Machete Season - Jean Hatzfeld

"For my part, I offer you an explanation: it is as if I had let another individual take on my own living appearance, and the habits of my heart, without a single pang in my soul. This killer was indeed me, as to the offense he committed and the blood he shed, but he is a stranger to me in his ferocity. I admit and recognize my obedience at that time, my victims, my fault, but I fail to recognize the wickedness of the one who raced through the marshes on my legs, carrying my machete. That wickedness seems to belong to another self with a heavy heart. The most serious changes in my body were my invisible parts, such as the soul or the feelings that go with it. Therefore I alone do not recognize myself in that man. But perhaps someone outside this situation, like you, cannot have an inkling of that strangeness of mind."

"All genocides in modern history have occurred in the midst of war - not because they were its cause or consequence but because war suspends the rule of law; it systematizes death, normalizes savagery, fosters fear and delusions, reawakens old demons, and unsettles morality and human values. It undermines the last psychological defenses of the future perpetrators of the genocide. The farmer Alphonse Hitiyaremye summed it up his own way: "War is a dreadful disorder in which the culprits of genocide can plot incognito."

"In Germany as in Rwanda, genocide was undertaken by a totalitarian regime that had been in power for some time. The elimination of the Jew, the Gypsy, or the Tutsi has been openly part of the regime's political agenda from the moment it took power, and had been repeatedly stressed in official speeches. The genocide was planned in successive stages. It thrived in the disbelief of foreign nations. It as tested for short periods on segments of the population."

"In Germany and in Rwanda, efficient preparations preceded the formal decision on extermination, as if the decision were too appalling to be announced in public until it was already being carried out."

"Killing could certainly be thirsty work, draining and often disgusting. Still, it was more productive than raising crops, especially for someone with a meager plot of land or barren soil. During the killings anyone with strong arms brought home as much as a merchant of quality. We could no longer count the panels of sheet metal we were piling up. The taxmen ignored us. The women were satisfied with everything we brought in. They stopped complaining.
For the simplest farmers, it was refreshing to leave the hoe in the yard. We got up rich, we went to bed with full bellies, we lived a life of plenty. Pillaging is more worthwhile than harvesting, because it profits everyone equally."

"At the risk of offending historians of the Holocaust with this quick summary of their work, I would say that most of them - in particular Raul Hilberg, and his monumental study The Destruction of the European Jews - see four stages in the unfolding of the event: The first stage brought humiliation and loss of rights; next came designation and marking (armbands, yellow stars, writing on walls); then deportation and concentration; and finally complete elimination, through famine in the ghettos, shooting in the areas conquered by the German army, and gassing in the six specialized camps. These stages overlapped rather than succeeded one another in rigorous succession, and they were linked by continuous repression in the pogroms, as well as by plundering and expropriations, which were important for ensuring the support of a decisive segment of the population."

"As Jean-Baptiste Munyankore, a teacher in Ntarama and a survivor of the marshes, confirms: "The principal and the inspector of schools in my district participated in the killings with nail-studded clubs. Two teachers, colleagues with whom we used to share beers and student evaluations, set their shoulders to the wheel, so to speak. A priest, the burgomaster, the subprefect, a doctor -they all killed with their own hands… They wore pressed cotton trousers, they had no trouble sleeping, they traveled around in vehicles or on light motorcycles... These well-educated people were calm, and they rolled up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes. For someone who spent his life teaching the humanities, as I have, search criminals are a fearful mystery."

Ignorant of mechanized agriculture and agronomic technology, Rwanda's peasant society made no attempt to modernize the carnage, ignoring all scientific, medical, and anthropological experimentation, employee no efficient industrial techniques such as gas chambers and no ingenious methods to economize effort. The army did not use helicopters, tanks, or bazookas, while lighter weaponry such as grenades and machine guns came only sporadically into play, and then simply for tactical or psychological support..

In the fields, labor was manual. Therefore, the killings in the marshes were manual, and they proceeded at the pace of a seasonal culture.

Alphonse Hitiyaremye says that at one point, "We hurried things up, because the killing season was coming to a close. It promised to spare us the labor of one harvest, but not two. We knew that for the next season, we would have to take up our machetes again for other, more traditional jobs."

In the land of philosophy that was Germany, genocide was intended to purify being and thought. In the rural land of Rwanda, genocide was meant to purify the earth, to cleanse it of its cockroach farmers. The Tutsi genocide was thus both a neighborhood genocide and agricultural genocide. And in spite of its summary organization and archaic tools, it was outstandingly effective." 

I'll explain. When you receive a new order, you hesitate but you obey, or else you're taking a risk.When  you've been prepared the right way by the radios and the official advice, you obey more easily, even if the order is to kill your neighbors. The mission of a good organizer is to stifle your hesitations when he give you instructions.

For example, when he shows you that the act will be total and have no grave consequences for anyone left alive, you obey more easily, you don't worry about anything. You forget your misgivings and fears of punishment. You obey freely.

At bottom, we didn't care about what we accomplished in the marshes, only about what was important to us for our comfort: the stocks of sheet metal, the rounded-up cows, the piles of windows and other such goods. When we met a neighbor on a new bike or waving around a radio, greed drove was on. We inspected roofs along the way. People could turn mean if they heard about some fertile land already snapped up behind their back's. They could turn meaner than in the marshes, even if they were no longer brandishing there machetes.

All wars generate savage temptations  that are more or less murderous. The bloodthirsty madness of combatants, the craving for vengeance, the distress, fear, paranoia, and feelings of abandonment, the euphoria of victories and anguish of defeats, and above all a sense of damnation after crimes have been committed-these things provoke genocidal behavior and actions. In other words, panic or explosive fury and the desire to crush the enemy once and for all lead to massacres of civilians and prisoners, campaigns of rape and torture, deadly deportations, pure devastation in all directions. Sometimes non-military actions result as well: the poisoning of rice fields with pesticides, the slaughter of buffalo herds, the forced conversions to foreign religions and cultures. But to confuse these war crimes-even when they tend, in their collective insanity, to destroy a civilian community-with an explicit and organized plan of extermination is a political and intellectual mistake, symptomatic of our culture of sensationalism.

"War happens when authorities want to overthrow other authorities to take the wrong own turn at the trough. A genocide-that's what an ethnic group wants to bury another ethnic group. Genocide goes beyond war, because the intention last forever, even if it is not crowned with success. It is a final intention," says Christine Nyiransabimana, a farmer, in an astonishing echo of the "final solution."

In the Rwandan family, the main is the first one responsible for right and wrong actions, the in the eyes of the authorities and neighbors. If a woman wanted to hide Tutsi acquaintances, she had to get permission from her husband, because if she was found out, of course he was the one condemned by his neighbors to cut those acquaintances with his own hand, in public, right in front of his house. It was a punishment of some importance. It was a big thing to cut a person with whom you had shared years both good and bad.
The women were less deciding, they were less punishable, they were less active. They were in the second rank in that activity of genocide.
But really, in the Tutsi camp it was quite the opposite. The killings were more serious for the wives than for the husbands, if in addition they were raped at the end and saw their little ones get cut before their eyes.

It was not difficult to obtain sincere and detailed accounts from soldiers in Vietnam, from torturers for the Argentine dictatorship or in the Algerian war, from militiamen of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, from secret policemen in the Iraqi or Iranian detention camps - sometimes by following the maxim of Oscar Wilde, "Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

The Saturday after the plane crash was the usual choir rehearsal day at the church in Kibungo. we sang hymns in good feeling with our Tutsi compatriots, our voices still blending in chorus. On Sunday morning we returned at the appointed hour for mass; they did not arrive. They had already fled into the bush in fear of reprisals, driving their goats and cows with them. That disappointed us greatly, especially on a Sunday. Anger hustled us outside the church door. We left the Lord and our prayers inside to rush home. We changed from our Sunday best into our workaday clothes, we grabbed clubs and machetes, we went straight off to killing.

In the marshes, I was appointed killing boss because I gave orders intensely. Same thing in the Congolese camps. In prison I was appointed charismatic leader because I sang intensely. I enjoyed the alleluias. I gladly felt rocked by those joyous verses. I was steadfast in my love of God.

"You will never see the source of a genocide", he says. "It is buried too deep in grudges, under an accumulation of misunderstandings that we were the last to inherit. We came of age at the worst moment in Rwanda's history: we were taught to obey absolutely, raised in hatred, stocked with slogans. We are an unfortunate generation."
He also says, "there are situations that set you singing if you win or crying if you lose", an unwitting plagiarism of the same observation made by Robert Servatius, Adolph Eichmann's lawyer, at his trial in Jerusalem: "There are some actions for which you are decorated if you succeed and sent to the scaffold if you fail."

When the Tutsis were caught, many died without a word. In Rwanda people say "die like a lamb in the Bible." Of course in Rwanda there are no sheep, so we have never heard their cry.
It sometimes touched us painfully that they awaited death in silence. Evenings, we would ask over and over, "Why no protest from these people who are about to leave? Why do they not beg for mercy?"
The organizers claimed that the Tutsis felt guilty for the sin of being Tutsi. Some interahamwe kept saying they felt responsible for the misfortunes they had brought upon us.
Well, I knew that was not true. The Tutsis were not asking for anything in those fatal moments because they no longer believed in words. They had no more faith in crying out, like frightened animals, for example, howling to be heard above the mortal blows. An overpowering sorrow was carrying the people away. They felt so abandoned they did not even open their mouths.