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During the spring of 1994, in a tiny country called Rwanda, some
800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors
in a gruesome civil war. Several years later, journalist Jean
Hatzfeld traveled to Rwanda to interview ten participants in the
killings, eliciting extraordinary testimony from these men about
the genocide they perpetrated. As Susan Sontag wrote in the
preface, "Machete Season" is a document that "everyone should read
. . . because making] the effort to understand what happened in
Rwanda . . . is part of being a moral adult."
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, an international reporter for Liberation since 1973, is the author of many books, including "Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak." He lives in Paris. "The Antelope's Strategy" is 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. "Scarcely anyone in Rwanda, Hutu or Tutsi, was not touched by the savagery that broke out when, in April 1994, Hutu militias began to slaughter Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Overwhelmingly, Hatzfeld finds the survivors psychologically broken and hollow, feeling as if they had been 'betrayed by life--[and] who can bear that?' His account opens in 2003, with the specter of a thin, dusty, endless column of 40,000 men, freed from camps and penitentiaries after having served time for their role in the genocide. Some of the interned, one of their number reflects, were jubilant; others, denying any wrongdoing, were furious at having been imprisoned in the first place. All were faced with the problem of making new lives in public, among the relatives and families of those whom they had killed. Some respond with drink, some with silence, some with isolation and some with anger . . . Thanks to the work of Rwandans who insist on attaining justice--an arduous project, given the absence of a fully functioning judiciary and the difficulty of finding 'simple fairness' in the back-and-forth of accusation and defense--some measure of normality is at last attainable in that unfortunate country. A telling report and a substantive addition to the literature of humanitarian aid and ethnic violence."--"Kirkus Reviews" "'Why keep on?' asks Claudine Kayitesi, a Tutsi survivor living
in relative peace in Nyamata, Rwanda. Her question is not a
philosophical one, though that would be understandable given what
she has experienced--rape, displacement, the murder of a sister and
many others. Rather, her query is directed at the persistent
questions of the French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, who has returned
to the war-torn landscape he wrote about in two previous books,
"The Machete Season" and "Life Laid Bare," to speak again to
survivors and perpetrators of the 1994 genocide. Why Hatzfeld keeps
on asking questions is among the many thought-provoking issues at
the heart of his new book, "The Antelope's Strategy." Seven years
after his reporting for "Machete Season," Hatzfeld finds a
much-changed Rwanda: The terrors of war have been replaced by an
awkward--and sometimes dangerous--atmosphere of forced
reconciliation. Some Hutu prisoners have been released or have
returned from exile to live among the families of those they
killed. 'Not one prisoner came asking for forgiveness, ' says
Kayitesi. A Hutu ex-convict notes, 'I was charged, I was convicted,
I was pardoned. I did not ask to be forgiven.' Hatzfeld captures
this tension gracefully, weaving lengthy interview excerpts with
his own artfully written observations. The result is a book that
illustrates vividly the thorny realities that accompany survival
and appeasement. 'People are living peacefully, but actually they
are avoiding one another, ' Kayitesi comments in the book's final
pages. 'We'll be humble and nice, we'll share, we'll cooperate as
we should. But believing them is unthinkable.'"--Nora Krug, "The
Washington Post
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