between legal and illegal, law and violence, war and peace, life and death. Agamben’s work is often cited in refugee studies and in analyses of asylum/refugee camps as states (or places) of exception. They are spaces “of sovereign power and exception producing forms of ‘bare life’ that rule out political community” (Bulley 2014:65). In entering the camp, refugees enter a state of exception, stripped of their identity and reduced to bare life (see Bulley 2014:65 for a longer discussion). The critique of Agamben’s and other scholars’ use of the theory is that it tends to provide an overly simplistic characterization of places such as refugee or concentration camps as spaces where individual agency is often totally absent, and it tends to overlook the complexity of social relations even in the most marginalized social settings (e.g., Bulley 2014; Ramadan 2013). In anthropology, we might call these “gray zones,” and much social science research on informal, underground, violent, and marginal groups describes spaces that are gray enough to quality for Agamben’s state of exception. In the case of the Hutu fighters in the Congo forest,

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Agamben’s theories of a state of exception have been an important influence. The rebels can be seen as “political actors” operating in “the wasteland between exile and belonging, between life and death” (Nikolopoulou 2000:125). In this way, they are reduced to what Agamben has defined as bare life. Exiled in the mountains, they live in a state of exception, or a space we could call a wasteland, a gray zone, no-man’s-land, or a political limbo, not simply excluded from the wider society, but without any legal rights or citizenship.5 They dwell in a space where the boundaries between good and bad, legal and illegal, and peace and war, rather than being negotiated or contested, are simply dissolved.

The Congo rebels are not prisoners in a camp and they cannot be defined simply as victims. However, they are “prisoners” of a structural conflict. While Agamben sees the concentration camps as a horrific symbol of brutal modernity, I see the many hundreds of bamboo military barracks located in peripheral hills and mountains in the eastern Congo as a reflection of structural violence. They are the physical symbols of political failure, state fragmentation, and mass reciprocal violence due to an unresolved historical past. The Hutu rebels live as outlaws, hunted down by enemy groups, hiding in mountain shelters without legal rights or a right of return back to their country of origin. Even in these barest and most exceptional conditions, even in the absence of law and citizenship, of rights and claims in the society in which they live (Congo), they still live in communities.

Like other communities, they have norms, rules, practices, ideologies, relationships, trust, distrust, and individual agency. While philosophical considerations such as those of Agamben are helpful for rethinking conventional concepts, I would argue that we need to understand how people experience life in such liminal spaces. We need to understand how violence is produced, constructed, and endured in such a zone where boundaries are blurred. Perhaps violence is a consequence of being reduced to a bare life. But life is not as bare as Agamben would have it. It is the task of anthropology to reveal even the most extreme forms of human practice, including brutal violence, in all its complexity.

Working in a Conflict Zone This book is the result of 15 months of anthropological fieldwork in the eastern Congo. The fieldwork was carried out between 2010 and 2012 and

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again in 2016 and was divided into three different stages. The ethnographic data was gathered in various rebel camps, in demobilization centers for excombatants, and in territories controlled by militia and rebel groups. I am not the first to point out that research in conflict areas is difficult; scholars such as Elizabeth Wood (2006) or Koen Vlassenroot (2006), for example, have discussed the methodological and ethical challenges of doing fieldwork in conflict settings. The eastern Congo is a volatile region with sporadic violent outbreaks. Everyday life is under constant threat through instability, low levels of trust, and prevailing uncertainty. It is plagued by political insecurity, and corruption and poverty is deeply rooted and rampant. There are no functional social institutions, there is no social security, the Congolese police and military are weak, disorganized, corrupt, and involved in crimes and violence against the civilians they should be protecting. There are few reliable sources of accurate and unbiased information; the media and local journalists are suppressed, official data and statistics are often wrong and rumors are widespread. In such a setting, manipulation, even lies, are a part of everyday life. In this environment, it is difficult to plan beforehand how to move from place to place, and one is forced to be flexible in choosing how to do so. This was the case throughout the whole fieldwork process, and I think it is useful here to describe my research methods and how I gained access to the field in some detail, as well as outlining some of the limitations that I encountered.

During the first weeks of my fieldwork, I was lucky to meet Ray. Ray was a short-haired man in his late thirties with a great smile and a fine sense of humor. He grew to become a dear friend and collaborator, and we came to work closely together in the time that followed. Ray and I met for the first time in his office in Bukavu, where he had been trying to set up a small research organization to document the relationship between armed groups and the mining industry. Through Ray’s working experience and local knowledge of rebel activity in the region, I was able to pinpoint a number of key actors inside armed groups. It was Ray who introduced me to Cédric. Cédric was a man in his late thirties and of Rwandan origin. He told me that prior to the Rwandan genocide, he had been employed as a bodyguard for the former Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, but, at the time we met, he was working for the FDLR as an intelligence operative. His role there was to monitor the urban areas and provide updates to the organization—observing, documenting, and analyzing the political and security dynamics in the urban center, Bukavu, and then providing the

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information to the rebels operating out of the forest. Cédric became one of my coworkers and a gate-opener for access to the rebel camp. After consulting with a range of contacts, we decided to travel south to the Uvira region to talk to a number of armed groups based in the area. It was in this way that I made contact with one of the groups of Hutu fighters living in the mountainous region in the South Kivu province. The Hutu rebels have several military units positioned in both North and South Kivu, and my fieldwork, during the time that followed, was carried out in one of those military camps, deep in the Itombwe Forest, beginning at the foot of the Uvira Mountains in the South Kivu province.

At that point, a Swedish documentary filmmaker, Mark, came to meet me—we had agreed to make an ethnographic film together to complement my research. We returned twice to the camp to conduct ethnographic fieldwork and to make the film. Together we relocated to a rebel unit located on a mountain peak in the forest. The rebel camp, which I call Rainbow Brigade, was an “intelligence unit” and home to about 150 soldiers and their wives and children, and it was here that I collected the most comprehensive data. When I stepped into Rainbow Brigade for the first time, I stepped into an unknown setting of soldier and rebel activity. While I had lived and worked in several war zones before, to be in a rebel camp among soldiers and their families was a novel experience for me. I had to learn about the hierarchy and about military order. I had to call soldiers by their rank rather than by name. And I soon learned not to question the officers’ authority. While my first days in the camp were characterized by mutual suspicion, I never experienced any actual hostility. The rebel leaders, the fighters, and their family members welcomed me to the camp and said they had positive feelings about having a visitor in their midst. They built me a very small, but neat, bamboo hut, close to where the leaders lived—they called it Hotel Forest—and that is where I lived while in the camp. The soldiers’ bodyguards brought me food, they washed my clothes and cleaned my house, and at night the officers made sure there were always bodyguards standing outside the hut where I was sleeping to protect me. I always felt safe in the camp; the soldiers and their wives consistently treated me with respect, curiosity, and friendly eyes.

Fieldwork in the camp consisted of observation and participation in daily life, as well as formal and informal interviews, and I usually walked around in the camp with a pen and notebook. During the day, I joined in with the routine activities of the camp. I followed the fighters to the

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bamboo churches, to the fields to look for food, and spoke with them and their wives and children. During the evenings, I would sit at the fireside, speaking to the officers, commanders and other high-ranking soldiers living close to my house. By taking part in the daily life of the camp, I tried to acquire insights into how the fighters and their family members subjectively experienced the conditions of their lives, seeking to understand what it is like to live in the midst of insecurity and to fight an endless war, as well as how the rebels imagined their world and their future. I witnessed military performances, church ceremonies, and late-night prayers and attempted to comprehend the social organization and structure of the camp. At first, everything seemed to be going well.

In anthropology it is generally accepted that if we establish trust and long-term relationships with our informants, we can expect to understand not only what they think is important but also why they think so. One of the goals of establishing lasting relationships with the people we study is to find out how they experience their world and to collect accurate data about how they perceive it. Building trust and rapport, anthropologists believe, will ultimately generate good data. However, this was not the case in the rebel camp. In a militarized setting, and in the midst of a group that habitually uses spying and deceit to collect information, I soon found myself in a tricky situation. After a couple of weeks, I realized that I was followed, even controlled, by a group of soldiers that the leaders had allocated and instructed to spy on me. This group monitored my interactions, taking notes on whom I had spoken to and who had said what. This attention was not confined to me alone. In the camp it was standard practice that everyone was subjected to the strict hierarchy, including surveillance by the leadership, and many lower-ranking soldiers, women, and children were afraid of speaking about sensitive topics in front of their superiors. I gradually began to notice that they were wary of speaking freely and would only open up about their personal lives out of earshot of the leaders. While I was increasingly accepted by the officers, the women, children, and lowerranking soldiers became more distant and quiet, simply because they were afraid to talk to me.

Given this situation, most of my data was collected among the highranking rebel leaders and soldiers with middle-rank positions. However, while I had limited personal interactions with the other groups, my observations of their anxiety and reluctance to speak openly were in themselves a source of information about the general climate of fear in the camp, the

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prevailing gender and hierarchical inequalities, and how a military camp is organized and structured.

Although my informants in general spoke little about their personal lives, they were quite prepared to speak freely about political topics and general considerations of the war. At times, it was very evident that the officers and other soldiers were actively promoting their own agenda and avoiding other, more revealing topics. The group were very well aware of how outsiders perceive them and of how they are depicted as génocidaires, murderers, and evildoers. My presence in the camp was a chance for them to prove otherwise and they clearly intended to make use of me to spread their own political messages and propaganda: that outsiders are under a false impression about the genocide and that the political regime in Kigali, not the FDLR, was in fact the main motivator behind the genocide.

When I began my fieldwork in the camp, I predicted that one problem would be to speak with the fighters about their personal experiences of war.

I was right. However, they spoke freely about their living conditions, their histories, and their political ideology. They rarely requested anonymity but, rather, wanted their opinions to be widely known to the outside world.

Hence, sometimes they tried to make me into their spokesperson—to take political sides and to adopt their version of the truth.

At times I found it difficult to maintain a neutral position and struggled not to fall into the trap of “ethnographic seduction” (Robben 1996, 1995:83). Antonius Robben, for example, describes his first meeting with his informants (Argentinian high-ranking generals) to be quite different from what he expected. Based on what he knew about these men—that they had been accused of torturing civilians, of kidnappings, and of the disappearance of innocent people—it came as a shock for him to encounter their kindness, courtesy, and gentlemanly behavior. (1995:83; see also Sluka 2005: 280–290 for a longer discussion on the same subject). Robben soon found himself in a situation in which he met with officers whose politics he detested but for whom he felt a personal liking and attachment. This was very similar to my own experiences. From a self-reflexive perspective, I know that I was sometimes blinded by the friendly relationships I had with my informants; further, I had to struggle not to become biased or blinded by my own emotions.6 In the field situation, it was difficult for me not to become personally engaged in people’s suffering and miserable conditions.

Now, and at a distance, however, I find it easier to allocate the responsibility that my informants must bear for their own actions.

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Another challenge to my objectivity was that my interaction with people in and around Rainbow Brigade was almost entirely limited to the inhabitants of the camp; I was therefore dependent on this relatively small number of fighters, their families, and civilians to inform me about the surrounding situation and about how the rebel camp might be perceived in the local communities or by their enemies. While trekking with the soldiers, for example, I had to trust their knowledge of the terrain and follow their advice, including that relating to hostile forces around us. Through my interviews with ex-combatants from various groups, townspeople, aid workers, local officials, and others, I was able to gain a fair idea of how other people perceive and are affected by the presence of armed groups.

However, it remained impossible to capture a fully rounded picture of the situation and I made no attempt to do so.

One dimension of fieldwork was the question of language and memory.

Like the majority of the inhabitants of Eastern Africa, the rebels are multilingual. Although I made a serious attempt to learn Swahili, to my regret I was not able to learn Swahili or Kinyarwanda to the extent that I could even engage in day-to-day conversation without an interpreter. When Rwanda adopted linguistic reform, changing the official language from French to English, the Hutu community quickly followed. Most officers speak fluent English, and the ordinary soldiers practice English in the “English club” in camp. On the other hand, the older people and the soldiers’ wives and children did not speak fluent English. Between themselves, however, the rebels spoke mostly Kinyarwanda, a language that I never learned.

It is unfortunate that these language barriers possibly led me to miss some important information. However, my second co-worker, Christopher, was a great help. Christopher, a 20-year-old man from Burundi, speaks Kinyarwanda, Swahili, French, and English fluently and helped me in very many ways to frame my understanding. Together we bounced around words, discussing their local meaning and the way they should be interpreted to fit the context. His knowledge of the conflicts in the Great Lakes region, his personal experience of the war in Burundi, and his Tutsi identity all contributed to our many challenging discussions. Christopher was able to identify his own history with that of the Hutu rebels, especially the younger ones. During the war in Burundi, he was forced to flee the violence in the streets of the capital Bujumbura, and for several years, he lived in a temporary refugee camp in the forest. Several years later, when the civil war in Burundi had calmed down, Christopher left the camp and

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found his way back to Bujumbura, where he learned that his mother had died. This personal background of war, violence, and loss, as well his personal experiences of rebel violence, enabled Christopher to befriend the combatants in the rebel camp and establish good relationships with them.

Some of the interviews and conversations I had with the rebels were tape recorded or filmed and later transcribed. However, the high-ranking leaders refused to be recorded on tape, citing security reasons. It was also not always possible to use a tape recorder—there was no electricity in the camp, and when I ran out of batteries, I had to rely on pen and paper.

Every night before I went to bed, I sat by the fire and wrote detailed field notes and added information to the notes I had taken during the day.

Over and above the limitations I have described, my fieldwork in Rainbow Brigade was further circumscribed, perhaps self-evidently, by my own lack of experience of much of what my informants had been through. My informants had their memories, some of them memories of traumatic, violent, or confusing events. As Susan Sontag (2003) has written, in critical and traumatic events, language becomes even more difficult to translate into actual words. Thus, we can only gain an imperfect glimpse of what “really” happened; we cannot know how it was felt or experienced at that time and in that moment. I myself do not know what war-related pain, suffering, and grief feel like, nor, on the other hand can I understand what it feels like to plan and participate in brutal attacks against enemies or civilians, to kill, murder, rape or torture someone else. Nor can I completely grasp the feelings and memories that remain in the aftermath of such deeds.

If acting on the world is agency, my informants sometimes acted on the world with brutal, and, on occasion, deadly agency. Such experiences exist beyond my knowledge; however, we can know how our informants talk about these experiences, giving us an understanding of how they experience the world and how they act on it.

One final caveat about the fieldwork is necessary. It was difficult to stay in the camp for longer than a month at a time due to the surrounding instability and insecurity. Being close to one rebel group can pose a security risk, and I was not willing to jeopardize my own or my co-workers’ security.

In total, I spent no more than three months with the rebels, of which one month was trekking—that is, walking in the mountains and sleeping in the forest or in villages. Although the time I spent inside the camp was relatively short, I believe that the material I gathered was thick, and given the hierarchy and the nature of control in the camp, I am not sure I would have

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been able to collect more comprehensive data simply by staying longer.

Therefore, in addition to living in the camp with the rebels, I continued to conduct interviews with former soldiers in the demobilizing center. In retrospect, however, I believe that the ethnographic data I collected inside the camp provided me with the richest material.

Visual Material and Collaborations Part of the fieldwork in the camp was carried out in collaboration with a Swedish documentary filmmaker, using the video camera as an ethnographic tool. Working with a camera opened up a new way to document and collect data. Some of the high-ranking leaders were reluctant to reveal their faces and identities in the footage, although the younger combatants believed it was a good opportunity for them to speak out and communicate with the rest of the world. Yet almost everyone agreed to be recorded and videotaped.

There were, however, other practical issues that had an impact on the material we gathered. Since there was no electricity in the camp, we had to rely on solar panels connected to motorcycle batteries to charge the batteries to the camera. It was not always sufficient. The rainy season lasts for months in this part of the Congo, and due to heavy rainfalls every day and lack of sun in the hills, we could not charge the batteries to the extent that we needed to; therefore, we only used the camera for a few hours a day. The rest of the time, we used a tape recorder to capture the sounds of the camp—to record interviews, songs, speeches, and ceremonies in the church.

When we used the camera, at least in the beginning, it was clear that the rebels took advantage of being filmed. They used the opportunity to disseminate their propaganda, to discuss the political issues of the war, and to speak about the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame. The younger soldiers and the civilian population highlighted the bad living conditions in the camp and spoke about the ignorance of the international community in refusing to assist the Hutu refugees with help and support. Working subsequently with the footage from a distance, the visual material has been very helpful in terms of analyzing the data and as an empirical reference. In particular, it has helped to analyze group interactions, to remember people’s facial expressions and body language and to recall the public manifestation in the church, in the English club, and so on. The material also helped me to remember details, such as the number of people present, the

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setting, and what items they had, such as clothes, weapons, and so on. To collaborate in this way and carry out a mutual project had many advantages; however, although I benefitted greatly from the contributions and ideas of my co-workers, I alone bear the responsibility for the interpretation of the data in this book.

Reliability of Sources and Ethical Considerations It is important to say a few words on the reliability of sources and data.

While there exists extensive research on the genocide in Rwanda and the spillover violence and conflicts in the eastern DRC, as well as numerous historical narratives of the Congo wars, there is comparatively very little research on the main Rwandan armed rebel force, the FDLR, and I have not been able to find any ethnographic or sociological study of the organization. Given the secrecy surrounding the group, the difficulty of accessing the rebel camps, and conducting firsthand interviews and observations with high-ranking leaders and active fighters, it was extremely difficult to obtain reliable information on this military grouping. Data does exist, however, on defectors, ex-soldiers, and other official sources.7 In the absence of academic studies, a number of UN reports and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) publications by local and international consultants have been published. But many of these reports also rely on interviews with excombatants, former members, and Rwandan and Congolese officials. The limited access to first-hand information has led to a situation in which much of the published information is predominantly anecdotal. Nevertheless, many reports are well written and are carefully analyzed, reflecting the voices of the civilian population as well as providing accurate information about the FDLR leadership and its military operations. Research by organizations such as Human Rights Watch (2009), the International Crisis Group (2003, 2005, 2009), the Pole Institute (2010), and the Enough Project (2008, 2013), the Peace Appeal Foundation (Hege 2009), and the World Bank (Romkema 2007, 2009) have provided informative reports on the origin of the group, its leadership and war alliances, as has the Usalama Project (2012b, 2012c, 2013),8 which produced a series of reports on armed groups in the region. Although there are few reports dedicated exclusively to the FDLR, the group is often included in content and analyses of conflict dynamics. In addition, the FDLR is mentioned in annual reports on the

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security and military situation in the Kivu regions compiled by the UN group of experts (United Nations Security Council 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018).

To conduct research with a rebel group that tries to protect its military interests and identity and to promote its own agenda can be problematic.

Previous research on the FDLR has often been conducted among excombatants, deserters, ex-officers, and other military staff who have a past history with the rebels, and much of it relies on the same sources of information. In other existing documentation, there is a pattern of similar kinds of data being repeated (also because the rebels themselves are often repeating the same “official narratives”) at the same time there is much about the group that is still missing. While I am aware of the missing information, my aim has not been to fill in the gaps about the group’s military function, leadership, operations or intelligence, nor was it to map the entire structure of the FDLR or document names of combatants, camps, or leaders. My focus was on the rebels’ experience of being part of an FDLR combat group and my fieldwork in the camp was an attempt to understand how these rebels live and act in a war zone and how they comprehend their own life situations and how violence is justified in their own words.

While it is hard to obtain suitable and reliable data in a war zone, ethical considerations present another set of challenges. One of the main difficulties working in a war-torn society, especially with perpetrators and active fighters in war, is how to approach the question of ethics. To undertake fieldwork with rebels and others directly implicated in war crimes certainly challenged standard ethical codes. I have tried my best to follow the general ethical guidelines set up by anthropological ethics committees, including the protection of the confidentiality and identity of my informants by using pseudonyms for names and places unless they are widely known to the public, as is the case with known rebel leaders, warlords, and high commanders among others. To carry out the study I applied for permission from the Congolese authorities. These authorities, including the Congolese army and the National Intelligence Agency (ANR, Agence Nationale de Renseignements) in the South Kivu province provided me with the necessary permission to conduct research among a foreign armed group.

All my informants in the camp were fully informed about the research and consented to participate in the study. Because the setting is a hierarchical and top-down controlled unit, consent was first negotiated with the rebel officers, who also gave permission on behalf of the lower-ranks, families, and civilians in the camp. While my informants were very well aware

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of their own need for protection and personal security, and regularly change names and speak in a coded language when communicating military logistics, I want to stress that even I do not know the real names of my informants. I also do not possess any kind of secret or hidden information; the leaders were adamant that I was not allowed to enter any of the militarized spheres of operations and logistics and furthermore that was never my intention. Where I refer to military capacity, structure of the system, and so on, I am using information that has been collected by organizations and agencies and is open to the public, often easy to access online, in reports, and in in journal articles. Where I interviewed ex-combatants from the FDLR, I firmly believe that my account of these interviews would not present any risk to them or jeopardize their security. An increasing number of ex-combatants are open to a dialogue with agencies such as the UN, and numerous NGOs and further data can be readily obtained in demobilization camps or in civilian communities controlled by the FDLR. Nevertheless, I have been confronted with many dilemmas in the writing process. For example, it was common for the leaders and soldiers to try to promote their own political agenda while avoiding discussion of other more compromising topics, and my informants may not have anticipated that I would also describe the more destructive sides of rebel activity. I also believe that some of the younger combatants were not fully alert to their own need for security and protection and may have revealed information that the leadership would not accept seeing spread. For example, many young combatants proudly performed in front of the camera and begged me to include their pictures in the book; they also provided information to me in confidence. In cases where I cannot fully ensure my informant’s security, I have chosen not to include such data or photographs. It goes without saying that in this setting, the leaders had good knowledge of who among their soldiers was talking to me and could no doubt determine what they were talking about. The best one can say here is that these informants chose to talk to me and decided what to say and that they are the best assessors of the risk of interacting with a foreign anthropologist.

How to Read the Book This book has seven chapters. After the Introduction, I begin by providing a historical and political background of the wars and crises in Rwanda and the Congo. Since history plays a crucial role in my informants’ current life,

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it is necessary to explore the long political history and power struggles between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda. The focus is on the events that eventually led to the genocide in 1994 and its aftermath. Writing a history of the Great Lakes region is a difficult endeavor. In this region, history is full of contested and competing narratives of what really happened. History has been used by all sides in the conflicts to manipulate and spread propaganda with consequences lived out in mass reciprocal violence.

Building on previous research by historians, social scientists, and anthropologists, I trace the “official narrative” of history. As I come back to it in Chapter 2, this narrative is contested by members of the FDLR, who argue for a different version of historical “truth.” In Chapter 3, I explore the social and military organization and daily life of a rebel camp. Here I challenge the popular stereotype of rebel activity as chaotic and violent by providing a more nuanced ethnography of how the rebels and their families live in war. The focus here is on the everyday routines, the hardships, and the coping strategies in daily life—doing, knowing, acting, and reflecting on their current situation. As in many anthropological studies, a focus on ordinary everyday life can help to “get inside a (putative) culture and associated holistic assumption about cultural processes whereby understanding one set of practices . . . demands rooting them in other activities carried out by the same actors” (Ballinger 2002:9).9 By analyzing the daily routines of the camp—such as attendance at the bamboo churches, praying sessions, cleaning and the preparation of food, military training and performances and the orders of daily life—what people actually do, I believe that we can better understand the underlying webs of meanings and how our informants themselves make sense of the surroundings. The chapter demonstrates how routine tasks, decency, and boredom go hand in hand with the organization of security and the planning of military logistics. Life on a mountaintop in the midst of war is an insecure and difficult existence, and the chapter describes some of the ritualistic expressions of the community’s efforts to cope with violence and hardship. Some of my informants experienced violence partly through the verbalizing of it in the form of laments, stories, and narratives. They also used nonverbal expressions, such as religious ceremonies, celebrations, and other kinds of public manifestations, to make sense of their surroundings.

In Chapter 4, I look beyond the legacy of the genocide and explore how a rebel community transmits, produces, and reproduces ideologies of violence in day-to-day interaction and various forms of performances. In

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the setting of isolation and desperation, I trace the reconfigurations of memory and identity and how concepts such as exile, dislocation, time, and space weave into real military and political action. In particular, I explore how memories and ideologies of the past give rise to current political decisions and a refusal to lay down arms until the rebels have achieved their goal of returning to their country, Rwanda.

Chapter 5 examines the destructive rebel military system and how the camp becomes a “prison” to some combatants, while, at the same time, the leadership experiences it as a place to escape war crimes and find strategic benefit. It explores why soldiers and their families stay in the camp rather than lay down their weapons and repatriate. In this chapter I explore how the larger military system continuously erodes a combatant’s personal identity and how leaders construct “fighter” identities to maintain cohesiveness among soldiers. Overall, the chapter explores the paradox of living in a highly destructive system of terror and fear, while simultaneously transferring strong identities of loyalty and personal commitment to the group.

In Chapter 6, I move away from the camp and explore how the rebels interact with the surrounding civilian communities. I explore interactions and relationships under conditions of war and how the rebels strategically exercise terror to maintain and balance power. Terror warfare is not only about acts of killing but also about a strategy to control every aspect of civilian life through humiliation and threats of violence. I also discuss how the soldiers navigate landscapes of (in)security, danger, and fear and how the fighters themselves balance on the thin line between making war and surviving it. In Chapter 7, I present concluding remarks and return to the discussion and explanation of understanding violence both as a state of exception and as a way of life and exile.

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