Changes

Another prisoner with whom Hatzfeld spoke was Joseph-Désiré, a man sentenced to life in prison after the commutation of his death sentence. This killer echoes Adalbert’s assertion that exposure to discriminatory propaganda was the reason these Hutus became “‘contaminated by ethnic racism without noticing it.’”<ref>Hatzfeld, 175.</ref>This is undoubtedly true, however, opinions and ideologies cannot be used to excuse violent behavior. Rather than accept responsibility for his actions, Joseph-Désiré continually tries to deflect culpability onto those who taught him to hate. He goes further with this type of rationalization via thrusting the onus of guilt onto an accident of birth. He employs determinism and thus victimizes himself by claiming, “‘I was born Hutu, I did not choose this, it was God’”<ref>Hatzfeld, 144.</ref>Through this circular logic, he insinuates that God created him to be a Hutu and Hutus were created to kill Tutsis thereby placing the liability of murder at the hands of God.

== Beyond Murder ==

As is the case with all genocides, destroying an entire population comes in forms other than murder. Rape is used as a show of power and as a means by which to elevate the women of the perpetrator group to a higher status. Torture is used to instill fear. Both of these means were employed by the Hutus in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

According to all members of the interview group, the only order the Hutus were given was to kill. Those who participated in rape and torture did so freely of their own inclination and cannot rationalize those actions under the guise of obedience. When discussing rape, Adalbert intentionally uses a third person narrative when stating “‘''they'' [emphasis mine] raped for a little while and then handed them over to be killed right afterward.’”<ref>Hatzfeld, 97.</ref>Pancrace, another killer confined in Rimila prison, matter-of-factly remembers that, “‘Torture was a supplementary activity…a distraction, like a recreation break in a long work day.’”<ref>Hatzfeld, 129.</ref>The long day of which he speaks involved many hours of hunting Tutsi prey, hacking people to death with a machete, and looting the villages of those they had just killed in order to profit from the Tutsi goods and supplies, of which the Hutu had been so envious. The strenuous days to which Pancrace alluded usually ended with excessive alcohol consumption.

Genocidal studies continue to show that when faced with the task of murdering one’s neighbors, courage is often confused with cowardice. The 10,000 Hutus who were murdered by their fellow Hutus because they refused to slaughter Tutsis, were neither weak nor cowards; they were courageous people who had the strength to sacrifice themselves rather than succumb, through fear, to fabricated racial hatred. It was those who killed and soon devolved into sadists and rapists who were weak in their principles and hypocritical in their faith. The prisoners of Rimila were seeking forgiveness not because they were remorseful but simply because they were selfish. They were too cowardly to introspectively assess their actions and accept responsibility for their crimes. Admittedly, the only nightmares suffered by Joseph- Désiré where those that dealt with his death sentence. To chase an unarmed child through the forest while wielding a machete takes no courage. To deflect blame onto another for an evil act is not a sign of strength. To expect forgiveness from one whose life you destroyed is cowardly, weak, and egocentric; which is why nothing less is expected from the killers of Rwanda.