Jean Hatzfeld

A veteran foreign correspondent shares a collection of interviews with ten Hutu men--all tried, convicted, and sentenced for the genocidal killings of their Tutsi neighbors--as they describe their participation in the heinous crimes and their reasons for the murders, in a study that considers the roots of human morality and ethics. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

The Killers in Rwanda Speak

Machete Season

Draws on interviews with fourteen survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, recounting their experiences as well as the lives of victims close to them, their perspectives on why they were targeted, and their outlooks in the tragedy's aftermath. Original.

The Survivors in Rwanda Speak

Life Laid Bare

Met en scène une bande de dix copains, acteurs du génocide rwandais. J. Hatzfeld met en évidence le processus qui transforme les protagonistes en hommes inhumains.

récits

Une saison de machettes

In Rwanda in 1994, five out of six Tutsis (800,000) were hacked to death with machetes by their Hutu neighbours. In the villages of Nyamata and N'tarama, where, in the first two days of the genocide, over 10,000 Tutsis were massacred in the churches where they sought refuge, Jean Hatzfeld interviewed some of the survivors. Of all ages, coming from different walks of life, from orphan teenage farmers to the local social worker, fourteen survivors talk of the genocide, the death of family and friends in the church and in the marshes of Bugesera to which they fled. They also talk of their present life and try to explain and understand the reasons behind the extermination. These horrific accounts of life at the very edge contrast with Hatzfeld's own sensitive and vivid descriptions of Rwanda's villages and countryside in peacetime. Into the Quick of Life brings us, in the author's own words, ?as close to (the event) as we can ever get?. It is a unique insight into a genocide.

The Rwandan Genocide - the Survivors Speak

Into the Quick of Life

A follow-up to Libération and Machete Season continues the author's research into genocidal activities in Rwanda, picking up the stories of previously interviewed individuals years later to explore how former Hutu killers were re-acclimating to life after prison and how formerly victimized Tutsis were tolerating their Hutu neighbors.

Living in Rwanda After the Genocide

The Antelope's Strategy

ROSA FREIRE D'AGUIAR

Durante a primavera de 1994, 800 mil tútsis foram mortos a golpes de facão, em Ruanda. Numa rotina que durou quase cem dias, os hútus saíam de casa cantando e vasculhavam os pântanos em busca dos próprios vizinhos. Decepavam até o final do expediente. À noite, bebiam cerveja, trocavam mexericos, contavam piadas e afiavam as ferramentas nas pedras-pomes. Dez anos depois, o jornalista Jean Hatzfeld instalou-se em Ruanda para entender o genocídio. Em 'Dans le nu de la vie', registrou o testemunho das vítimas sobreviventes. Agora, em 'Uma temporada de facões', ouve os matadores. Com enorme franqueza e, muitas vezes, até com candura, dez dos assassinos falam sobre a organização e a execução da matança, a banalidade, o ódio, o arrependimento e o perdão. Discursam sobre o horror e o indizível. Nas conversas, uma angustiante constatação - são pessoas comuns, sem traços de ferocidade. Pais de família, jogadores de futebol, professores e lavradores que deceparam amigos íntimos sem constrangimento e, no final, fariam tudo novamente.

relatos do genocídio em Ruanda

Uma temporada de facões

Les trafiquants italiens dans l'Orient hellénique

Stratégia antilop

The continuation of a groundbreaking study of the Rwandan genocide, and the story of the survivor generation In Rwanda from April to June 1994, 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors in the largest and swiftest genocide since World War II. In his previous books, Jean Hatzfeld has documented the lives of the killers and victims, but after twenty years he has found that the enormity of understanding doesn’t stop with one generation. In Blood Papa, Hatzfeld returns to the hills and marshes of Nyamata to ask what has become of the children—those who never saw the machetes yet have grown up in the shadow of tragedy. Fabrice, Sandra, Jean-Pierre, and others share the genocide as a common inheritance. Some have known only their parents’ silence and lies, enduring the harassment of classmates or the stigma of a father jailed for unspeakable crimes. Others have enjoyed a loving home and the sympathies offered to survivor children, but do so without parents or an extended family. The young Rwandans in Blood Papa see each other in the neighborhood—they dance and gossip, frequent the same cafés, and, like teenagers everywhere, love sports, music, and fashion; they surf the Web and dream of marriage. Yet Hutu and Tutsi children rarely speak of the ghosts that haunt their lives. Here their moving first-person accounts combined with Hatzfeld’s arresting chronicles of everyday life form a testament to survival in a country devastated by the terrible crimes and trauma of the past.

Rwanda's New Generation

Blood Papa

A lucid, readable history of Greece and Greek culture from the earliest Aegean civilization to the Roman Conquest.

History of Ancient Greece

Deux mètres dix

In April-May 1994, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were massacred by their Hutu fellow citizens--about 10,000 a day, mostly being hacked to death by machete. In Machete Season, the veteran foreign correspondent Jean Hatzfeld reports on the results of his interviews with nine of the Hutu killers. They were all friends who came from a single region where they helped to kill 50,000 out of their 59,000 Tutsi neighbors, and all of them are now in prison, some awaiting execution. It is usually presumed that killers will not tell the truth about their brutal actions, but Hatzfeld elicited extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they had perpetrated. He rightly sees that their account raises as many questions as it answers. Adabert, Alphonse, Ignace, and the others (most of them farmers) told Hatzfeld how the work was given to them, what they thought about it, how they did it, and what their responses were to the bloodbath. "Killing is easier than farming," one says. "I got into it, no problem," says another. Each describes what it was like the first time he killed someone, what he felt like when he killed a mother and child, how he reacted when he killed a cordial acquaintance, how 'cutting' a person with a machete differed from 'cutting' a calf or a sugarcane. And they had plenty of time to tell Hatzfeld, too, about whether and why they had reconsidered their motives, their moral responsibility, their guilt, remorse, or indifference to the crimes. Hatzfeld's meditation on the banal, horrific testimony of the genocidaires and what it means is lucid, humane, and wise: he relates the Rwanda horror to war crimes and to other genocidal episodes in human history. Especially since the Holocaust, it has been conventional to presume that only depraved and monstrous evil incarnate could perpetrate such crimes, but it may be, he suggests, that such actions are within the realm of ordinary human conduct. To read this disturbing, enlightening and very brave book is to consider in a new light the foundation of human morality and ethics.

A powerful report on the aftereffects of the genocide in Rwanda—and on the near impossibility of reconciliation between survivors and killers In two acclaimed previous works, the noted French journalist Jean Hatzfeld offered a profound, harrowing witness to the unimaginable pain and horror in the mass killings of one group of people by another. Combining his own analysis of the events with interviews from both the Hutu killers who carried out acts of unimaginable depravity and the Tutsi survivors who somehow managed to escape, in one, based mostly on interviews with Tutsi survivors, he explored in unprecedented depth the witnesses' understanding of the psychology of evil and their courage in survival; in the second, he probed further, in talks with a group of Hutu killers about their acts of unimaginable depravity. Now, in The Antelope's Strategy, he returns to Rwanda seven years later to talk with both the Hutus and Tutsis he'd come to know—some of the killers who had been released from prison or returned from Congolese exile, and the Tutsi escapees who must now tolerate them as neighbors. How are they managing with the process of reconciliation? Do you think in their hearts it is possible? The enormously varied and always surprising answers he gets suggest that the political ramifications of the international community's efforts to insist on resolution after these murderous episodes are incalculable. This is an astonishing exploration of the pain of memory, the nature of stoic hope, and the ineradicability of grief.

Jean Hatzfeld

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