The term ‘identity’ tends to have positive connotations. This article presents an example of a lethal form of identity politics, where self-expression was not possible for victims or victimizers. At the time, killings in Rwanda in 1994 were presented by (and to) the international media as the outcome of deep-seated ‘ethnic’ or ‘tribal’ hatred, between Tutsi and Hutu Rwandans. However, research on the period, oral testimonies from all sides, video evidence and court cases at the UN Tribunal in Arusha established since the genocide, have all confirmed that this was not the case. It has become clear that the killings were systematic, planned and enforced bureaucratically. The rural and urban Hutu population were persuaded to kill neighbours, friends, family members and strangers, and such killings were planned on a national scale and meticulously monitored. Genocide of the Tutsi was organized by a beleaguered inner core of state functionaries, principally comprising top military officers who came mainly from north-western Rwanda and who refused to implement the terms of the Arusha peace Accords (1991–4). Rwanda's genocide of Tutsi in 1994 is the most dramatic example of ‘race science’ in action since the Holocaust, with which some parallels are drawn in this article. In both cases, the genocide option was arrived at during a time of economic and political crisis, and a mix of terror and bribery was used to gain popular compliance. To make the genocide thinkable, myths of origin were reinvented and differential forms of citizenship enforced. Identity politics became a means of legitimizing collective violence and scapegoating, and a knife in the back of the civilian population as a whole, victims and victimizers alike.