Machete Season

Every evening after the killing, the gang met to discuss their loot over drinks. Thus, Élie says the killing made them “gossipy and greedy” (82).

Looting became so important to the killers that they only cared about what they could get for their own comfort, like sheet metal, cows, radios, or cash stolen off dead bodies or from Tutsis who offered it while begging for their lives.

According to a nurse at the Sainte-Marthe Maternity hospital, a different member of the interahamwe came each day to demand a bribe. After UNAMIR rescued the White, Swiss medical personnel, the Hutu killers rounded up and killed all the women and infants left behind and looted the bodies. 

Although the gang members killed as a group, they looted as individuals. They even seized land. Whenever they learned that a murdered Tutsi owned land, a gang member claimed it and sent his wife to loot the house. The women would steal the bloody clothes and take the money hidden in the dead’s underwear. Some men raped women and young girls instead of looting.

With so little land and one of the highest population densities in the world, Rwanda did not attract many immigrants. As a result, when the violence began, no outside ethnic group or culture could successfully counter it.

UNAMIR dispatched three armored vehicles to stop and collect all foreign Whites two days after Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. When the interahamwe outside the maternity hospital realized the Whites and the UN were gone, they started to celebrate. Hatzfeld notes that not a single foreigner can explain why they all left right when the genocide began. Perhaps they could not believe that genocide would truly come.

After the UN left, the killing began, as Radio Rwanda host Milles Collines blared orders, instructions, and jokes, egging on the Hutu to kill. The Hutus closed the courthouse, let the Hutu prisoners out of jail, and closed the churches, except those giving refuge to Tutsis. Within three days, with foreign eyes and conscience gone, all the Tutsi were killed in the churches; 5,000 were killed in one day.

According to Adalbert, the ease of the killing made them lazy, slow, and overconfident. Adalbert adds: “That overconfidence is what did us in” (92).

In the evenings, many killers celebrated through the night by drinking and feasting on Tutsi cattle. These revelries displaced the usual celebrations marking changes in life, like weddings, which no longer interested the killers.

Clementine, a survivor, notes that even before the genocide, the gang harassed Tutsi women. After the genocide began, no one was punished for raping women and girls in the bush. According to Adalbert, since the girls were “marked for death” it did not matter (96). Some men took Tutsi girls as wives, while others raped them before handing them over to be killed.

For some killers, their home life changed. Afraid of her husband, Fulgence’s wife slept on the floor. Élie’s wife, however, believed that her husband’s hard work hard entitled him to intimate relations every night.

Hatzfeld argues that genocide is a distinct form of mass murder. Therefore, the killings should not be conflated with war crimes.

Few Hutus showed Tutsis any compassion. For example, before the genocide, Rwandan footballers on the Bugesera Sport team were Tutsis and Hutus. Tutsi player Tite Rushita survived. When the killing started, Tite took refuge at a Hutu teammate’s house, but the teammate, who already killed two children, chased Tite into the marshes. His teammates hunted him continuously.

In war, people often have memories of camaraderie between enemies. In Rwanda, there were no escape routes for the victims, a characteristic of genocide absent in war. Also in war, soldiers generally lack the intent to exterminate an entire group, and men are killed first because they have the ability to fight back. But in genocide, they also kill women and babies because they are the group’s future. Finally, in war, one group wants to take over the political state; in genocide, they want to kill an entire people and usually already control the state.

Most of the killers agree that women’s place is to follow the man’s commands. Men in Rwandan society are held responsible for “right and wrong actions” of their wives, so if a woman chose to harbor a Tutsi, the punishment fell on the man (109). Thus, women refused to care for infants of killed mothers because they did not want their husbands punished.

According to Jean-Baptiste, the killing was men’s work. Women’s primary roles were to cook, care for the family, provide intimate relations, and loot. During the genocide, most women said nothing because they had plenty of food and material goods from looting.

Most Hutu women showed Tutsi women and children no mercy. According to Ignace, women knew their husbands raped women and young girls but objected only when they did so near the family home. Few women publicly went against their husbands or the killing more generally. Some, like Alphonse’s wife, feared the Lord’s punishment. Women also killed Tutsis but rarely in the marshes. Hutu women also knew how cruelly Tutsi women and girls were often killed. Many Tutsis were forced to watch their children killed first. Others were raped for days at a time before they were killed. 

Of Hutus who are wrongly killed or refuse to kill, Hatzfeld calls them “the Just.” The author also explains why some Tutsi were spared.

Examples of the Just include Isidore Mahandago, who was killed when he called a group of killers walking near him “evildoers” (114). Marcel Sengali was killed after being mistaken for a Tutsi because he is was a cattle farmer.

Some Hutus refused to kill. The interahamwe told a Hutu named François Kalinganiré to kill his Tutsi wife; he refused and was killed. Innocent encountered three men who refused to kill because, as Pentecostalists, their religion forbade them from killing those created in God’s image. Hatzfeld meets a few of the Just, like Ibrahim Nsengiyumua, who kept paying fines rather than kill. He tells Hatzfeld he refused to sully the fortune he worked so hard for with blood.

Many Tutsi wives were spared. By way of comparison, Nazi Germany did not separate couples: if one spouse was Jewish, they both were. But Hutu men were allowed to bargain for their Tutsi wives, especially if the man was wealthy or an especially prolific killer of Tutsis.

The killers discuss how they treated Tutsi acquaintances. Most of them tried not to distinguish between Tutsis in the belief that all Tutsis had to be killed. Adalbert insists that in the gang, no Tutsis were spared because they were acquainted with a group member.

Whenever Pio came across a Tutsi he knew, he let another gang member kill them without betraying his feelings to the others. Most the killers agree that they could only spare a Tutsi for a matter of moments or days; someone would find them and kill them eventually. Hutu women did not save Tutsi acquaintances either, for fear that they would later be required to kill them.

Jean-Baptiste recalls seeing only one person saved, a Hutu boy. Raised by Tutsis, the boy fled with them to the marshes. When the killers found him and told him he is Hutu, he left the marshes. Although the boy was fit and old enough to kill, he was not required to participate in the genocide, nor was he punished.

Sometimes, the killers tricked acquaintances by whispering their names so they came forward thinking they were safe, only to be killed. When killing an acquaintance, a Hutu may have been especially cruel to show that he viewed all Tutsis, acquaintance or not, as the same.