Season of the Long Knives

You’ve heard the accounts of Tutsi victims of the Rwandan genocide. For the first time, author Jean Hatzfeld brings you the Hutu killers' perspective.

By Kyle Mantyla
Web Exclusive: 07.01.05

The response to every genocide is more or less the same. In April 1993, President Clinton, in dedicating the newly constructed U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, lamented that “far too little was done” to save those who had fallen victim to the Nazi’s Final Solution and vowed that “we must not permit that to happen again.” Yet just one year later, nearly 1 million Rwandans were slaughtered by their neighbors over the course of a mere 100 days while the world did nothing. And even today, after more than a decade and countless pledges of “never again,” the world finds itself paralyzed in the face of another African genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

Just as global response to genocide is always the same, so are most of the books about it, in that they tend to place the slaughter within the context of the realpolitik that prevented international action. For this reason, it is understandable that books written for Western audiences tend to focus on the Western world’s action -- or, more accurately, its inaction -- to stop the senseless deaths of countless victims.