Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak
by Jean Hatzfeld
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jean HatzfeldTranslator: Linda Coverdale
Preface: Susan Sontag
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-04-18
ISBN: 0312425031
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak
Book Review: The Veil of Humanity is Thin
Summary: 4 Stars
Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak by Jean Hatzfeld is a book that tells the story of ten killers who willingly participated in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Hatzfeld interviews these ten killers at their prison and covers different topics such as their first victim, punishment, looting, rape, remorse and regrets, etc. The information is self reported so don't expect the complete truth; only the version of the truth that the killers want you to know. Hatzfeld provides plenty examples of unforgiving brutality. When the topic of regret is discussed the killers talk only about their personal losses and hardships, not those of their victims.
Fulgence, one of the killers, in referring to the first time he killed states: "First I cracked an old mama's skull with a club. But she was already lying almost dead on the ground, so I did not feel death at the end of my arm. I went home that evening without even thinking about it."
Pio, one of the killers states: "Many Tutsis showed a dreadful fear of being killed, even before we started to hit them...So this terror helped us to strike them."
Fulgence, one of the killers states: "We became more and more cruel, more and more calm, more and more bloody...The more we cut, the more cutting became child's play to us. For a few, it tuned into a treat, if I may say so."
Leopord, one of the killers states: "I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one."
Jean-Baptiste, one of the killers states: "At first killing was obligatory; afterward we got used to it. We became naturally cruel."
Alphonse, one of the killers states: "saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away."
One story was told as follows: "They surrounded the maternity hospital. They ripped down the gates, they simply shot up the locks...They killed the women with machetes and clubs. Whenever one of the more agile girls managed to escape in the commotion and get out a window, she was caught in the gardens. When a mama had hidden a child underneath her, they picked her up first, then cut the child, then cut its mother...they slammed them against the walls to save time, or hurled them alive on the heaps of corpses."
If you are looking for rational or logical answers as to "why" these killers behaved they way they did you won't find them in this book. Oftentimes the killers use rationalizations and minimizations when referring to the butchering that they repeatedly participated in day after day resulting in the slaughter of innocent men, women, children and babies. No Tutsi was spared death. Remorse and regret are slim and mostly self serving and fail to come across as authentic. Whatever apologies they offer are hollow and empty. We live in a world where evil is alive and strong. It doesn't have to look like Hitler, Stalin, Jeffrey Dahmer, or Ted Bundy. As Machete Season has proved it could be your neighbor, soccer teammate or drinking partner. Most of these killers are no longer in prison having served very short prison sentences. Only one was given the death penalty but it is more likely that he will spend the rest of his life in prison. Justice has not been served for the victims of this genocide.
Machete Season shows that the veil of humanity is thin and once pierced society breaks down and brutality ensues.
Summary of Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak
During the spring of 1994, in a tiny country called Rwanda, some 800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors in a gruesome civil war. Several years later, journalist Jean Hatzfeld traveled to Rwanda to interview ten participants in the killings, eliciting extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they perpetrated. As Susan Sontag wrote in the preface, Machete Season is a document that "everyone should read . . . [because making] the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda . . . is part of being a moral adult."
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