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Contributed by Editor One
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Monday, 18 July 2005 |
 The perennial story of a serial killer like Dennis Rader has a special power to make our skin crawl. How inhuman these creatures must be to kill others, in cold blood, again and again. They are not like us. We bear no resemblance to them.
Yet there are serial killers who may once have felt the same repulsion that we do at the notion of committing even a single murder. Therre are thousands of these people. And with such a large population of them, we cannot honestly lock them in a mental box with John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the others. They cannot all be reptilian creatures masquerading in human skin. At least a handful must be ordinary people like you and me who somehow became something else.
Jean Hatzfield has compiled a story of the Rwandan genocide that presents the testimony of some of these people. The accounts revealed in Machete Season are riveting and bone-chilling. The interviews also shed some light on how yielding to conformity can unleash unambiguous evil from everyday people.
Here are a few excerpts from the book by Rwandans who admittedly killed their countrymen:
Pancrace: Cutting corn or bananas, it's a smooth job, because ears of corn and bunches of bananas are all the same — nothing troublesome there. Cutting in the marshes, it was more and more tiring, you know the reason why. It was a similar motion but not a similar situation. It was more hazardous. A hectic job.
In the beginning the Tutsis were many and frightened and not very active — that made our work easier. But at the end only the strong and the sly ones were left, and it got too hard. Too often we would get all mired up for nothing. Plus, the marshes were rotting with bodies softening in the slime. They were piling up, stinking more and more, and we had to take care not to step in them.
Elie: The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural. The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood. Grab a machete — that is what we do every morning. We cut sorghum, we prune banana trees, we hack vines, we kill chickens. Even women and little girls borrow the machete for small tasks, like chopping firewood. Whatever the job, the same gesture always comes smoothly to our hands. The blade, when you use it to cut branch, animal, or man, it has nothing to say.
In the end, a man is like an animal: you give a whack on the head or the neck, down he goes. In the first days someone who had already slaughtered chickens — and especially goats — had an advantage, understandably. Later, everybody grew accustomed to the new activity, and the laggards caught up.
Leopold: We began the day by killing, we ended the day by looting. It was the rule to kill going out and to loot coming back... ...Anyone who could not loot because he had to be absent, or because he felt tired from all he had done, could send his wife. You would see wives rummaging through houses. They ventured even into the marshes to get the belongings of the unfortunate women who had just been killed.
Elie: We no longer worried about wasting alkaline batteries. We turned on all the radios at once. The blast of music never stopped. We listened to dance music and traditional Rwandan songs, we listened to soap operas. We did not listen to the speeches and news anymore.
Basically, we didn't give a hoot what they were scheming up in Kigali. We paid no more attention to events in the rest of the country, as long as we knew the killing was continuing everywhere without a snag. Poor people appeared at ease, the rich seemed cheerful, the future promised us good times.
Alphonse: Saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away. They were killed more quickly, because of their small size and because their suffering was of no use. The babies could not understand the why of the suffering; it was not worth lingering over them.
Leopold: It is awkward to talk about hatred between Hutus and Tutsis, because the words changed meanings after the killings. Before, we could fool around among ourselves and say we were going to kill them all, and the next moment we would join them to share some work or a bottle. Jokes and threats were mixed together. WE no longer paid heed to what we said. We could toss around awful words without awful thoughts. The Tutsis did not even get very upset. Since then we have seen those words brought on grave consequences.
More reviews of Machete Season can be found here.
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