Ours is, appallingly, an age of genocide, but even so, what happened in Rwanda in the spring of 1994 stands out in several ways. In a tiny, landlocked African country smaller than the state of Maryland, some 800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors. The women, men, and children who were slaughtered were of the same race and shared the same language, customs, and confession (Roman Catholic) as those who eagerly slaughtered them. “It’s too difficult to judge us,” says one of the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide who agreed to describe to Jean Hatzfeld what he had done. Why? “Because what we did goes beyond human imagination.” But that is just the point. Yes, what was done in Rwanda goes beyond human imagination, and yes, human beings, hundreds of thousands of otherwise normal people, not professional killers, did it. Against the constant backdrop of reflection about the Shoah and other modern genocides, Hatzfeld has harvested a unique set of avowals that forces us to confront the unthinkable, the unimaginable. This is not courtroom testimony but a series of remarkably varied reflections by articulate people who do, in large measure, understand what they have done and still hope to be forgiven and to get on with their lives.
Our obligation, and it is an obligation, is to take in what human beings are capable of doing to one another, not spontaneously (crimes of this order are never spontaneous) but when mobilized to think of other human beings—people who were
their school friends, neighbors, co-workers, and fellow parishioners—as not human beings at all, and when organized for and directed to the task of slaughter. For the issue, finally, is not judgment. It is understanding. To make the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda is a painful task that we have no right to shirk—it is part of being a moral adult. Everyone should read Hatzfeld’s book.
SUSAN SONTAG