The response to every genocide is more or less the same. In April 1993, President Clinton, in dedicating the newly constructed U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, lamented that “far too little was done” to save those who had fallen victim to the Nazi's Final Solution and vowed that “we must not permit that to happen again.” Yet just one year later, nearly 1 million Rwandans were slaughtered by their neighbors over the course of a mere 100 days while the world did nothing. And even today, after more than a decade and countless pledges of “never again,” the world finds itself paralyzed in the face of another African genocide in Darfur, Sudan.
Just as global response to genocide is always the same, so are most of the books about it, in that they tend to place the slaughter within the context of the realpolitik that prevented international action. For this reason, it is understandable that books written for Western audiences tend to focus on the Western world's action -- or, more accurately, its inaction -- to stop the senseless deaths of countless victims.
French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, on the other hand, has taken a new and vitally important approach to examining the 1994 genocide in Rwanda by seeking to understand it from the perspective of the very people who carried it out. His new book, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, despite minor flaws, is destined to become one of the most important resources for those seeking to truly understand the Rwandan genocide.
Understanding what happened in Rwanda requires more than simply understanding how and why the international community failed to stop the genocide. It also requires understanding how and why average Hutus willingly took up machetes and spent nearly three months cutting down their Tutsi neighbors. And Hatzfeld had the courage to do what no one else has done: go to Rwanda and ask them.
Machete Season is built around interviews Hatzfeld conducted with a loose group of 10 Hutu friends who lived in the hills of Rwanda some 30 miles south of the capital, Kigali. Once the genocide began, these friends all but abandoned their everyday lives and spent the next 100 days together scouring the swamps, murdering their neighbors with machetes and clubs.
Now serving prison sentences of varying lengths, the men spoke freely to Hatzfeld of their actions during the genocide, impassively describing their first murders, routine rapes, and rampant looting. While many of the ten men interviewed for the book now claim to have regrets about what they did, no such feelings interfered with their deeds at the time. “I want to make it clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one,” one said.
By taking a backseat to the firsthand accounts, Hatzfeld allows the killers to explain just how and why average Hutus calmly followed orders and willingly trekked into the swamps in search of their Tutsi prey. They admit that they killed reluctantly at first, but soon it became routine work, no different than the hacking of weeds and plants on their plots of land. A sense of camaraderie and teamwork existed among those who hunted in the swamps, and everyone was allowed to kill at his own pace, so long as he killed. For those who struggled, help was readily available. In the words of one of the killers, if someone was having difficulty, he was not reproached but rather assisted by “a specialist [who would] catch up with the target, and dispatch it.”
Scouring the swamps and killing Tutsis was hard work and soon became rather tedious, but the prospect of looting the dead drove them on. The killers found themselves living in an anarchic utopia where they no longer tended to their fields or even operated within a recognizable market economy. Rather, the entire society sustained itself by simply stealing everything of value from those it had killed.
Amid the carnage of their own making, the Hutus maintained a festive atmosphere. “Anybody who once had eaten meat only at weddings, he found himself stuffed with it day after day,” explain one killer. “When we got back from the marshes … we snapped up roast chicken, haunches of cow, and drinks to remedy our fatigue.” The others shared similar memories: “We got up rich, we went to bed with full bellies, we lived a life of plenty. Pillaging is more worthwhile than harvesting, because it profits everyone equally.”
The killers readily admit that they felt no remorse for their deeds and feared no punishment. In the first days of the genocide, 10 Belgian peacekeepers had been killed and mutilated by the Rwandan army. As a result, nearly the entire United Nations peacekeeping mission was pulled out. Well-equipped foreign soldiers poured into the country, and, as Hatzfeld's interpreter -- himself a Tutsi survivor -- explained, the killers initially panicked: “The white are here, others will come, they have terrible weapons, it's all over for us!” they shouted. But once they realized that these soldiers were there simply to evacuate their own nationals and not to stop the killing, they “celebrated with some [beer] and shot off the cartridges in their guns as a sign of relief.” And then they got back to work.
Hatzfeld has structured his book in an unusual manner, dedicating each chapter to a specific aspect of the genocide and providing a basic framework before allowing the killers' own words to make the point. The chapter titled “Suffering” contains nothing beyond the killers' own grisly recollections of the torture inflicted on individual Tutsis. Having conducted each interview one on one, the striking similarities of the killers' statements help the reader to understand that, though prevalent, torture was not encouraged by the authorities (as it only slowed down the killing). But such details offered little solace to Tutsis caught by bored Hutu killers because torture was, for them, “a distraction, like a recreational break in a long work day.” It is the repetition and consistency of the killers' testimonies that make the point unmistakably clear. When each man individually recalls that they were simply ordered to kill quickly because there was “no point in taking your time,” and that “saving the babies … was not practical,” there can be no doubt that they speak the truth when they admit that “we were men without mercy.”
Hatzfeld's book suffers from a few minor errors, such as suggesting that Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana died when his plane was shot down as he returned from Burundi. (In fact, the Rwandan leader was returning from Tanzania.) In addition, the killers' language seems abnormally flowery for a group of relatively uneducated rural farmers, but that can likely be attributed to the fact that the interviews were initially conducted in the local language, Kinyarwanda, and translated into French and then English.
Despite these minor faults, Hatzfeld has constructed a magnificent book, one that ought to be read by anyone interested in the Rwandan genocide. Over the last decade, numerous books, movies, and documentaries have been produced examining the international community's staggering apathy during those horrific 100 days. But until Machete Season, there has been very little written about the impact such global apathy had on the victims in Rwanda. As difficult as it is to admit, no one can better describe the atmosphere of despair in which these victims died than a killer himself: “They had stopped hoping, they knew they had no chance for mercy and went off without a single prayer. They knew they were abandoned by everything, even by God.”
Kyle Mantyla is a policy analyst with People For the American Way. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
