Declining Former Colonial Power About to Send Asylum Applicants to Genocide Torn, Former German, Belgian Colony. . . For "Processing"

The government of the UK has just struck a deal with the government of Rwanda that it will send asylum applicants to the latter, at a cost of approximately 20K - 30K British Pounds per person, one-way flights included. A brilliant boost to the UK's airline industry, among other things. Here is the route, just to have a sense of the physical distance, etc.

The society of the region that contains the country that is called, today, Rwanda, was first colonized by Germany, pro forma assigned to Germany in the Berlin Conference in 1884 as part of "German Central Africa". 

"Germany's "Chain-Gang" in her East African Colony", The New York Times, March 2, 1918.

In 1916, Rwanda-Burundi became a Belgian Mandate under the League of Nations "mandate" system. Rwanda was split from Burundi and gained independence in 1962. 

Resource-poor, landlocked Rwanda was stricken by extreme-high external dependency after independence, exacerbated by ethnic strife fueled, among other actors, by its former colonial powers. The Rwanda Civil War, also known as the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, lasted from 1990 to 1994. A hundred years after the area's assignment to Germany in Berlin, in 1994, the plane carrying the president of the country (whose army constituted one side in the war conflict) was shot down at Kigali airport, killing him. What followed was a meticulously planned genocide against the Tutsis, killing--according to an early, 1994 UN report referred to here--500,000 to 1,000,000 people, amounting to 9% to 16% of the country's population at the time. (Some estimates use historical demographic evidence to conclude that the death toll was even higher, particularly because of a likely systematic undercount of Tutsis before the civil war, and because of the undercount of the dead bodies after the war.) And those figures include of course only the lives lost, not the wounded. Plus there were the secondary effects (people suffering from post-war famines, collapse of economic processes and networks, etc.) All told, likely the lives of all families, all members of Rwandan society were adversely affected by the war.

Today, with a population of over 12 million people living in a territory of 26 thousand square km, Rwanda is one of Africa's most densely populated countries. After the civil war, Rwanda returned to its high-external-dependency mode of existence, with increased reliance on aid and foreign investment. Something resembling a "catastrophe tourism industry" has also emerged. The literature has also begun talking, as it has become common regarding all Global South countries, particularly in Africa, about "western concerns" over Chinese investment in Rwanda, "atypical" as it may be due to Rwanda's aid dependence the near absence of natural resources. Rwanda repealed 1000 (!) colonial-era laws as recently as 2019. 

Here is a visual representation of the contrast between the UK and Rwanda in terms of geo-political economy of their respective positions in the world over the last 7 or so decades.

The picture ought to speak for itself, so I will just add a couple of numerical tidbits to underline my point here. 

In 1950, the United Kingdom was approximately 222 times heavier in terms of global economic weight, and just under ten times richer than Rwanda while still a Belgian Mandate. By the time of the last data point available from the Maddison Project, 2018, the UK was still about 110 times more influential economically (in terms of its global economic weight) than the Republic of Rwanda--and its per capita GDP was 19.7 times higher (!). Sending asylum seekers there will of course only increase the population density of Rwanda further. Just what Rwanda needed, at 10.15% (!) of the world mean per capita GDP. Increasing the population.

That is where the good people of the United Kingdom, represented by their kind and gentle government, so to speak, are planning to send the asylum seekers who show up at their shores. What a marvelous example of post-independence neocolonial imperialism, coupled with bad old-fashioned, Thatcherite neoliberal cruelty! In terms of moral geopolitics, I can't put it in any other terms. . . a clear case of evil.