Rwandans’ Perspective on Genocide

Anthony Daniels reviews Jean Hatzfeld’s trilogy about the Rwandan genocide in New Criterion: “Fear of Regress,” New Criterion, Feb. 2008. (Registration is required to view the article on line.) Hatzfeld’s trilogy includes Life Laid Bare, Machete Season, and The Strategy of Antelopes.

Daniels asks whether there are human experiences so terrible that they lie beyond rational explanation. He first juxtaposes the viewpoint expressed by some that all human ills can be diagnosed and that science has power to alleviate them against his own belief that “[l]ife has depths that cannot be plumbed by technical means.”

Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis (an estimated 80% of the Tutsi population) were killed by Hutus in the 1994 genocide. Hatzfeld interviewed numerous survivors:

That morning I had run into the marsh behind an old woman I knew. We were crouching silently in the water. The killers discovered her first, and I saw them cut her [the word “cut” is used throughout by all witnesses, survivors and perpetrators alike, to mean kill with machete, a euphemism that, oddly enough, magnifies rather than diminishes the horror of the proceeding] without bothering to drag her from the bog. They searched the surrounding foliage with the utmost care, because they knew all too well that a woman never just is by herself. They found me, holding my child in my arms. They slaughtered my child. I asked to go out onto the grass and not die in the filth of slime and blood where the old woman was already lying. There were two men; I have not forgotten one feature of their faces. They dragged me out into the papyrus and clubbed me, laying me out straightaway with a first blow on the forehead, without cutting my throat. Often they would leave the wounded in the mud for a day or two before returning to finish them off. As for me … they simply forgot to come back there.

Daniels says the Rwandan genocide is distinctive for not being carried out mainly by agents of the state, but rather by the general population. “[T]he perpetrators were ordinary people – not hardened psychopaths – who were often polite to their Tutsi neighbors, played football with them, helped them in the fields when they needed help, even counted them as friends, and so forth.” This makes more inexplicable “the sheer brio, the unbridled joy of the killers.” Hutu perpetrators were also interviewed:

I haven’t retained a single deplorable trace of the killings. I have learnt to accept what happened in the marshes. I have become a better person than before, with the same character. I had been dragged into an unknown nastiness, I have been corrected in prison, I have learnt to avoid quarreling with the survivors, I have put aside the desire for revenge.

Daniels notes that this perpetrator “who seems to think that a genocide can be reduced to a learning experience” has married a Tutsi girl, many of whom were reportedly kept alive for sexual purposes for a time and killed when their captor tired of them or when their presence was discovered by other Hutus.

Rather than recapitulating the debate in the West over whether we were complicit in the genocide, this account focuses on the Rwandan perspective. No doubt efforts to provide aid in the wake of the genocide are laudable and perhaps obligatory, but the efforts of benevolent outsiders to restore normalcy bespeak the West’s apparent inability to fathom real suffering. One of the survivors explains:

Who, in the end, speaks of forgiveness? The Tutsis, the Hutus, the freed prisoners, their families? None of them, it’s the humanitarian organizations. They import forgiveness into Rwanda, which they wrap in plenty of dollars to convince us. There is a Forgiveness Plan just as there is an AIDS Plan, with meetings to spread the message, posters, little local presidents, very polite whites in turbo-charged 4×4s. These humanitarians teach the teachers and encourage the local counsellors. They finance various aid projects. We, we speak of forgiveness in order to be thought well of, and because the subsidies can be lucrative.

The eloquence of the farmers and villagers who give their accounts strikes Daniels as something our own population would lack. They speak “in a way that is immediately accessible to us; it does not take a social anthropologist, with a deep knowledge of the local customs, to understand what they say.” One Tutsi reflects:

Having lived the killings, my theories have changed, philosophical thoughts no longer convince me, I mistrust classical ideas, I no longer respect logic as I ought. I have learned to allow for the unthinkable, to expect any surprise, to reflect anxiously on everything. I see treason behind all thought. No explanation satisfies me. I am always mistrustful. I want always to know what is really happening behind what happens.

Daniels tells us convincingly why Hatzfeld’s trilogy deserves to be read. It is not to find an explanation or diagnosis. Rather, the book lays bare “our modern pretensions to understand ourselves at long last in a fundamental way,” for there is no point at which we can say we understand.