A Time for Machetes

by Linda Coverdale (Translator), Linda Coverdale (Translator), Jean Hatzfeld (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $3.44

  In April-May 1994 in Rwanda, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were massacred by their Hutu fellow citizens - more than 10,000 a day, mostly being hacked to death by machete. Jean Hatzfeld reports on the results of his interviews with nine of the Hutu killers, all of whom are now in prison, some awaiting execution. Hatzfeld elicits extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they perpetrated. Each describes what it was like the first time he killed someone, what he felt like when he killed a mother and child, and how he reacted when he killed a cordial acquaintance. Each reflects on his feelings of moral responsibility, his guilt, remorse, or indifference to the crimes. Since the Holocaust, it has been conventional to presume that only depraved and monstrous evil incarnate could perpetrate such crimes, but it may be, Hatzfeld suggests, that such actions are within the realm of ordinary human conduct. To read this disturbing, enlightening and very brave book is to consider the foundation of human morality and ethics in a new light.

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.44

  In April-May 1994, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were massacred by their Hutu fellow citizens - about 10,000 a day - most of them hacked to death by machete. In the late 1990s, French author and journalist Jean Hatzfeld made several journeys into the hilly, marshy region of Bugesara, one of the areas most devastated by the genocide. He interviewed both killers and survivors and A Time for Machetes is the result of his interviews with nine of the Hutu killers. Most of the men were farmers, ordinary men. They told Hatzfeld how the work was given to them, what they thought about it how they did it, what their responses were to the first time they killed and what they felt when they killed a mother and child or an acquaintance. Hatzfeld's meditation on the banal, horrific testimony of the killers is lucid, humane, and wise. To read this disturbing, enlightening, brave book is to consider human morality and ethics in a new light.