A Time for Machetes
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 @ 18:51
The Rwandan Genocide: The Killers Speak
by Jean Hatzfeld (2005)
Shying away from close analysis of the big picture, Hatzfeld instead focuses on the hands and foot of the genocide, i.e. common men and a few local leaders. The interviews are compiled into chapters, each focusing on specific aspects, interspersed with some overviews and notes by Hatzfeld. The ten men chosen for the interviews—all of them tried, sentenced, and convicted—are:
not just a series of randomly chosen individuals but a group of prisoners who would feel protected from the dangers of truth by their friendship and joint complicity, a bunch of pals secure in their group identity established before the genocide . . . They lived on the same hills as most of the survivors [Hatzfeld] had talked to. They had taken part in the carnage in the marshes of Nyamwiza, where the fugitives had gone to hide, burying themselves up to the neck in slime, beneath the vegetation. They were all farmers, except for one civil servant and one teacher; only three belonged to any paramilitary or interahamwe organization. Aside from Elie, they had never worn a police or army uniform. None of them had ever quarelled with his Tutsi neighbours over land, crops, damage, or women.
Reading the interviews—which Hatzfeld has repeatedly warned to be (at least) partially self-serving and contain some degree of unreliability—one is struck by the undisturbed serenity, detachment, and impassiveness the killers displayed despite the “unimaginable” crimes they’ve committed:
Not one of them presents the slightest symptom of psychic distress. Not one of them shows signs of any disturbance, and to hear them tell it, barely a dozen prisoners in all are psychologically troubled. There are regrets, complaints, homesickness, dejection, and ailment s due to imprisonment—but never any fits of depression about their machete blows.
No undisturbed sleep, confessions were often incredulous with an astonishing degree of naivete, and “their natural tendency to dwell on their own suffering is stupefying”. But Hatzfeld asked us the age-old questions:
What would we have dared to do? What would have happened to us? But there is no point to those questions, not so much because we cannot get inside the skin of bean farmers on a hill in Rwanda, but because we cannot imagine being born and growing up under such a despotic, ethnocentric regime, and because outside of a few individuals secure in their courage and moral strength, most of us would have come up with something like, “We would have slakced off, lagged far behind the group, and not dirtied our machetes”—privately hoping for better, without dispelling an iota of doubt.
It delves into “common man”’s feelings on the uneasy co-existence between Hutus and Tutsis, providing more intimate insights such as the role of soccer, cabarets, women, neighbourhood, religions, and insidious propagandastic dogmas, asking more questions than giving answers. Although a bit too simplistically dichotomical in the Hutu/Tutsi division, it’s a good book that gives specific perspectives from the common perpetrators, giving closer glimpses to their daily lives and routines, and would make an integral addition to the “bigger-picture” books like Gourevitch’s and Prunier’s.
Hatzfeld also interviewed the survivors in Into the Quick of Life: The Rwandan Genocide: the Survivors Speak.
