Alphonse Hitiyaremye, Rwandan farmer.
In 1990 rebel Tutsi troops – this was the early Rwandan Patriotic Front – marched out of the Ugandan bush to make war on the Hutu Rwandan army, opening a new phase in the conflict.
All genocides in modern history have occurred in the midst of war – not because they were its cause or consequence but because war suspends the rule of law: it systemises death, normalises savagery, fosters fear and delusion, reawakens old demons, and unsettles morality and human values. It undermines the last psychological defences of the future perpetrators of the genocide. The farmer Alphonse Hitiyaremye summed it up in his own way: “War is a dreadful disorder in which the culprits of genocide can plot incognito”
From A time for machetes. The killers speak by Jean Hatzfeld
From Season of Blood. A Rwandan Journey
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