then there was the Hutu man I talked with several months after the genocide ended. Fat and middle-aged, he was in jail for beating to death more than a dozen of his Tutsi neighbors.
He told me they were people he'd been friends with and regularly shared dinner with. He was a godfather to one of the children he killed. He couldn't explain why; he said didn't know what came over him.
For me, this sums up the Rwanda genocide. It's like a madness took over the country, turning otherwise normal, reasonable, loving people into monsters. It took me a long time afterward to try to make sense of what I had witnessed.
But I finally concluded there was no use trying. I believe mankind, at its base, is good. What happened in Rwanda 20 years ago was an aberration.
Read it all (my emphasis).
He told me they were people he'd been friends with and regularly shared dinner with. He was a godfather to one of the children he killed. He couldn't explain why; he said didn't know what came over him.
For me, this sums up the Rwanda genocide. It's like a madness took over the country, turning otherwise normal, reasonable, loving people into monsters. It took me a long time afterward to try to make sense of what I had witnessed.
But I finally concluded there was no use trying. I believe mankind, at its base, is good. What happened in Rwanda 20 years ago was an aberration.
Read it all (my emphasis).