The Antelope's Strategy

"The Rwandan genocide is not just one of Africa’s big stories, it is one of humanity’s big stories and it will have to be written about for decades and decades to come, just like the Holocaust. Hatzfeld is a journalist for the newspaper Liberation who has written three books on the subject, all translated from the French. The first is called Into The Quick of Life and is a series of interviews with survivors. In the second, Time for Machetes , he goes into a prison and talks to a group of young friends who took part in the genocide. This is the genocide seen through the eyes of killers. It is easy to write movingly about victims, but it is more interesting and more important, if we want to stop these things happening again, to talk to the perpetrators. In this third book he goes back to Nyamata, the village where he started out, and this time he talks to both victims and perpetrators, now living cheek-by-jowl. President Paul Kagame, who realised that the prisons were overflowing, introduced the ‘Gacaca’ system of justice. If you were a suspected killer you were offered a deal – you could go back to the village and confess in public to your crimes. If you were telling the whole truth you were released and sent home. If someone said: ‘No! You actually killed 15 more people up the road,’ – then you went back to prison. This is a searing, poignant and very poetic book, not cluttered with facts and figures. The individual voices all come across so strongly and what you realise, listening to them, is that while there can be cohabitation, there is no real reconciliation. But there is simply no better alternative. Well, a World Bank report recently named Rwanda as the country that had done most in the world to make it easy to do business there. Kagame is trying really hard to attract investors and find a new role for the country. But it’s hard to see how you can ever recover from a genocide in which nearly a million people died."