Machete Season by Jean Hatzfeld

The educated people were certainly the ones who drove the farmers on, out in the marshes. Today they're the ones who juggle with the words or turn close-mouthed. Many sit quietly in their same places as before. Some have become ministers or bishops; they aren't much in the public eye, but they still wear their fancy clothes and fold framed glasses. While suffering keeps us in prison. Adalbert, a Hutu farmer turned killer in the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

What a book. Its a book which is unlike any other, written from the point of view of a journalist with very few of his own deductions. I loved the whole outlay of the book as it just presented the facts from the killers point of views. There was little covering or philosophy behind the pure butchery of the whole exercise which sort of makes sense when you consider butchers dealing with meat, taking life every day and living without any remorse in their daily lives. The interviewed Hutu killers were like the butchers for three months of absolute carnage, egged on by the society and the leadership, they killed with systematic efficiency, over and over again. There seems to be no rational explanation of this absolute carnage. All you get is quiet contemplation and a warning to quell any hate filled rhetoric as quickly as possible, because any idea once popular is impossible to kill.