The author, an international reporter, has written three books on post-genocide Rwanda. Machete Season: the killers in Rwanda speak looks at the 1994 genocide from the perspective of incarcerated Hutu suspects; La Stratégie des Antilopes describes the situation in Rwanda after the government released 40,000 Hutu involved in the genocide from prison. The present book, originally published in French in 2000, consists of statements by fourteen Tutsi who witnessed the horrors and brutalities of the genocide, but miraculously survived it.
Hatzfeld gathered the survivors' statements in the 1990s from Tutsi living in the town and district of Nyamata, an area south of Kigali where Hutu slaughtered five out of six Tutsi. Two of the mass murders took place in churches where thousands of Tutsi had sought refuge. The statements came from ten females, aged 17–45, and four males, aged 12–60. Most had lived and socialised with Hutu before April 1994, and none suspected that Hutu neighbours would turn on them so viciously. Actually, most of the brutality was inflicted by the interahamwe, young Hutu men who, armed with government-supplied machetes, gleefully hunted down and slashed their Tutsi victims so as to cause maximum suffering.
Hatzfeld probably worked from an interview schedule because certain themes are addressed by almost all the survivors. One is the interviewees' own explanation for the genocide. Most attributed the cause in significant part to greed. ‘On April 10 [1994] … some neighboring Hutus came to our house … to order us out, because they wanted to take it over …’ (fourteen-year-old male, p. 49). Two male teachers stressed the Hutu farmers' desire for scarce farmland. A female farmer claimed that the Hutu agreed to exterminate Tutsi ‘so that they could loot their houses, ride their bicycles, eat their cows’ (p. 88). Another male teacher stressed that the interahamwe began by attacking prosperous Tutsi businessmen, ‘because even from the start they were preoccupied with getting rich’ (p. 97).
A 25-year-old female shopkeeper offered a different explanation: ‘it's our physiognomy that is the root of the problem: our longer muscles, our more delicate features, our proud carriage’ (p. 41). However, a forty-year-old female shopkeeper rejected all of the above explanations. She could find no rational reasons why the Hutu, with whom she and other Tutsi shared so much in life, ‘suddenly went on a rampage like wild beasts’ (p. 130).
Forgiveness and justice were two additional themes discussed. Some of the survivors wanted those involved in the genocide to confess and ask relatives of murdered Tutsi for forgiveness, even though they said they could not forgive. Most demanded justice; they wanted the genocidaires to undergo some appropriate punishment. Practically all said their ability to trust others was lost or markedly diminished. A few were worried that genocide could reoccur.
With its sobering first-person accounts, this book complements the many social scientific analyses of the Rwandan genocide. It presents the human perspective that only those who experienced the unimaginable horrors of Rwanda's hell can offer.
