Machete Season (Hardcover)

Even for an age blighted by routine atrocity, the toll is confounding: eight hundred thousand dead in twelve weeks. The staggering loss of life wrought by Rwanda’s 1994 genocide is extraordinary not just because of the rate at which it occurred-the murderous expeditiousness of its génocidaires outstripped the most concentrated efforts of the Nazi regime-but because it was carried out primarily by civilians wielding simple farming tools. Most westerners have at least some inkling of the crimes perpetrated just over a decade ago in the small African republic. Some of us, too, could identify the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups as, respectively, the killers and victims in the mass frenzy. A few, even, know that these groups (contrary to so many other genocides) share the same language, customs, and religion. But what virtually none of us understands is how, in the early days of April, uncountable multitudes-labourers, teachers, civil servants, church deacons, soccer players, everyone-could rise up and begin hunting their neighbours.
Machete Season is Jean Hatzfeld’s search for an explanation. A longtime journalist for the French newspaper, Libération, Hatzfeld has adopted as his beat those poisoned regions of the globe where ethnic cleansing and civil war fester. In 2000, he published Dans le nu de la vie (Into the Quick of Life), the story of fourteen Rwandans who survived the massacres in Nyamata, where fifty thousand Tutsis were slaughtered. This latest book is a companion volume of sorts: a collection of interviews with ten Rwandans who took part in the killings. All of the subjects also hail from the aforementioned district; all are men; all were in prison at the time of the interviews for the murders they committed.
One of the interviewees says in the course of the book: “What we did goes beyond human imagination, so it is too difficult to judge us.” You might be inclined to believe him, too, except that the twentieth century, with its terror-famines and purges and crematoria and killing fields, has forced human imagination to warp and expand into new regions. We grapple with once-impossible thoughts all the time. As with any of the darker chapters of human history, it’s understanding that eludes us. What are we to make of those who rampaged through the halls of a maternity hospital, clubbing and stabbing Tutsi mothers and their nurses, slamming infants against the walls or throwing them alive onto heaps of corpses? What sense can we impose on the actions of Hutu fathers, who taught their young sons how to swing a machete by having them practise on live victims-typically children their own size? What can we infer from the singing and laughing of the murderers as they made their way down to the papyrus bogs to find their hiding countrymen, or the taunts and jeers they directed at their victims in those moments before death?
Hatred such as this is not reared overnight; it is fattened on lies and envy for years. Hatzfeld punctuates the interviews with history lessons on Rwanda, which read like surreal catalogues of oppression, strife, and internecine devastation. While it was ostensibly the assassination of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana (a Hutu) that precipitated the violent reprisals against Tutsis, the conditions necessary for a full-blown genocide had been coalescing for decades. Hatzfeld touches on the lasting effects of Belgian colonisation in the region, and explains how, since 1959, Rwanda has seen the Tutsis-traditionally cattle herders, landowners, even aristocrats, and a group formerly favoured by its imperial masters-inexorably and forcibly supplanted by the less privileged Hutus. After the declaration of the country’s independence, popular Hutu leaders organised the seizure of Tutsi property, implemented pogroms, and instigated bloody massacres, most notably in 1963 and 1973. Running through all of these horrors was a systematic propaganda campaign, not dissimilar to that used by the Third Reich to vilify European Jewry, which isolated particular physical characteristics (noses, for instance) and character defects (treachery and greed) as the defining traits of a people who needed to be eliminated.
By the time Hutu authorities issued the order to round up and kill Tutsis, a powerfully compelling system of punishment and reward was in place. Openly dissenting Hutus were executed. Those who were slow to obey were penalised with fines, and ostracised by their fellows. The ones who eagerly joined in the bloody work, however, were quickly seduced by the benefits that often attend violent conflict-the spoils from looting, and a gratifyingly complete collapse of moral standards where even the vilest transgressions go unpunished. In a surpassingly cruel century, Hutus set a new standard of ruthlessness. Hatzfeld reflects on the moments of reprieve observed in other war zones: “wonderful stories about friendships, incredible romances, amazing gestures of solidarity, comical and poignant collaborations between protagonists in enemy camps.” In Nyamata, he notes, “we find not one comradely impulse . . . not one gesture of compassion . . . no bond of friendship or love that survived . . . And not a single escape network.” His subjects offer no argument. Had militias from Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and Zaire not militarily intervened and put the Hutus to flight, says one, “we would have killed one another after the death of the last Tutsi . . . We could no longer stop ourselves from wielding the machete, it brought us so much profit.”
When faced with the madness recounted here, the reader’s impulse is to closely parse the subjects’ language; word choice and inflection become clues to the speaker’s character. It is vexing, then, that while most of the interviewees speak with eloquence and gravitas and a damning candour about what they did, none emerges as the very picture of evil. At worst, their vocabulary shows them as not having fully absorbed the consequences of their actions. They rarely talk of genocide, preferring to frame the event as “a tumult, an uproar, a confusion,” or “a war.” In describing the killings, they borrow from the lexicon of the farmer and the commune: murdering becomes “cutting”, “pruning”, a “job” with “teams” of “colleagues” who worked up until “the last whistle” that signalled the end of their work day. The men talk of seeking forgiveness from the survivors upon their release, but their words betray a crucial misunderstanding about how onerous such a request would be for still-living Tutsis.
Part-way through the interviews, the cagiest subject stubbornly insists that Hatzfeld won’t find the answers he’s looking for: “You will never see the source of a genocide . . . It is buried deep in grudges, under an accumulation of misunderstandings that we were the last to inherit.” At bottom, the reader wonders if he isn’t right. For all of Hatzfeld’s rigorous research, skilful questioning, and lucid commentary, we arrive at the same irreducible and now rather unsurprising fact already confronted at Nuremberg and elsewhere: that apparently normal people will commit abhorrent acts in a properly permissive environment. In the end, this remarkable book-the most affecting I’ve read in memory-is limited in its capacity to explain the minds of the killers or elicit empathy for them. What it does, instead, is serve as a powerful reminder of the West’s despicable apathy and inaction while a country destroyed itself. Our quiescence was so total that even the Hutus reproach us for it. Here are the words of one young killer:

“When the Tutsis were caught, many died without a word . . . It sometimes touched us painfully that they awaited death in silence. Evenings, we would ask over and over, ‘Why no protest from those people who are about to leave? Why do they not beg for mercy?’ . . . The Tutsis were not asking for anything in those fatal moments because they no longer believed in words . . . An overpowering sorrow was carrying these people away. They felt so abandoned they did not even open their mouths.”
Matt Sturrock (Books in Canada)

This book features the testimony of 10 friends from the same village who spent day after day together, fulfilling orders to kill any Tutsi within their territory during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. While their anecdotes are shocking at first, they detail how an ordinary person with an everyday life in a farming village can be transformed into a killer. As one man explains, "if you must obey the orders of authorities, if you have been properly prepared, if you see yourself pushed and pulled, if you see the killing will be total and without disastrous consequences for yourself, you feel soothed and reassured." A reporter for Paris's Libération, Hatzfeld has a remarkable ability to pry into the killer's memory and conscience. One Hutu tells how "a pain pinched his heart" when confronted with an old Tutsi soccer teammate he was obligated to kill. Others describe the regrets or nightmares they have now that the genocide is over (and they are in prison). But for the most part, the interviews reveal the killers' naïve expectations for forgiveness and reconciliation once they are released. Hatzfeld offers an analysis of the psychology of the perpetrators and how the Rwandan genocide differs from other genocides in history. Steering clear of politics, this important book succeeds in offering the reader some grasp of how such unspeakable acts unfolded. Agent, Valerie Borchardt at Georges Borchardt Inc.(June)
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