Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak

by Jean Hatzfeld, Linda Coverdale (Translator), Susan Sontag (Preface by)

Overview

A chilling and illuminating account of the Rwandan genocide, as told by the killers themselves.

In Machete Season, veteran foreign correspondent Jean Hatzfeld reports on his interviews with nine Hutu killers who participated in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, during which 800,000 Tutsis were massacred by their Hutu fellow citizens—about 10,000 a day, mostly hacked to death by machete. The killers, all friends from a single region, helped slaughter 50,000 out of their 59,000 Tutsi neighbors. Now in prison, some awaiting execution, they provide extraordinary testimony about the genocide they perpetrated.

With shocking candor, the men describe how the killing was easier than farming, recount their first murders, and reflect on their actions. Hatzfeld's lucid and humane meditation on their horrific testimony considers what this means for human morality and ethics. Suggesting that such atrocities may be within the realm of ordinary human conduct, this disturbing yet enlightening book offers a new perspective on the foundations of morality in the wake of crimes against humanity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429923514
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/18/2006
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	413 KB

About the Author

Jean Hatzfeld, an international reporter for Libération since 1973, is the author of many books, including an earlier one on Rwanda and two on the war in Croatia and Bosnia.

Read an Excerpt

Machete Season
Copyright © 2003 by Éditions du Seuil Translation copyright © 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC Preface copyright © 2005 by Susan Sontag

Editorial Reviews

“An extraordinary book. Jean Hatzfeld's interviews in Machete Season shed a glaring light on the multiple yet similar faces of ordinary executioners in the genocides of our time.” —Saul Friedländer

“Hatzfeld's harrowing documentation of the voices of Rwandan killers reminds us once again how perfectly human it can be to be perfectly inhumane.” —Philip Gourevitch

From the Publisher

Frontline reportage from one of the world's more recent genocides, as narrated by the foot soldiers who perpetrated it. In the space of three months in 1994, some 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were killed by compatriots from the Hutu tribe. The Nazis, observes Liberation reporter Hatzfeld, were never so efficient, "never attained so murderous a performance level anywhere in Germany or its fifteen occupied countries." The agents of that efficient death-dealing were ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events, and they threw themselves into their work, driven by several motives. Not least of the reasons, several of the now-imprisoned killers relate through the interviews collected here, is the simple fact that killing is easier than farming, more rewarding, with no discipline required; as one killer says, "Rule number one was to kill. There was no rule number two. It was an organization without complications." Other of the perpetrators were driven by longstanding ethnic jealousy of the Tutsi, praised by early European ethnologists for their aristocratic features; one Rwandan remarks, for example, that considering parallels with the Shoah, "The Tutsis are not a people punished for the death of Jesus Christ. The Tutsis are simply a people come to misfortune on the hills because of their noble bearing." Yet others were motivated by talk radio, which assured them that the Tutsis were cockroaches and snakes; remarks a killer, "The evil-mindedness of the radios was too well calculated for us to oppose it." Most of the men relate that, whatever drove them, they felt very little guilt, very little of any emotion, as they were butchering Tutsis of whatever age or gender; only one or two admit toguilty memories or dreams after the fact, which prompts Hatzfeld to wonder whether it could be that "of all categories of war criminal, the perpetrator of genocide winds up the least traumatized."Of the utmost importance. A trove for future historians and ethnographers seeking to explain the mechanics of genocide, and eye-opening, sobering reading for the rest of us.

Kirkus Reviews