The Aftermath and After

Living in Rwanda After the Genocide By Jean Hatzfeld (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 242 pp., $25)

The Antelope’s Strategy:

Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda By Lee Ann Fujii (Cornell University Press, 212 pp., $29.95)

After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post- Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond Edited by Phil Clark and Zachary D. Kaufman (Columbia University Press, 399 pp., $50)

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster By Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 353 pp., $27.95)

I.

The subject of catastrophe invites the high eloquence of writers, the explanatory power of historians, and the deepest empathy of ordinary people. But the aftermath of catastrophe--that is not yet a subject to which many people kindle. Most of us prefer to back away from the scene of torment, with its inconsolable survivors and its insoluble problems. The survivors, though, cannot back away. They continue to live where the others died. Jean Améry, tortured at Auschwitz, wrote powerfully about the world’s readiness to isolate the survivor, who is unable to join in “the peace chorus all around him, which cheerfully proposes: not backward let us look but forward, to a better, common future.”

After a century of wars of unprecedented scale and savagery, of mass murders and natural disasters, the problems of post-catastrophic societies are a huge and unconscionably neglected quandary for our times. Gedenk! Remember! It is a beloved dictum, generalized from the Holocaust to other genocides and disasters. For the fortunate, the unscarred, the calamity can be comfortably assigned to the past, and the ongoing effects remedied with material assistance and goodwill. But for those who remain on the scene, and suffer for it, neither the present nor the future can be divested of the darkness of the past. They are surrounded by our talk of sympathy and fellow feeling--and they may be forgiven for wondering whether this post-catastrophic uplift is not often a mask for indifference.

So is there a more efficacious response? Are there forms of empathy that are not smug and spurious and self-serving? What moral relationship can outsiders forge with those who have been irreparably and unimaginably harmed? These are ancient problems, addressed by seers and philosophers and divines; but they have practical urgency--and even policy dimensions--for ordinary people in the twenty-first century.

In July 1994, the French journalist Jean Hatzfeld crossed the border from Burundi into Rwanda with the first reporters to arrive at the end of the genocide. Fresh from the war in Bosnia, Hatzfeld had covered conflict and its aftermath in Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East for two decades. In the totality, and the intimate savagery, of the killing, Rwanda was like nothing he had ever seen. Eventually he left journalism to write full-time about the difficulties of rebuilding Rwanda, dividing his time between Paris and Nyamata, a market town in a devastated region in the south of the country. Months of interviews and investigations turned into years, and one book led to another. Into the Quick of Life, about the town’s survivors, and Machete Season, about an imprisoned gang of local perpetrators, published in French three years apart, appeared in English in 2005. Hatzfeld became a familiar figure in Nyamata. Now The Antelope’s Strategy brings the story up to 2008, with the killers returned from prison and townspeople trying to cobble together a common life under the sign of “reconciliation,” which is the official policy of the government and the mantra of Western humanitarian organizations.

Too little known in the United States, Hatzfeld’s work is a profound inquiry into the character of social relationships in a post-genocide society. There is no comparable work about Jewish survivors in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and none from within Cambodia after 1979, and none, to my knowledge, about Bosnia, where in any case the violence was less total. One would not guess the importance of Hatzfeld’s slim volumes from their calm pacing and their modest tone. His books seem at first glance to be compilations of interviews strung together with short commentaries. Ruminative rather than hard-hitting, characterized by sparse exposition and rigorously controlled details, these books are kin to Jan Gross’s Neighbors and Fear, short and definitive and profoundly troubling studies of the murders of Polish Jews by Poles before and after the Nazi genocide. Taken together, Gross’s books constitute a pared-down alternative to the big Holocaust classics, as well as a refutation of the genocide melodramas that Hollywood has popularized. Like Gross, Hatzfeld works from an awareness of the essential paradox in writing about genocide, which is that he is bound to describe what is beyond words. Leaving much of the exposition to his tersely eloquent Rwandan subjects, his solution is linguistic restraint and emotional tact, as if too many words and too many feelings would corrupt the account of such a reality.

How are people doing? It is the only question from which any real empathy proceeds; but unfortunately it is rare for outsiders to ask it. The question is at the core of The Antelope’s Strategy, which takes its title from a survivor’s description of sprinting every day for months to outwit the killers. Many readers are likely to have left Rwanda back with Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, an account of the genocide and the immediate aftermath that ends in 1997. A tiny African country with no book publishers, few writers, and a thin literary tradition has difficulty in keeping the story going. Hatzfeld’s assurance to survivors that “you also interest us when you go on living” is admirable, but it goes against the grain of declining Western interest.

As far as most of the literate public is concerned, Rwanda was never so fascinating as in those three months of 1994, and the survivors never so interesting as when they were about to die. This despite the complex and extraordinary history of the last fifteen years. For the génocidaires did not fall to their knees, repentant: they fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo and continued to attack across the border. France continued to meddle secretly, and Congo’s Mobutu supplied them with arms. The war in Congo since 1997 has killed an estimated 5.4 million people. Meanwhile, Rwanda has been the only nation ever to bring to trial masses of low-level perpetrators; the trials have fueled bitter controversies and have provoked a surge of genocide denial outside the country. But as far as most Westerners--and most Africans, too--are concerned, Rwanda is, well, so 1990s.

Hatzfeld’s books, and especially The Antelope’s Strategy, push against the tight framing of genocide as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Hatzfeld wants us to see that genocide is a process halted only with great difficulty and political will. In Rwanda, as in Cambodia, the actual violence did not end for years after the spotlight moved on; and even after the countries were finally pacified and secured, the moral and psychological ravages continued--as they do today. Hatzfeld’s important book investigates the intimate history of a single town. For a lesser writer, the task of tracing the threads that connect the blood-drenched past and the barely tolerable present would end up in platitudes. But Hatzfeld turns out to be no mere journalist. He is a historian and a moral observer of great distinction.

II.

Compared to postwar Poland, where locals expelled or murdered Jewish survivors who managed to stagger home from the camps, present-day Rwanda looks like a multicultural haven (although there were plenty of murders in Rwanda in the 1990s). Visitors to the country are impressed by what they find there, as I myself have been; and rightly so. The country could have ended up like Somalia, or like Sierra Leone during its cycles of horror. In Nyamata, however, no one is killing anyone. (Or almost no one: Hatzfeld discusses one murder.) Fewer fields lie fallow, and there are fewer abandoned houses scarring the landscape. Hatzfeld stresses that Hutu and Tutsi go to the same churches, and even to the same cabarets, and their children attend the same schools.

But that is not the whole truth. At the end of Sunday services, Tutsis and Hutus huddle in separate groups. As evening falls, you would notice that Tutsis gather to walk home together from town for safety in numbers. On the hills, he reports, “people walking along abruptly cross to the other side of the path, sneering or muttering insults at a passerby.” And those picture-perfect schools, where adorably well-behaved children sit on hard benches with no distractions except the teacher (American kids would riot), are the same schools, Hatzfeld points out, where the killers and the victims sat beside each other twenty years ago, schoolyard chums.

 Hatzfeld’s book begins with the return of a group of convicted killers in 2003, unexpectedly freed from long prison sentences by President Paul Kagame’s startling release of some forty thousand génocidaires. (Forty thousand!) The decision rocked the country--“stupefied” is Hatzfeld’s description of the survivors in Nyamata, “stunned, anxious when not plain terrified.” The Tutsis were always a minority, less than 10 percent, but now the survivors--an estimated 130,000 at the end of the genocide--constitute a sliver of the population of 9.7 million. The release of the Hutu killers in 2003 was a huge gamble that they would not endanger the survivors. And most of the gang in Machete Season returned, to remake lives alongside people whose loved ones they once hunted down and hacked to death. Reconciliation was the plan. The men had learned in prison to ask forgiveness, and official ideology encouraged the survivors to grant it.