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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"The journalist Jean Hatzfeld was born to Jewish parents who had fled to Madagascar during WWII. He was raised in France and first traveled to Rwanda in 1994, the year of the massacre. He hasn't stopped writing about it since. As Hatzfeld admits, he is 'obsessed' with the history of Rwanda's genocide, in which Hutu militias killed approximately 800,000 Tutsis over a 100-day period, primarily using clubs and machetes. Hence the title of his stunning "Machete Season," which collects Hatzfeld's interviews with the killers. "Life Laid Bare," a companion volume, provides an oral history from the survivors' point of view. Both books are astonishing, but "The Antelope's Strategy," his latest book on the war, may be the most intriguing of the trilogy, because it combines both killer and survivor voices to examine the thorny and existentially frustrating issue of national reconciliation. In January 2003, a presidential decree released a group of 40,000 killers convicted of genocide from prison. "The Antelope's Strategy"--named after the scattering technique of groups of hunted Tutsis running in the forest--follows up with the speakers of his