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Jump to navigationJump to searchA Time for Machetes: The Rwandan Genocide - The Killers Speak by Jean Hatzfeld (view source)
Revision as of 09:38, 14 May 2018
, 09:38, 14 May 2018no edit summary
In Rwanda, in the spring of 1994, 800,000 Tutsis were murdered by their Hutu fellow citizens, hacked to death by machetes. As the rest of the world looked on, as the UN did nothing but evacuate westerners and actually reduce its presence in a country wracked by civil strife, Tutsis took refuge in churches and were burned to death. They were hunted down in marshes and cut to pieces by their very neighbours.
In this book, Jean Hatzfeld talks to a group of nine of the perpetrators, at the time in prison for their crimes. Each describes what he did during those horrendous two months, what it was like to kill someone for the first time, how the massacre was organised, how the spoils were divided, what remorse they feel, if any, and how they plan to spend their lives when their sentences are up. As you can imagine, it doesn't make for easy reading. Hatzfeld's [[Into the Quick of Life: The Rwandan Genocide - The Survivors Speak|other book]] about the genocide, the story from the survivor's perspective, has a lot less authorial comment. It's easy to see why. This is a brave but dangerous book, full of ethical quandaries. As Hatzfeld struggles with the rights and wrongs of his project, so does Innocent, his Tutsi translator and genocide survivor, and so do you, the reader.
Where the survivors talked about horrors and grief, the perpetrators talk about work and quotas. One imagines this enables them to distance themselves from the true meaning of what they did. I was truly shocked to learn that these men approached the two months of slaughter like a job. They began at nine in the morning and butchered until about four in the afternoon. After that, well, they went home for their tea. Of all the horrors, the burnings, the impalings of pregnant women, the murders of babes in arms, this is the thing I just can't get over. These men were killing their neighbours, their colleagues, and at four in the afternoon they went home for their tea. In some ways they understand what they have done, in other ways they simply don't even begin to approach it.
