Vol 33 (2013): Special Issue: Confronting Mass Atrocities
Articles

Mudende: Trauma and Massacre in a Refugee Camp

Emily A. Lynch
University of Texas at Austin
Published November 6, 2013

Abstract

The narratives in this article frame Congolese refugees’ violent experiences of the recent past in relation to a protracted forced migration: the Gihembe refugee camp in Rwanda and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees’ (UNHCR) efforts to resettle these refugees in Western nations. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I elaborate on the style of narration used by refugees within UNHCR interviews to demonstrate how refugees narrate trauma and violence in everyday life in the form of expressive idioms rather than more literal, detailed, and technical descriptions of massacres as prompted by the UNHCR. Within these interviews, the subject of Mudende is never far from the surface. A former refugee camp where many occupants of Gihembe lived until 1996 when it became the site of brutal massacres, narratives related to Mudende invoke refugees’ understandings of the political climate in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) surrounding the 1996 civil war. Yet when narrated to the UNHCR, memories of the Mudende massacres are key for assessing the narrator’s need for resettlement. As such, narratives of Mudende vary drastically according to the audience. This article shows how refugees narrate massacres to the UN humanitarian apparatus in a distinct style in comparison to when speaking among themselves. Of particular importance, personal narratives related to shared experience of violence reveal the profound ways that Gihembe camp inhabitants cope with and endure the spectacular violence of the past within the slow brutality and discrete violence of their present camp conditions.