Machete Season by Jean Hatzfeld

Author:Jean Hatzfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

ALPHONSE: Some amused themselves with their machetes on the Tutsis, to show off their skill to everyone. They would swagger around boasting later in the evening. Some slowed down their machetes just for punishment. If a Tutsi had worn out a pursuer in a running chase, he could be teased with the point of a machete—it could be nasty for him. It was like demonstrating the bad example, except no one was left alive to notice.

JEAN-BAPTISTE: Extreme agonies were worked on important people, well-known businessmen. It was to punish them for past misdeeds or make them cough up their hidden savings. Also torments were done to people with whom there had been a stubborn grievance—a bargain that had not been settled or bad blood over some trampling by cows, for example. But not often. No orders were given about this. The bosses would say, “Kill, and fast, that’s all. There’s no point in taking your time.”

In Congo, on the way back, I knew some perpetrators who were driven by madness into Lake Kivu. Fright plunged them into an engulfing grave. They thought death would welcome them more mercifully in the waters than on the hills. Horrible threats were flying in all directions as the return drew close. Terror gave them detailed promises of a wretched death, since they had themselves cut a great many in a vicious way. But they were the exceptions.

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