A Time For Machetes

Author : Jean Hatzfeld
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Time for Machetes written by Jean Hatzfeld and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April-May 1994, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were massacred by their Hutu fellow citizens - about 10,000 a day, mostly being hacked to death by machete. Jean Hatzfeld reports on the results of his interviews with nine of the Hutu killers, all of whom are now in prison, some awaiting execution. Hatzfeld elicits extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they perpetrated. Each describes what it was like the first time he killed someone, what he felt like when he killed a mother and child, and how he reacted when he killed a cordial acquaintance. Each reflects on his feelings of moral responsibility, his guilt, remorse, or indifference to the crimes. Especially since the Holocaust, it has been conventional to presume that only depraved and monstrous evil incarnate could perpetrate such crimes, but it may be, Hatzfeld suggests, that such actions are within the realm of ordinary human conduct. To read this disturbing, enlightening and very brave book is to consider in a new light the foundation of human morality and ethics.

Author : Jean Hatzfeld
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 9781429923514
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Machete Season written by Jean Hatzfeld and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2006-04-18 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April-May 1994, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were massacred by their Hutu fellow citizens--about 10,000 a day, mostly being hacked to death by machete. In Machete Season, the veteran foreign correspondent Jean Hatzfeld reports on the results of his interviews with nine of the Hutu killers. They were all friends who came from a single region where they helped to kill 50,000 out of their 59,000 Tutsi neighbors, and all of them are now in prison, some awaiting execution. It is usually presumed that killers will not tell the truth about their brutal actions, but Hatzfeld elicited extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they had perpetrated. He rightly sees that their account raises as many questions as it answers. Adabert, Alphonse, Ignace, and the others (most of them farmers) told Hatzfeld how the work was given to them, what they thought about it, how they did it, and what their responses were to the bloodbath. "Killing is easier than farming," one says. "I got into it, no problem," says another. Each describes what it was like the first time he killed someone, what he felt like when he killed a mother and child, how he reacted when he killed a cordial acquaintance, how 'cutting' a person with a machete differed from 'cutting' a calf or a sugarcane. And they had plenty of time to tell Hatzfeld, too, about whether and why they had reconsidered their motives, their moral responsibility, their guilt, remorse, or indifference to the crimes. Hatzfeld's meditation on the banal, horrific testimony of the genocidaires and what it means is lucid, humane, and wise: he relates the Rwanda horror to war crimes and to other genocidal episodes in human history. Especially since the Holocaust, it has been conventional to presume that only depraved and monstrous evil incarnate could perpetrate such crimes, but it may be, he suggests, that such actions are within the realm of ordinary human conduct. To read this disturbing, enlightening and very brave book is to consider in a new light the foundation of human morality and ethics.

Author : Jean Hatzfeld
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374271038
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Antelope's Strategy written by Jean Hatzfeld and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. 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.

Author : Immaculee Ilibagiza
Publisher : Hay House, Inc
ISBN 13 : 1401944329
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Left to Tell written by Immaculee Ilibagiza and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2014-04-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee’s family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans. Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them. It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculee discovered the power of prayer, eventually shedding her fear of death and forging a profound and lasting relationship with God. She emerged from her bathroom hideout having discovered the meaning of truly unconditional love—a love so strong she was able seek out and forgive her family’s killers. The triumphant story of this remarkable young woman’s journey through the darkness of genocide will inspire anyone whose life has been touched by fear, suffering, and loss.

Author : Jean Hatzfeld
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781852429898
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Into the Quick of Life written by Jean Hatzfeld and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rwanda in 1994, five out of six Tutsis (800,000) were hacked to death with machetes by their Hutu neighbours. In the villages of Nyamata and N'tarama, where, in the first two days of the genocide, over 10,000 Tutsis were massacred in the churches where they sought refuge, Jean Hatzfeld interviewed some of the survivors. Of all ages, coming from different walks of life, from orphan teenage farmers to the local social worker, fourteen survivors talk of the genocide, the death of family and friends in the church and in the marshes of Bugesera to which they fled. They also talk of their present life and try to explain and understand the reasons behind the extermination. These horrific accounts of life at the very edge contrast with Hatzfeld's own sensitive and vivid descriptions of Rwanda's villages and countryside in peacetime. Into the Quick of Life brings us, in the author's own words, ?as close to (the event) as we can ever get?. It is a unique insight into a genocide.

Author : Tomás Q. Morín
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 1524711985
Total Pages : 97 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Machete written by Tomás Q. Morín and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fresh voice in American poetry wields lyric pleasure and well-honed insight against a cruel century that would kill us with a thousand cuts. "Morín's writing uses the mundane details of everyday life...as a jumping-off point for creating fascinating and philosophical worlds." —LitHub "Dios aprieta, pero no ahorca" ("God squeezes, but He doesn't strangle")--the epigraph of Machete--sets the stage for a powerful poet who summons a variety of ways to endure life when there's an invisible hand at your throat. Tomás Morín hails from the coastal plains of Texas, and explores a world where identity and place shift like that ever-changing shore. In these poems, culture crashes like waves and leaves behind Billie Holiday and the CIA, disco balls and Dante, the Bible and Jerry Maguire. They are long, lean, and dazzle in their telling: "Whiteface" is a list of instructions for people stopped by the police; "Duct Tape" lauds our domestic life from the point of view of the tape itself. One part Groucho Marx, one part Job, Morín considers our obsession with suffering--"the pain in which we trust"--and finds that the best answer to our predicament is sometimes anger, sometimes laughter, but always via the keen line between them that may be the sharpest weapon we have.

Author : Romeo Dallaire
Publisher : Vintage Canada
ISBN 13 : 0307371190
Total Pages : 585 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shake Hands With the Devil written by Romeo Dallaire and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the tenth anniversary of the date that UN peacekeepers landed in Rwanda, Random House Canada is proud to publish the unforgettable first-hand account of the genocide by the man who led the UN mission. Digging deep into shattering memories, General Dallaire has written a powerful story of betrayal, naïveté, racism and international politics. His message is simple and undeniable: “Never again.” When Lt-Gen. Roméo Dallaire received the call to serve as force commander of the UN intervention in Rwanda in 1993, he thought he was heading off on a modest and straightforward peacekeeping mission. Thirteen months later he flew home from Africa, broken, disillusioned and suicidal, having witnessed the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in only a hundred days. In Shake Hands with the Devil, he takes the reader with him on a return voyage into the hell of Rwanda, vividly recreating the events the international community turned its back on. This book is an unsparing eyewitness account of the failure by humanity to stop the genocide, despite timely warnings. Woven through the story of this disastrous mission is Dallaire’s own journey from confident Cold Warrior, to devastated UN commander, to retired general engaged in a painful struggle to find a measure of peace, reconciliation and hope. This book is General Dallaire’s personal account of his conversion from a man certain of his worth and secure in his assumptions to a man conscious of his own weaknesses and failures and critical of the institutions he’d relied on. It might not sit easily with standard ideas of military leadership, but understanding what happened to General Dallaire and his mission to Rwanda is crucial to understanding the moral minefields our peacekeepers are forced to negotiate when we ask them to step into the world’s dirty wars. Excerpt from Shake Hands with the Devil My story is not a strictly military account nor a clinical, academic study of the breakdown of Rwanda. It is not a simplistic indictment of the many failures of the UN as a force for peace in the world. It is not a story of heroes and villains, although such a work could easily be written. This book is a cri de coeur for the slaughtered thousands, a tribute to the souls hacked apart by machetes because of their supposed difference from those who sought to hang on to power. . . . This book is the account of a few humans who were entrusted with the role of helping others taste the fruits of peace. Instead, we watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect.

Author : Roberto Lovato
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062938487
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unforgetting written by Roberto Lovato and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An LA Times Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Editors' Pick • A Newsweek 25 Best Fall Books • A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year "Gripping and beautiful. With the artistry of a poet and the intensity of a revolutionary, Lovato untangles the tightly knit skein of love and terror that connects El Salvador and the United States." —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes and Nickel and Dimed An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time—and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten. The child of Salvadoran immigrants, Roberto Lovato grew up in 1970s and 80s San Francisco as MS-13 and other notorious Salvadoran gangs were forming in California. In his teens, he lost friends to the escalating violence, and survived acts of brutality himself. He eventually traded the violence of the streets for human rights advocacy in wartime El Salvador where he joined the guerilla movement against the U.S.-backed, fascist military government responsible for some of the most barbaric massacres and crimes against humanity in recent history. Roberto returned from war-torn El Salvador to find the United States on the verge of unprecedented crises of its own. There, he channeled his own pain into activism and journalism, focusing his attention on how trauma affects individual lives and societies, and began the difficult journey of confronting the roots of his own trauma. As a child, Roberto endured a tumultuous relationship with his father Ramón. Raised in extreme poverty in the countryside of El Salvador during one of the most violent periods of its history, Ramón learned to survive by straddling intersecting underworlds of family secrets, traumatic silences, and dealing in black-market goods and guns. The repression of the violence in his life took its toll, however. Ramón was plagued with silences and fits of anger that had a profound impact on his youngest son, and which Roberto attributes as a source of constant reckoning with the violence and rebellion in his own life. In Unforgetting, Roberto interweaves his father’s complicated history and his own with first-hand reportage on gang life, state violence, and the heart of the immigration crisis in both El Salvador and the United States. In doing so he makes the political personal, revealing the cyclical ways violence operates in our homes and our societies, as well as the ways hope and tenderness can rise up out of the darkness if we are courageous enough to unforget.

Author : Scholastique Mukasonga
Publisher : Archipelago
ISBN 13 : 0914671537
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cockroaches written by Scholastique Mukasonga and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mukasonga unsparingly resurrects the horrors of the Rwandan geocide while lyrically recording the quieter moments of daily life with her family—a moving tribute to all those who are displaced, who suffer. Mukasonga’s extraordinary, lyrical, and heartbreaking book … is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about the endurance of the human spirit and who hopes for a better world. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Los Angeles Review of Books Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches is a compelling chronicle of the author’s childhood in the years leading up to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In a spare and penetrating tone, Mukasonga brings to life the scenes of her family’s forced displacement from Rwanda to neighboring Burundi. With a view made lucid through time and pain, Mukasonga erodes the distance between her present and her past, resurrecting and paying homage to her family members who were massacred in the genocide, but also, in movingly simple language, the beauty present in quiet, daily moments with her loved ones. As lyrical as it is tragic, Cockroaches is Mukasonga’s tribute to her family’s suffering and to the lingering grip of the dead on the living.

Author : Boubacar Boris Diop
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780253112064
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Murambi, The Book of Bones written by Boubacar Boris Diop and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[W]hat is true of Rwanda is true in each of us; we all share in Africa." -- L'Harmattan "[This novel] comes closer than have many political scientists or historians to trying to understand why this small country... sank in such appalling violence." -- Radio France International In April of 1994, nearly a million Rwandans were killed in what would prove to be one of the swiftest, most terrifying killing sprees of the 20th century. In Murambi, The Book of Bones, Boubacar Boris Diop comes face to face with the chilling horror and overwhelming sadness of the tragedy. Now, the power of Diop's acclaimed novel is available to English-speaking readers through Fiona Mc Laughlin's crisp translation. The novel recounts the story of a Rwandan history teacher, Cornelius Uvimana, who was living and working in Djibouti at the time of the massacre. He returns to Rwanda to try to comprehend the death of his family and to write a play about the events that took place there. As the novel unfolds, Cornelius begins to understand that it is only our humanity that will save us, and that as a writer, he must bear witness to the atrocities of the genocide. From the novel: "If only by the way people are walking, you can see that tension is mounting by the minute. I can feel it almost physically. Everyone is running or at least hurrying about. I meet more and more passersby who seem to be walking around in circles. There seems to be another light in their eyes. I think of the fathers who have to face the anguished eyes of their children and who can't tell them anything. For them, the country has become an immense trap in the space of just a few hours. Death is on the prowl. They can't even dream of defending themselves. Everything has been meticulously prepared for a long time: the administration, the army, and the [militia] are going to combine forces to kill, if possible, every last one of them."