In an interview on Rwanda

When Hatzfeld finished that book, which was called Dans le Nu de la Vie (or in English translation Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak) people asked him, well what about the killers? So he wound up going back to Rwanda and realised that the whole group of killers who had been pursuing the survivors he’d been writing about were all in one prison nearby. And he arranged to meet with them on a regular basis, individually and collectively, to hear their stories. And it’s the most direct (I guess you could say honest) account, by people who took part in the genocide, of the excitement and thrill of the hunt and the kill that motivated a lot of them. Then on New Year’s Day in 2003, President Kagame announced an amnesty, in which a huge number of prisoners – 40,000 from around the country – were to be released. These were prisoners accused of genocide, who had by then spent nearly ten years in prison. Many of them had been through some form of justice, or at least rudimentary justice, but many of them had not yet been fully judged or punished by any tribunal. The government just felt the need to diminish the prison population, which was massive and overcrowded, and to start reintegrating people into the society, however awkward that would be.

In an interview on Africa

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.

And has Rwanda recovered?

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.