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Overview
Jean Hatzfeld’s Machete Season: the Killers in Rwanda Speak is a much different book than the Pol Pot history that I covered a couple of weeks ago. It’s harder to write about, because it’s just what the title describes: the killers in their own words, interspersed with short contextual explanations of the events surrounding the Rwandan genocide.
Hatzfeld – who has also written two books about the horrific Baltic wars of the 1990s – argues that many of what the mainstream media call genocides should be described as war crimes instead: brutal, unacceptable mass killings of defenseless humans that nonetheless take place in the the context of reducing a population’s ability to wage war. Genocide, he argues, is a term that should be reserved to describe an effort to completely exterminate a population and leave it incapable of ever recovering. In the Rwandan genocide, for example, the Hutu killers often preferred to murder women and children first, because it would leave the Tutsi population less capable of carrying on to the next generation.
History
Modern Rwanda has three main ethnic groups: the majority Hutu, the minority Tutsi, and a small population of Twa jungle-dwelling hunter-gatherers. At the time of Continue reading