Confessions, justice in Rwanda's killing fields

By now, nearly everyone knows the horrific facts: from April through July of 1994, machete-wielding Hutus raped, maimed, and massacred their neighbors -- Tutsis and moderate Hutus -- at a rate that, as one author notes, made Hitler's killing machine seem inefficient. In a little over three months one of every 10 Rwandans was murdered.

In an effort to explain the unexplainable, French journalist Jean Hatzfeld has written ''Machete Season," in which he interviews 10 seemingly ordinary men, all friends and farmers, who recount the carnage with a remorseless zeal. Hatzfeld's reportage follows his 1999 book, ''Into the Quick of Life," in which he interviewed Tutsi survivors in the same rural area south of the capital, Kigali.

The newer book is organized in straightforward fashion, almost like a script. Each man has his say on a variety of topics, from how the killing was organized to the historical hatred of the Tutsis by the Hutus. Though Hatzfeld breaks in with his own observations and analysis, it is the men's words that carry the most emotional weight. Hatzfeld lets the chilling words speak for themselves. ''Rule number one was to kill. There was no rule number two," says one man.

The hunters showed up at the soccer field in the morning, were given their daily instructions, and then took off to the nearby marshes, where many of the Tutsis had fled. ''We had to work fast, and we got no time off, especially not Sundays -- we had to finish up," says one interviewee. Their job? ''To crush all the cockroaches," as the Tutsis were called.

In the chapter titled ''Apprenticeship," the men, who ranged in age from 22 to 62 at the time of the killings, describe how ordinary farmers became seasoned killers.

''Doing it over and over: repetition smoothed out clumsiness."

''The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural. The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood."

''I saw papas teaching their boys how to cut. . . . They displayed their skill on dead people, or on living people they had captured. . . . The boys usually tried it out on children, because of their similar size."