How does the UK government truly see the country of Rwanda? Is it as a vibrant and secure place to start a new life? Or is it – to adapt a phrase allegedly deployed by the home secretary about part of Teesside – a “shit-hole”? I think we probably know the answer. You might recall that back when former prime minister Boris Johnson’s government first floated the idea of processing asylum seekers abroad, it chucked out the names of both Rwanda and Albania as countries it was looking at working with. The Albanian government swiftly denied it would be involved, seemingly furious to have been named as some kind of bogeyman destination. Or, to repeat that home secretarial language, as a shit-hole.
I’m sorry if that sounds repulsive – I’m not stating my opinion, but surely the unspoken opinion of the entire policy. The government may not say it out loud, but the reason it has chosen Rwanda as the deterrent is because it thinks it sounds like a place no one in their right mind would want to go to. That may be completely unfair – but the unfairness is irrelevant. The view of Rwanda is inseparable from the explicit idea that it is a deterrent. Every picture of former home secretary Suella Braverman roaring with laughter on a Kigali construction site seemed to underscore this spectacularly dark and mirthless joke – the human equivalent of a tourist billboard reading: “There’s more to Rwanda than the genocide!”
