Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (review)

The provocative title of French journalist Jean Hatzfeld's book, Machete Season, now in English translation, evokes a key point Hatzfeld makes about the Rwandan genocide—that it was an "agricultural" genocide (70), born of the same instruments the killers had used to harvest their fields. The only difference in 1994 is that the crops were human.

The book is a fascinating read. The group of ten men Hatzfeld interviewed come from the same region as the genocide survivors he interviewed for an earlier book, Dans le nu de la vie: récits des marais rwandais (Paris: Seuil, 2000). As with his previous book, Hatzfeld organizes Machete Season by alternating descriptive chapters—about the region of Bugesera, the political history of Rwanda, and other topics—with the killers' own words. In this way, he sets the stage for the their remarks on select themes, such as looting or forgiveness.

The killers' words are chilling. They are remarkable for both their level of detail and, paradoxically, the level of evasiveness the killers maintain about the suffering they inflicted on their victims. The killers talk with seeming disaffection about how local authorities organized the killings, for example. There was no extensive planning beforehand, explains one in the group. When the orders came, the men obliged. In their matter-of-fact tone, the killers come across as willing, even blasé, executioners, who were spurred on as much by the camaraderie of "hunting" with their friends as by the loot each claimed after dispatching a victim. "We liked being in our gang" (12), Adalbert, the leader of the group, explains, as if genocide were just another team-building sport.

The detail with which some of the killers relate the first time they killed borders on the pornographic. One man, for example, refers to killing as a "game" (24). Another describes how it felt to shoot two children in the back as "pleasantly easy" (25). Most killers wielded machetes, not guns, which prompted one man to compare killing humans to slaughtering livestock: "In the end, a man is like an animal: you give him a whack on the head or the neck, and down he goes" (37).

Hatzfeld does not approach his subjects with naïveté. He explains the ground rules he and the men agreed upon for the interviews. Hatzfeld would interview the men individually so the men could not collude on their stories. The prisoners, in turn, agreed not to lie or, if a question came up they preferred not to answer, to explain why they did not want to answer that question. In exchange for their participation, the killers would receive medicine, sugar, soap—luxury items by prison standards.

Having the killers speak directly to the reader is a powerful tactic. What is missing, however, is the role that Hatzfeld played in shaping the men's responses. Hatzfeld, the interlocutor, is absent when the killers speak, and this absence gives a false impression of the immediate context of their words. Was it Hatzfeld, for example, who first asked whether killing people was like killing animals or did this analogy originate with the killers? Without Hatzfeld's part in the interviews, the killers' words seem to spring from a spontaneous and ongoing monologue. This sense of streaming monologue, in turn, helps to render these men as cold-blooded monsters. Once they become monsters, however, they are easy to dismiss as aberrant members of society who would never remind us of ourselves. What remains unspoken is the extent to which the killers' words are also a product of Hatzfeld's own hand—the questions he asked, the wording he used, the way he edited the men's responses, and the way he presents those responses as uninterrupted paragraphs on the page.

Despite these lapses and some awkwardly translated passages from the original French, the book provides a valuable...