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With his first book, the #1 international bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Vintage, 1997) Daniel Jonah Goldhagen – then a professor of political science at Harvard University– forced the world to re-think some of its most deeply-held beliefs about the Holocaust. Hitler’s Willing Executioners inspired an unprecedented worldwide discussion and debate about the role ordinary Germans played in the annihilation of Europe’s Jews.

A decade later – and more than half a century after the end of World War II – Goldhagen is convinced that the overall phenomenon of genocide is as poorly understood as the Holocaust had once been. How and why do genocides start? Why do the perpetrators kill? Why has intervention rarely occurred in a timely manner? These and other thought-provoking questions are explored in a new documentary film, WORSE THAN WAR.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is the author of #1 international bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Vintage, 1997), published in fifteen languages, which was named by Time one of the two best non-fiction books of 1996 and for which he won Germany’s prestigious triennial Democracy Prize in 1997.  Hailed as “a monumental achievement” by the Sunday Times of London, and as “masterly…one of those rare new works that merit the appellation landmark” by the New York Times, Hitler’s Willing Executioners may have generated more international discussion than any book in our time.  He is also the author of the prizewinning A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (Vintage, 2003), published in eight languages, and has published Briefe an Goldhagen (Letters to Goldhagen) (Siedler, 1997).  The just published Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (PublicAffairs 2009), which is already being published in eight languages, has been instantly greeted with great acclaim.

Goldhagen’s essays and columns can be found in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, New York Sun, Forward, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Süddeutscher Zeitung, Die Welt, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, El Pais, El Mundo, Ha’aretz, Gazeta Wyborcza and many other publications nationally and internationally.  He has appeared on many national television and radio programs around the world, including The Today Show, The O’Reilly Factor, Charlie Rose, has been profiled on television, including on Dateline, and in magazines, including the New York Times Magazine and the New York Review of Books, and has been, together with the eponymous international debate, the “Goldhagen Debate,” the subject of dozens of books. Twice named to the Forward 50, Goldhagen lectures frequently nationally and internationally on diverse subjects about the Holocaust, the Catholic Church and Jews, Israel, antisemitism today, and Political Islam.

Goldhagen, born in 1959, received a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a professor in Harvard’s Government and Social Studies departments until he decided to devote himself full time to writing.  He is an affiliate of Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and on the board of directors of Humanity in Action. For more information, please see goldhagen.com.

Image courtesy JTN Productions.

The names of the children have been changed for their protection.

Human Rights Watch does not endorse, and does not necessarily share, the views and opinions expressed in the film “Worse Than War” or other work contained or referenced therein. Human Rights Watch takes no responsibility for the accuracy or currentness of any information contained in the film “Worse Than War” or other work contained or referenced therein.

by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2009. For more information, please visit

Eliminationist assaults are strategic political acts embedded in larger political contexts, practices, and goals. Perpetrators therefore do things to their victims that, strictly speaking, go beyond their immediate tasks of annihilating, expelling, or incarcerating them, and their acts have political, social, economic, and cultural consequences beyond the al­ready momentous facts that people lose their homes, families, and lives. What follows is a preparatory sketch about these themes that subse­quent chapters elaborate upon.

Politically, the perpetrators with their eliminationist programs re­move or at least severely weaken people who would contest their power. In Burundi, Tutsi slaughtered Hutu in a more targeted fashion, and in Rwanda, Hutu slaughtered Tutsi comprehensively, each to fore­stall a lessening of their power. Liisa Malkki quotes Burundian Hutu survivors describing the Tutsi’s systematic decapitation of the Hutu by slaughtering their elite:

They wanted to kill my clan because my clan was educated. The clans which were educated, cultivated, they were killed. In my clan there were school teachers, medical assistants, agronomists . . . some evangelists—not yet priests—and two who were in the army. . . . All have been exterminated. Among those [kin] who were educated, it is I alone who remain. . . . There are many persons who leave Burundi to-day because one kills every day. The pupils, the students . . . It is because these are intellectuals. . . . One killed many Hutu university people.

The government workers . . . They were arrested when they were in their offices working. The others also in their places—for example, an agronomist, when he was walking in the fields where he works, he was arrested. There were medical technicians, professors. . . . Or the artisans in the garage, or those who worked in printing houses or in the ateliers where furniture is made. They were killed there, on the spot.

Be you a student, this is a cause; be you a rich [person], that is a cause; be you a man who dares to say a valid word to the population, that is a cause. In short, it is a racial hate.³⁹

The Indonesian government, with the army and nonmilitary anticom­munists, removed its opponents from contesting political power by an­nihilating the critical mass of a popular communist party, putting many other communists in camps, and forcing still others to convert to ei­ther Islam or Christianity. The Pakistanis targeted the Bengalis’ politi­cal, communal, and intellectual elite, most intensively when the Indians were about to defeat them, which is when they began during a three-day period to systematically slaughter the leadership of the soon-to-be rival country. In many Latin American countries, including Argentina and El Salvador, rightist tyrannies victimized people challenging power from the Left. In Chile the Right’s mass murdering and removal of the Left started with its overthrow of a democratically elected Marxist gov­ernment. In Germany the Nazis killed or incarcerated leading German communists and socialists to consolidate their power in 1933. And after conquering Poland, they slaughtered members of the Polish elite to re­duce resistance to the Germans’ occupation and transformative plans. Hans Frank, the German governor of Poland, in a planning meeting for the “extraordinary pacification” of Poland, reported that Hitler had told him that (these are Frank’s words) “what we have now identified as the leadership elements in Poland is what is to be liquidated.”⁴⁰ The Germans’ assault on the Poles combined the qualities of a nineteenth-century imperial land grab with the purposeful murder of significant elements of the population and brutal suppression and exploitation of those left alive. Similarly in the Soviet Union, the Germans sought out and killed the communist elites. But the Germans did not kill Jews for reasons of power, because Germany’s Jews did not contest power and had nothing that the Germans wanted. This is also true of other countries’ Jews, who were no more dangerous to Germany than their countrymen. After consolidating their rule, the Soviets, the Chinese communists, and other communist regimes also faced no contestation of power, so it was not an actual factor in their mass eliminations. Re­moving political rivals or those who might foment resistance increases the perpetrators’ security and power and, once eliminationist assaults are decided upon and begun, the perpetrators facilitate their eliminationist and political projects’ further execution by initially killing the targeted people’s elites. Targeting elites was also part of the eliminationist pro­grams of the Turks, British in Kenya, Indonesians, Guatemalans, Serbs, Hutu, and many more.

Socially and economically, perpetrators expropriate targeted peoples sometimes of territory and always of homes, belongings, and social and economic positions (though individual perpetrators often do not per­sonally benefit). While the victims’ personal losses are almost always in­cidental to mass annihilations and eliminations’ larger political goals, their territorial losses have often been integral to them. This was the case for the Germans in South-West Africa, for the Belgians in Congo, for the Turks’ slaughter of the Armenians, for the Germans’ push into Eastern Europe, where they sought Lebensraum, imperial living space, for the Poles’ expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland after World War II, for the British in Kenya, for the Chinese eliminationist cam­paign in Tibet, for the Serbs’ onslaughts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and many others. But it was not the case for the Germans’ slaughter of the Jews, Sinti, and Roma, the communists’ decades-long slaughters in China proper, or the Khmer Rouge’s mass murders. Serbs killed and expelled their Bosnian Muslim neighbors not only to Serbify the terri­tory. Some also took the victims’ homes, belongings, and places in the social and economic order. While the Khmer Rouge removed their vic­tims from their homes and belongings, they, unlike the Serbs, had no designs upon such possessions.

Economically, the perpetrators can also exploit the victims’ labor— even if they do so irrationally and, according to ordinary standards, unproductively. They put victims to work for prior ideological and ex­pressive reasons, as the Germans did to the Jews or the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodians. They also do so as a practical and almost inciden­tal accoutrement to the fundamental eliminationist enterprise itself.

Eliminationist perpetrators alter their societies’ social composition and structure. Their societies’ faces are irrevocably changed, and the social structures are mangled and shuffled. The obvious losers are the victims. The winners, those assuming improved places in the social array, are variable. Sometimes the perpetrators themselves gain new positions—victims’ homes, valuables, and goods. But it is usually by­standers, or selected groups or individuals among them, who take over the victims’ social positions.

Culturally, the perpetrators spread their dominance by annihilating completely or partially (and then suppressing) competing forms and practices. Eliminationist assaults almost always substantially homoge­nize a country, not only politically and socially but also in this way. The perpetrators often destroy and expel people precisely because they bear despised or rival cultural ideas and practices. This is particularly evident when religion is the impetus for one leadership and group to slaughter or eliminate another. Religious leaders’ support of mass mur­derers and their eliminationist goals often shocks, though it should not. German Catholic and Protestant clergy supported, often tangibly, the Jews’ elimination from German society, and some even justified, pro­moted, or tacitly supported the mass annihilation itself. The Slovakian Catholic Church was itself deeply complicit in the mass murder of the country’s Jews, issuing an avowedly antisemitic pastoral letter to be read in every church explaining and justifying the Jews’ deportation (to Auschwitz). Catholic bishops and priests supported the Croats’ mur­derous onslaught against Jews and Orthodox Serbs during World War II. Orthodox leaders supported the Serbs’ eliminationist assaults against Muslims during the 1990s, even opening their churches to the perpetrators for planning and organizing local eliminationist cam­paigns. The Orthodox Bishop Vasilije of Tuzla-Zvornik in Bosnia, an area of intensive killings and other brutalities, was one of Arkan’s more impassioned supporters. Several Orthodox bishops from Croatia and Bosnia presided over Arkan’s wedding in 1994, two years after he ini­tiated the eliminationist assaults in Bosnia. During the fully mytholo­gized event, celebrating Arkan’s exploits symbolically, Arkan clothed himself as a Serbian hero and his bride was the Maiden of Kosovo, a Mary Magdalene figure.⁴¹ In Turkey, Japan, Indonesia, and elsewhere, Islamic, Buddhist, Christian, and other religious leaders have sup­ported, blessed, and sometimes participated in mass murder and elim­inations. In Rwanda, many Catholic clergy tangibly assisted the mass murderers, lending themselves and their authority to organizational meetings, delivering Tutsi to the executioners, ferreting out hiding parishioners, and even participating in the actual killings. A Tutsi woman, a Catholic elementary school teacher, recalls:

The priest, Nyandwe, came to my house. My husband [who is Hutu] was not there. Nyandwe asked my children, “Where is she?” They said that I was sick. He came into the house, entering even into my bedroom. He said, “come! I will hide you, because there is an at­tack.” . . . He said “I’ll take you to the CND [police].” He grabbed me by the arm and took me by force. He dragged me out into the street and we started to go by foot toward the church. But arriving on the path, I saw a huge crowd. There were many people, wearing ba­nana leaves, carrying machetes. I broke free from him and ran. I went to hide in the home of a friend. He wanted to turn me over to the crowd that was preparing to attack the church. It was he who pre­vented people from leaving the church.⁴²

Whether or not the perpetrators understand cultural homogeniza­tion to be an important goal, their eliminationist onslaughts increase it substantially. During World War II the Soviets deported and dispersed different national groups Stalin deemed disloyal and thereby, in addi­tion to substantial human losses, destroyed the infrastructure—schools, newspapers, cultural institutions—necessary for maintaining a thriving ethnic culture. Sometimes an eliminationist onslaught is, or includes, a nonmurderous, transformative cultural (and social) initiative, such as when perpetrators compel victims to convert or renounce their religion, as the Khmer Rouge forced the Muslim Cham to do. The result is a transformed public cultural life, in which previously contested or plu­ral cultural ideas or practices, including historical understandings, dis­appear, initiating the reign of a far more homogenized and diminished field of culture that is more to the perpetrators’ liking.

The perpetrators know that destroying the victims’ cultural institu­tions, objects, and artifacts further undermines them. Serbs purposely shelled the major cultural institutions in Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, as they sought not only to eliminate Bosniaks from Bosnia but also to oblit­erate their communal and cultural existence’s foundation. They first destroyed the Oriental Institute, burning the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts in southeastern Europe, then the National Museum, and finally the National Library, incinerating more than one million books, more than 100,000 manuscripts and rare books, and centuries of the country’s historical records. For the artist Aida MušanoviN, and certainly for other Sarajevans, seeing their principal cultural repository engulfed in flames and then having the smoke, ash, and wisps of burnt paper hovering over and raining down on their city, “was the most apocalyptic thing I’d ever seen.”⁴³ Indonesians forced

2.5 million communists to adopt religion and thereby renounce god­less communist atheism. Communists routinely destroyed or appropri­ated for other uses churches, temples, and other buildings belonging to different religions. The Germans destroyed or burned more than 250 synagogues in Germany alone on Kristallnacht, the proto-genocidal as­sault of November 9, 1938, and they destroyed many more across Eu­rope, sometimes, as in Białystok’s main synagogue, using them as figurative and ironic funeral pyres to burn hundreds or thousands of Jews alive. Serbs, as a self-conscious attempt to eradicate all vestiges of and the foundations for Muslim life in the hoped-for greater Serbia, systematically destroyed mosques and entire Bosniak and Kosovar vil­lages, as the Germans before them had destroyed hundreds of Polish areas they wished to Germanify. Croats, in their own eliminationist as­sault on Serbs and Bosniaks, did the same to Orthodox churches and mosques. Perpetrators target not just the victim groups’ religious build­ings and symbols but also their religious leaders. Of the ten thousand Tibetans the Chinese slaughtered in suppressing a rebellion in the cap­ital of Lhasa in 1959, they killed eight hundred Buddhist monks. A novice monk recalls, “The Chinese began closing down monasteries and arresting the high lamas and abbots. Those abbots who had op­posed the Chinese were arrested, subjected to thamzing [a ‘struggle ses­sion’ that often included verbal condemnations and severe beatings] and sent to prison. Many died under torture, others committed sui­cide.” The Chinese used the rebellion as a pretext to stamp out Tibetan Buddhism, destroying most of the country’s monasteries by 1961, and killing, sending to labor camps, or compelling most of the monks to leave the few surviving monasteries.⁴⁴ In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge methodically destroyed Buddhist temples and shrines, and slaughtered Buddhist monks, so that only seventy of 2,680 monks from eight monasteries were alive when the Khmer Rouge fell after only four years. Extrapolating to the rest of Cambodia, which the evidence sug­gests is warranted, fewer than two thousand of seventy thousand monks may have survived, a 97 percent extermination rate.⁴⁵ The Ger­mans, having thought out and planned the Jews’ total eradication with an unparalleled purposefulness, precision, and thoroughness, set about to save Jewish books, artifacts, and photographs so that when there were no Jews or Jewishness on the planet, they would have evidence of the putative demonic race that walked the earth until the Germans had extirpated it.

The perpetrators do butcher the political, social, economic, and cul­tural spheres of their society or of other countries, yet their most im­mediate objects of transformation are the individual bodies and psyches of their victims—of those left alive and even often, before striking the lethal blow, those they kill. As in Franz Kafka’s penal colony, they seek to inscribe on their victims’ bodies and souls their own conceptions of them as degraded, worthless, or hated, to be used, maimed, discarded at the perpetrators’ pleasure. Some perpetrators kill their victims, doing little or nothing else to them, and when the perpetrators slaughter or expel their victims by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands many victims perish without suffering any additional personal act of cruelty or degradation. Yet those eliminating their real or putative en­emies often seek to mark them before snuffing out their lives or ban­ishing them from the land. As one Tibetan explains, “We were forced to see our orderly Buddhist universe collapse into chaos, both in men­tal and physical terms. The Chinese Communists, full of revolutionary zeal and utterly without any human sentiment, deliberately set out to prove to us that what we pathetically believed in was nothing more than a mirage.”⁴⁶ The perpetrators make their victims hear their ha­tred. They taunt and mock them. They torture them in myriad ways. They physically mark and maim them. A specific torture, understood by the perpetrators but rarely by interpreters to be torture, and which needs separate analysis (see Chapter 9), is rape. Perpetrators use their victims as playthings, forcing them to perform painful, self-denigrating, and, for the perpetrators, amusing acts. They laugh at their victims’ sufferings. They express their domination and vent their passions and aggression against them, all the while conveying the victims’ powerlessness. The murderers and torturers physically and symbolically transcribe the new power and the new social and moral relationships on the victims’ bod­ies and minds. Even though many, in some cases all, of the victims will perish, the perpetrators in varying degrees seek to express their power, have it understood, and thereby legitimize it to themselves as they an­nounce that no political rules, law, or morality apply to the victims save their victimizers’ matrix of suffering, degradation, and death.

Mass murders and eliminations ultimately are far-flung transforma­tive political campaigns that—even if not always so conceived—leave a more thoroughgoing mark on societies and set more profound processes of change in motion than virtually any other kind of politics or individual program. For many societies afflicted by such politics, eliminationist and exterminationist programs are the most profound of any political program that takes place within their extended time pe­riod, rivaling or exceeding even the effects of major economic growth. In many instances, these transformative effects are part of a visionary goal of creating a new society, but even when not linked to calls to transformative arms, they radically transform the societies, often be­yond recognition, albeit in a somewhat different manner, anyway.

40. Hans Frank, Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen, 1939–1945, ed. by Werner Präg and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer (Stuttgart, Germany: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1975), entry of May 30, 1940, p. 212.

41. See Michael A. Sells, “Kosovo Mythology and the Bosnian Genocide,” in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, eds., In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn, 2001), pp. 187–188.

42. Timothy Longman, “Christian Churches and Genocide in Rwanda,” in Bartov and Mack, eds., In God’s Name, p. 156.

43. Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 1–2.

44. Mary Craig, Tears of Blood: A Cry for Tibet (London: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 123–124.

45. Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide—1975–1979,”, p. 436.

46. Dawa Norbu, Red Star Over Tibet (New Delhi, India: Sterling, 1987), p. 220.

Family members of the Cuska victims carry photographs of the deceased in a funeral procession. © 1999 Fred Abrahams/Human Rights Watch

When the sun rose above the western Kosovo village of Cuska (pronounced CHOOSH kuh) on May 14, 1999, it was one of those humid, airless mornings that warns of a scorching day ahead. Dragan, a young Serbian militiaman, was agitated. He had been crouching in a grassy field since the previous day when he and dozens of other fighters were ordered to Cuska’s outskirts and told to prepare to attack the ethnic Albanian village. Dragan says he hated these expectant moments that delayed the adrenaline rush of combat. He furtively smoked cigarettes, exchanged lewd jokes about the Albanians, and contemplated death – preferably someone else’s.

“We waited all night for the signal to attack,” he says, his thin face staring off at a distant scene. “It was nerve-wracking. … The only way to forget about the blood and death is to treat it like a football game. And the only thing is to win the game.”

“At dawn we finally got the go-ahead.”

The first fired shots by Dragan and his comrades startled Lule, a 27-year-old Albanian woman who was dozing in her father’s house in the center of Cuska. “I ran outside in my pajamas,” she recalls. “I saw the men of our village running. I also saw smoke and flames. My neighbors said the Serbs were killing and burning, … so I woke my parents and my uncle and the children.”

“The soldiers had face paint, and some wore bandannas for masks,” recalls Akif, Lule’s uncle. “They were wearing a mixture of uniforms – some were police officers’ uniforms, and some were the Yugoslav army’s.”

Some Albanian men managed to flee to nearby woods. Others were shot as they tried to escape. But many families were trapped. The militiamen quickly seized Lule’s father, her uncle Akif, and her cousin.

The village of 200 houses and some 500-700 people (some Albanians had fled earlier in the war) was an easy target for the 100-or-so Serbian fighters present on May 14. The Albanian inhabitants could not have known that the early-morning attack was part of a broad assault on Cuska and two neighboring villages that had been planned days before by Serbian police and military commanders and that was carried out by some of Serbia’s most elite units as well as its notorious militia gangs.

Serbian police and military commanders gave each of the six or seven fighting units a set of coordinates and a sector in the village to attack and “cleanse” according to Dragan. “When we went into the village it was undefended. We went house to house, clearing people out,” he says. “We concentrated on killing rebels from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). If we decided a guy was KLA, we often executed him on the spot.”

“They took us to the village cemetery,” says Akif, the wiry, 57-year-old Albanian farmer. “They separated the men from the women. The men they thought could fight. Then they started burning houses and shooting at people’s feet to scare them.”

Akif and his neighbors recognized some of the gunmen from their previous patrols in the village, when the Serbs rolled into Cuska looking for KLA fighters and menacing the villagers. But on those earlier visits the Serbs assured Cuska’s residents that if they worked their land and lived peacefully, they’d be safe. May 14 was different.

“We were rough, even with kids or women,” says Dusan, another Serbian fighter who took part in the attack on Cuska. “At one house an Albanian came out with bread and salt, which is a traditional Serbian way to welcome guests. We were insulted. So one of our guys hit the Albanian’s wife with his rifle and then kicked the guy’s child. Then that Albanian guy was taken away.”

Akif was rounded up with some of his neighbors. “They divided us men into three groups and took us away. There were 12 of us in my group. They took us inside a neighbor’s house and lined us against the living-room wall. They cursed us, then demanded more money. But we had already given them all the money we had.”

Dragan was one of the Serbian fighters who led Akif and the others into the house. “We took 11 or 12 men. We concluded that some of them were KLA. … You know the way we got them to talk, interrogation — fists and a rifle butt to the head. Cut them with a knife so they’d confess something.”

“The soldier came to the door,” Akif says slowly, “and he said, ‘In the name of Serbia you will all be executed.’ And then he opened fire.”

A bullet ripped into Akif’s thigh, but he was saved by the bodies of his brother Halil, and a neighbor. Before the killers left they tossed a cushion soaked with gasoline into the room where Akif lay hidden by the bodies of his family members. Dragan says the fire was meant to destroy the evidence, especially the bodies.

Remarkably, Akif escaped. “The door outside was on fire. Fortunately there was a window,” Akif says. “I jumped from the window and ran bleeding into a grassy field and that’s where I hid.” None of the other men escaped the house alive.

Two other groups of men from the village were forced into separate houses, gunned down, and set on fire. In all, 41 men died in Cuska on May 14, ages 19 to 69. That same morning, Serbian security forces attacked two adjacent villages, Pavlan and Zahac, driving out the women, children, and elderly, and killing a total of 72 people. One young woman was kidnapped and never seen again.

Cuska, July 18, 1999. Two months have passed since the massacre. Nine Albanian soldiers snap to attention, raise their assault rifles to the blue, summer sky, and fire three sharp volleys. As the shots crackle through the war-scarred village, Albanian mourners rush the burial mound in a desperate lurch. Women in black head-scarves and their children wail fiercely. One woman, whose two sons and husband were killed, tries to throw herself onto the grave, shouting, “I must be with you.”

The ceremony is part of a grim reckoning across Kosovo, as returning Albanian families gather to re-bury their dead. On this day, mourners are honoring the men murdered in Cuska on that stifling morning in May.

Akif, the Albanian farmer, stands among the mourners dressed in a simple black suit, starched white shirt, and black tie. His expressionless gaze betrays none of the anguish he feels as one of few men in the Cuska who survived the massacre. “This is where they gathered us,” Akif says quietly, motioning to the small cemetery. “Before they took us men away.”

Situated in the fertile cropland along the Bistrica River, Cuska sits on a flat plain shadowed by the rocky peaks of the Accursed Mountains, which form the border with neighboring Albania. Like many of Kosovo’s Albanian villages, the place is latticed with dirt roads and the traditional, high stone walls which surround each family compound. The village is considered a suburb of Pec, a city that was emptied and half-burned by Serbian forces.

By mid-July, 1999, Serbian forces were gone — driven out of Kosovo by NATO troops. NATO helicopters now patrolled Kosovo’s skies, and peacekeeping troops guarded the uneasy truce below. With NATO came investigators from the UN war crimes tribunal and from human rights groups. In their effort to piece together what happened in Kosovo and who did the killing, these investigators came to Cuska, too.

When Fred Abrahams arrived at Cuska for the massacre commemoration, he had already visited similar atrocity sites across Kosovo. But something was different here — accounts of survivors like Akif and Lule were more detailed, for one — so Abrahams decided to investigate further. Abrahams is an Albanian-speaking researcher for the United States-based Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental group that investigates war crimes and other human-rights abuses. During and after the war, Abrahams traveled in Albania, Macedonia, and Kosovo, interviewing Albanians about the Serbs’ three-month campaign of murder and deportation that was the focus of NATO’s air war and led to war crimes indictments against Slobodan Milosevic and four aides. Western governments estimate that some 10,000 Albanians are dead or missing, though fewer than 3,000 bodies have been recovered so far. But what drew Abrahams to Cuska was not so much the brutality of the massacre but rather the executioners’ utter recklessness. The fighters were sloppy.

“The remarkable thing about Cuska,” Abrahams says, “is that in each of these three houses there was one survivor. Three people who can tell us very precisely how the execution took place.”

Abrahams found another detail that distinguished Cuska from other massacres in Kosovo; In their haste to pull out of the province in June — just ahead of NATO’s ground force — some of the Serb fighters left behind a record of what they had done. Returning Albanians found military documents and even snapshots showing Serbian fighters in action, flaunting guns and posing before burning buildings. These photos provide unusual clues for war crimes investigators like Abrahams and the opportunity to finally unmask the men behind the killings.

Abrahams got hold of a series of color photos from the office of the Pec prefect, a former KLA commander now in charge of running the city. They show Serbian fighters in full combat gear.

“The photographs clearly have a weekend warrior, Rambo-esque aura about them,” says Abrahams. “They’re quite remarkable. They showed local Serbs in various military poses in front of burning homes with automatic weapons in full uniforms. Apparently these individuals were somehow proud or interested in showing off their large guns and sharp knives.”

Abrahams scanned the photographs into his laptop and went back to Cuska, where he powers up the computer screen for Akif and his 27-year-old niece, Lule. As the image emerges, Akif and Lule react immediately, pointing at the screen, exclaiming, “That’s him!” Lule begins to shake as she recalls how on May 14, the fat, dark-haired man in the photo, wearing the same gold cross and gripping a machine gun, pulled her away from the other villagers and threatened to kill her family unless she followed his orders.

“It’s the same guy,” Lule says. “Nobody else. If I saw him ten years from now, I would still recognize him. He’s the one that took me aside and threatened to rape me. He was the commander.”

Seven villagers told American RadioWorks that the barrel-chested man posing so proudly with his machine gun in the photograph was one of the militia commanders who led the attack on Cuska. They say other gunmen called him by a nickname — Burdush — the name of a heavyset, Balkan television entertainer. The villagers say Burdush ordered the three groups of unarmed men to be taken away for execution.

So who was this man called Burdush, who appeared to give orders to the other gun men. And who were his commanders? What kind of men would order such a cold-blooded massacre, and why? Does the killing of unarmed men bother these “triggermen”? Can justice really cope with the aftermath of such heinous crimes, or does violence of this order feed itself in an unending cycle?

Important clues lie not just in the events of May 14, but in the distant past.

For many Serbs, Kosovo is sacred land, soaked in the blood of martyrs and eulogized in folk songs. The fields of Kosovo were the heart of Serbia’s medieval empire and the site of the Serbian nation’s defining moment, a legendary defeat to the Ottoman imperial army at a place called the Field of Blackbirds.

By the end of the 20th century, Kosovo was still a Serbian province but populated mostly by ethnic Albanians. Serbia’s leader, Slobodan Milosevic, waged a ten-year campaign to impose a Balkan-style apartheid to enforce Serbian control over the Albanians and to boost his own political power. At the same time, Milosevic fought wars in Croatia and Bosnia in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and deported. In 1997, a shadowy Albanian independence group calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army struck back, launching a guerrilla war. KLA fighters assassinated Serbian government officials, police officers, and so-called Albanian collaborators.

As the insurgency widened, Milosevic rushed more military and police forces to Kosovo, targeting suspected rebels and their village strongholds. Many of Milosevic’s fighters were veterans of the Bosnian and Croatian wars. But Western investigators say the Serbs killed thousands of unarmed civilians without troubling to find direct evidence of KLA connections.

Jon Cina, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organization that is collecting war-crimes data in Kosovo, says Serbian attacks incrementally expanded in scope and brutality from the early clashes with the KLA in 1997.

“If you compare it to a tree, initially they were trying to lop off the branches, then they decided to hack away at the trunk,” he says. “Finally they decided to dig up the garden, which obviously is going to remove the tree, but it’s also going to cause a hell of a lot of collateral damage, as they like to call it.”

To this day, Serbia’s leadership and many of its citizens deny that the police and army committed atrocities in Kosovo. They insist the war was a legitimate effort to destroy anti-government guerrillas, and they dismiss atrocity stories as NATO and KLA propaganda that exaggerates the excesses of a few rogue units.

Dennis Milner, one of the UN war crimes tribunal’s lead investigators in Kosovo, rejects official Serbia’s view of the war.

“What do they call a rogue element?” he asks. “Are they talking about a whole (army) corps as a rogue element? Is one of their generals a rogue element? It defies all common sense.”

Human rights investigators contend massacres like the one in Cuska, in which Serbian forces murdered unarmed civilians who offered no resistance, are textbook examples of war crimes. Yes, Cuska is the home village for the KLA’s top commander, Agim Ceku. And Ceku’s father was murdered on May 14, but several Serbian fighters say his killing was not the primary aim of the attack. “There’s no evidence to suggest that Cuska had any KLA activity whatsoever,” says Abrahams. “All of the villagers said that while some of them had been members of the KLA and fought in other areas, Cuska during the war remained quiet.”

Why Cuska? The key seemed to lie in the identities of the gunmen, especially the commander called Burdush. Through them it might be possible to learn who planned the operation and, more importantly, why. None of the survivors at Cuska knew Burdush’s real name. But Lule, the young woman he threatened to rape, says no one in Cuska will forget his face, nor the crimes they say he committed.

“Do you see these hands?” Lule asks trembling. “With these two hands I collected the bones of my uncles, my cousins, and my father. I found my father’s remains last, but just parts of him. I didn’t find his legs or his head. Just his torso. And with these hands I placed him in the earth. As for those Serbs, the ones who killed him, they have their hands covered with blood. They belong in The Hague.”

Read the full essay here.

Human Rights Watch does not endorse, and does not necessarily share, the views and opinions expressed in the film “Worse Than War” or other word contained or referenced therein. Human Rights Watch takes no responsibility for the accuracy or currentness of any information contained in the film “Worse Than War” or other work contained or referenced therein.

Watch Goldhagen’s presentation at the U.N. in this video filmed originally for the THIRTEEN Forum.

Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch has played significant roles in documenting the “ethnic cleansing” that took place in Rwanda and Bosnia, and in Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign against Iraq’s Kurds. They have documented violations of the laws of war, war crimes and crimes against humanity in numerous conflicts around the world. The organization has sought the prosecution of abusive leaders, like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who perpetrated torture, killings and enforced disappearances; Liberia’s Charles Taylor, convicted of seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his campaign in Sierra Leone; and Hissene Habre of Chad, who is finally facing trial in Senegal on charges of mass murder and torture.

Human Rights Watch has supported and critiqued the international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and played a prominent role in the drafting of the Rome Statute to create the International Criminal Court.

For 30 years, Human Rights Watch has worked tenaciously to lay the legal and moral groundwork for deep-rooted change and has fought to bring accountability and justice to people around the world.

Rwanda:

In the person of the late Dr. Alison Des Forges, Human Rights Watch sounded the alarm on the ethnic tensions that lead to the 1994 genocide. When the killing started, and the world stood by and watched, Des Forges did everything humanly possible to save people. She relayed how the massacres took place on a systematic and ethnic basis, and how the perpetrators killed at least 500,000 people in 100 days, using machetes, knives and clubs.

Afterwards, she wrote the definitive account, her award-winning book, “Leave None to Tell the Story.” Des Forges appeared as an expert witness at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and in numerous other venues.

Read more about the Rwanda Genocide on Human Rights Watch’s Web site.

Video: Rwanda experts Alison Des Forges and Corinne Dufka talk about the genocide. The video is on Human Rights Watch’s Web site:

Bosnia-Herzegovina:

Human Rights Watch researchers traveled under exceedingly dangerous circumstances to interview witnesses and victims, all while Slobodan Milosevic’s government targeted Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia between 1992 and 1999. They documented the shelling of Sarajevo, the mass murder of thousands of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, a UN-proclaimed “safe area,” and the Omarska detention camp. Their work resulted in two volumes of documented war crimes perpetrated in Bosnia, where tens of thousands died.

Throughout it all, Human Rights Watch used our research to push the European Union and the United States to intervene in the killings, and then to bring those responsible to justice. Our researchers have testified against Slobodan Milosevic at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Read more about the legacy of Srebrenica on Human Rights Watch’s Web site.

Iraq:

In 1991 and 1992, Human Rights Watch researchers were given access to Kurdistan in northern Iraq, where Human Rights Watch conducted months of interviews and forensic examinations. Additionally, they spent more than one year analyzing 17 metric tons of Iraqi security agency documents, entrusted to Human Rights Watch by the major Kurdish political and military parties.

The result: a ground-breaking report, “Genocide in Iraq – The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds,” which details the systematic and deliberate murder of at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds between February and September 1988.

Read more about the Anfal Campaign on Human Rights Watch’s Web site.

Human Rights Watch does not endorse, and does not necessarily share, the views and opinions expressed in the film “Worse Than War” or other work contained or referenced therein. Human Rights Watch takes no responsibility for the accuracy or currentness of any information contained in the film “Worse Than War” or other work contained or referenced therein.

by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2009. For more information, please visit

Although significant, dissenters, both individuals and small groups, re­ceive disproportionate attention compared to an overwhelmingly im­portant but neglected theme: the perpetrators’ communities. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, I wrote about the Holocaust’s perpetrators in a manner that restored their humanity. I treated them fully as human be­ings having views about their deeds and making decisions about how to act, not as abstractions wrested from their lives’ real social contexts but, as they actually were, embedded in their social relations. Such an approach was at the time absent, even stridently opposed. The German perpetrators of the Holocaust and of eliminationist and extermina­tionist assaults on Poles, Russians, Sinti, Roma, and other targeted peo­ples operated within broader communities. They undertook their deeds often over long periods, always with considerable time on their hands to reflect. They had social lives. Wives and girlfriends accompanied many of them (many of whom also became perpetrators). The perpe­trators went to church, played sports, even organized athletic competi­tions. They attended cultural events, went to movies, and had parties. They wrote revealing letters to loved ones and went home on furlough. Most of all they talked—while on duty, while off duty, while eating meals and driving places, among themselves and others, discussing the days’ events, their historic deeds, and more. Those many German per­petrators carrying out their brutal eliminationist tasks in Germany it­self, especially in the camps densely blanketing the country, often lived at home. After a day of mistreating and brutalizing, and even killing victims, they returned to their families, had dinner, played with their children. They spent time with friends, also went to church, and did all the social and communal things, including talking about work, that people do. What is true about the German perpetrators’ rich social and communal lives is also obviously true, a commonplace, about other mass eliminations’ perpetrators.

Yet if you pretend people killing, expelling, or brutalizing others are atomized individuals, are under authority’s hammer or intense social psychological pressure with no capacity to think, or are bureaucratic abstractions instead of real human beings; if you toss around mind-deadening phrases such as “banality of evil” or “obedience to author­ity” or “group pressure,” or treat mass murder as if an artificial social psychological environment, such as the Zimbardo Experiment of a tiny number of people (twenty-four) for a short time (six days) with no ex­perimental controls to speak of, so it was not really an “experiment” in a scientific or social scientific sense, is a guide to its perpetrators’ real­ity and existences as people with families, friends, and communal lives; or if you postulate these fictive and dehumanizing reductions of the perpetrators as a tautological account of their actions and, more broadly, as a way of conceiving and discussing them, then there is no reason, as we have seen, to investigate how they come to hold their views about the world and their victims (or even what those views are). There is also no reason to examine the perpetrators in their multiple communal contexts while committing their eliminationist acts or to ex­amine their social relations, ways of living, and activities. The hard­headed questions we ask to ascertain the perpetrators’ motives and their sources, and the bystanders’ attitudes and their sources, also pro­vide answers that can be built upon to explore the perpetrators’ rela­tionship to the bystanders helping to form the communal contexts of the perpetrators’ eliminationist actions and lives.

The analytically unfortunate fact is that we know little about elim­inationist perpetrators’ communal lives. Some perpetrators, in the So­viet gulag’s frozen reaches, were removed from conventional social life. Yet many other eliminationist perpetrators are like the Germans, going home to dinner and out with friends, partaking in cultural events, attending church, talking about their deeds with others and among themselves—comparing notes, swapping stories, and discussing their deeds’ historic significance—and carrying on with their lives. This was so for the Japanese in Asia, the British in Kenya, the Indonesians slaughtering communists, the communist Chinese, the Tutsi in Burundi, the Serbs in Bosnia, the Hutu in Rwanda, the Political Islamists in Sudan, and so many more, certainly of most perpetrators killing people within their own country. As do other Hutu executioners, Léopord Twagirayezu conveys the easy conversational and convivial nature of the perpetrators’ talk and social lives: “In the evening, we told about Tutsi who had been obstinate, those who had gotten themselves caught, those who had gotten away. Some of us had contests. Others made pre­dictions or bets to win an extra Primus [beer]. The bragging amused us—even if you lost, you put on a smile.”¹⁸

The evidence strongly suggests that perpetrators live in a milieu over­whelmingly supporting and affirming their treatment of the victims in the name of and for their people. As with eliminationist assaults’ many other aspects, if broad principled opposition or dissent had existed, then there would be abundant credible contemporaneous evidence about it. It does not. Nothing suggests that family and friends, or community members generally, saw or treated the perpetrators with disapproval, let alone the withering condemnation that would be directed at those considered among humanity’s worst criminals. Nothing suggests that family, friends, and community members treated the killing and other eliminationist acts as anything more distasteful than an unpleasant part of a necessary elim­inationist time and project. Nothing suggests that the perpetrators’ com­munity and social and recreational lives were normalcy’s salve to guilty consciences. And nothing suggests that their communities were saying to them: You are a good man despite what you do. Rather the communal verdict was: You are a good man because of what you do. Nothing sug­gests that during eliminationist onslaughts the perpetrators’ existences are psychically and social-relationally fragmented. Rather, they consisted of integrated selves, with integrated minds, in integrated communities with their self-conceived heroic, violent acts on behalf of their country, their people, their God, or humanity harmonizing with their communal exis­tences and with family, friends, and acquaintances. In Indonesia, through­out Bali, “whole villages, including children, took part in an island-wide witch-hunt for Communists, who were slashed and clubbed and chopped to death by communal consent.”¹⁹ In Bosnia, the ethnic Serbian commu­nity was so supportive of the eliminationist assault, and so deeply com­plicit and involved, that the extremely knowledgeable Alisa Muratčauš, president of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors in Sarajevo, maintains that “a lot of people from Republika Srpska [Bosnian Serbs] were involved in the crimes, and I think that actually maybe 70 or 80 percent of Republika Srpska’s population should be actually punished in prison, in jail.” Adamant that she does not mean they merely “sup­ported” the crimes of raping, torturing, expelling, and killing people, de­stroying their houses, and more, she explains that they “actually committed crimes. People who returned to their original community meet very often their perpetrators, [who say] ‘Oh, hi, hello.’”²⁰ In Rwanda, an in-depth study about one community of killers shows how the perpetra­tors slaughtered their victims with incredible cruelty and lived their lives with family, friends, and community in a thoroughly integrated and sym­biotic way. Jean Hatzfeld, its author, writes: “In 1994, between eleven in the morning on Monday April 11 and two in the afternoon on Saturday May 14, about fifty thousand Tutsi, out of a population of around fifty­ nine thousand, were massacred by machete, murdered every day of the week, from nine-thirty in the morning until four in the afternoon, by Hutu neighbors and militiamen, on the hills of the commune of Nyamata, in Rwanda.” This, he adds, “is the point of departure of this book.”²¹

Clothing of the victims, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Bugesera District, Rwanda, April 2008.

Although we need more evidence to draw firmly grounded general con­clusions for certain eliminationist assaults, the substantial existing evidence suggests that, overwhelmingly, ordinary people, moved by their hatreds and prejudices, by their beliefs in victims’ evil or noxiousness, by their con­viction that they and others ought to eliminate the victims, support their countrymen, ethnic group members, or village or communal members’ killing, expelling, or brutalizing others—as Germans did during the Nazi period, as Poles of Jedwabne did, as the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe did regarding ethnic Germans, as British settlers in Kenya did, as Bosnian Serbs did, and as Hutu across Rwanda did. The killers, and those near them in their cities, towns, and villages, and especially those emo­tionally dear to them, constitute mutually supportive eliminationist com­munities. Alphonse Hitiyaremye, a Hutu mass murderer, conveys how the Nyamata commune’s ordinary Hutu had this unmistakably affirmed, starting with the killing’s first day, a machete butchering orgy of five thousand Tutsi holed up in the local church and then in the Sainte-Marthe Maternity Hospital:

The first evening, coming home from the massacre in the church, our welcome was very well put together by the organizers. We all met up back on the soccer field. Guns were shooting in the air, whistles and suchlike musical instruments were sounding.

The children pushed into the center all the cows rounded up dur­ing the day. Burgomaster [the mayor] Bernard offered the forty fattest ones to the interahamwe, to thank them, and the other cows to the people, to encourage them. We spent the evening slaughtering the cat­tle, singing, and chatting about the new days on the way. It was the most terrific celebration.²²

The perpetrators of mass annihilation and elimination know they exist in supportive eliminationist milieus; they themselves witness the open communal expressions of support. The eliminationist campaign against the Jews was immensely popular among Germans not only during the pre-exterminationist phase of the 1930s, as everyone in Germany knew—the regime and ordinary Germans alike openly celebrated it with fanfare—but also during the mass-murderous phase starting in 1941.

To see how this knowledge of the Germans’ broad base of support for the Jews’ elimination was acted upon by the regime, shared by Ger­man bystanders, and communicated by the perpetrators to their loved ones, we need merely to look to Europe’s largest concentration of Jews, the Warsaw Ghetto camp in the heart of Poland’s capital. Did the Ger­man leadership try to hide half a million Jews’ inhuman conditions? Not at all. In the midst of the Germans’ all-out extermination of the Jews, the German Labor Front’s recreational organization for German workers, called Strength Through Joy, organized coach tours of the ghetto where the Germans were starving the Jews to death on fewer than four hundred calories a day.

The Polish government in exile reported in May 1942:

Every day large coaches come to the ghetto; they take soldiers through as if it was a zoo. It is the thing to do to provoke the wild an­imals. Often soldiers strike out at passers-by with long whips as they drive through. They go to the cemetery where they take pictures. They compel the families of the dead and the rabbis to interrupt the funeral and to pose in front of their lenses. They set up genre pic­tures (old Jew above the corpse of a young girl).

Pedestrians in the Warsaw Ghetto walk past corpses lying on the pavement on Rynkowa Street, near the ghetto wall, Warsaw, Poland, 1940-1941.

The brutality—whips!—the photographing, the mocking, the joyful­ness and obvious approval (already seen and further discussed below), these recurring features of eliminationist assaults were apparent (1) in the tourism itself (common among German bystanders where perpe­trators brutalized or slaughtered Jews), (2) in the acts of these coachloads of ordinary Germans, and, of course, (3) for all the perpe­trators in Warsaw and other places hosting such tourists to see. The regime, knowledgeable of Germans’ broad solidarity with their elimi­nationist project, also made films of the ghetto, showing them in Ger­many. Members of the German press, so that they, the eyes of the people, could be fully knowledgeable of what the regime was doing, toured ghettos. One, named Roßberg, wrote in a manner capturing Germans’ common knowledge of this eliminationist assault’s charac­ter, great support for it, and transmutation of ordinary emotional re­sponses into their opposite upon beholding Jews:

I had the opportunity to get to know the ghetto in Lublin and the one in Warsaw. The sights are so appalling and probably also so well-known to the editorial staffs that a description is presumably superfluous. If there are any people left who still somehow have sympathy with the Jews then they ought to be recommended to have a look at such a ghetto. Seeing this race en masse, which is de­caying, decomposing, and rotten to the core will banish any senti­mental humanitarianism.²³

Germans seeing people in a state ordinarily evoking compassion and pity are expected, when the people are “this race,” to behold them as a physical embodiment of their true, hateful nature. We have no reason to believe they did otherwise. After the Germans had methodically de­ported to Treblinka’s gas chambers the Warsaw Ghetto’s inhabitants they had not already starved to death, the surviving Jews decided to go down fighting, rebelling in April 1943, until after a month the over­whelmingly militarily superior Germans crushed them. Many Germans celebrated the ghetto’s utter destruction. Air force sergeant Herbert Habermalz, wanting to make his comrades similarly joyful, wrote his former place of employment, a farm equipment manufacturer, a letter that, as letter writers knew, was likely to circulate among the workers: “We flew several circles above the city. And with great satisfaction we could recognize the complete extermination of the Jewish Ghetto. There our folks did really a fantastic job. There is no house which has not been totally destroyed.” That Habermalz wrote, without thinking he needed to explain to them anything about the “complete extermi­nation” of a Jewish ghetto once containing nearly half a million Jews, merely confirms what a vast array of sources definitively show: The Jews’ systematic annihilation was well known and well supported among Germans, so much so that Habermalz unabashedly termed the job done “fantastic.”²⁴

To develop a systematic and comparative understanding of the per­petrators’ social existences and communal lives, and how their social embeddedness affects or reflects treatment of their victims, we need to examine the perpetrators’ various communities and social relations. We must replace the fictitious general image of the frightened, atomized, isolated killer (said to exist under a regime’s draconian authority, or under group pressure), with a realistic account of the perpetrators’ so­cial, psychological, and moral communal existences. These vary sub­stantially across eliminationist assaults, and even within given eliminationist assaults when a particular eliminationist program cov­ers large territories or long periods.

The framework for the needed extensive empirical inquiry into the perpetrators’ communal lives in individual eliminations and then com­paratively distinguishes five principal kinds of communities that form the social context for the perpetrators’ actions. First, the community of the perpetrators themselves, including but not restricted to men serv­ing in the same camp, mobile killing squad, death march, and other eliminationist institutions. Second, the broader nonperpetrator com­munities in which they are embedded while eliminating their victims. These consist of local cities and towns where the perpetrators are sta­tioned, whether at home or abroad, and the social communities and lives their governments and institutions at times create for them. Third, their home communities, to which most of them will return, of family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and fellow members of their local national, ethnic, or communal groups. Fourth, related to the third, the more abstract—though given the power of nationalism and ethnic or religious group membership to move people, hardly trivial—larger na­tional, ethnic, religious, or political communities. Fifth, far more distant and less relevant for most perpetrators, the international community, the rest of humanity.

The perpetrators’ community: SS female auxiliaries and Karl Höcker, the adjutant to Auschwitz’s camp commander, eat bowls of blueberries to accordion music, Solahütte retreat near Auschwitz, Poland, 1944.

The perpetrators live in all or most of these communities while they kill and eliminate their victims. Their physical and social existences are continuous in some, episodic in others, and nonexistent or almost so in others. But in them all, though obviously varying substantially, the perpetrators are situated socially, psychologically, or morally, and even in those they do not physically inhabit while acting as perpetra­tors, they know they eventually will have some relationship of moral accountability, psychological influence, or social or political conse­quence. This knowledge is relevant, can be powerful, and should not continue to be discounted. Still, whatever is generally true about the per­petrators’ various communities, including their general supportiveness, more can be said about each of them, and their interconnectedness.

Working in eliminationist institutions can be utterly normal (or at least can become utterly normal after a perpetrator’s initial participa­tion in an eliminationist operation) when the need to carry out the elim­inationist assault seems unquestionable. Even among perpetrators viewing the victims as sufficiently noxious or threatening to warrant or necessitate their elimination, including lethally, some may doubt such actions’ wisdom or morality. In such circumstances, a perpetra­tor’s comrades’ validation of the violence, or the knowledge that he op­erates under the state’s aegis, or as the nation’s or the perpetrators’ ethnic or religious group’s representative and guardian, can help quell a perpetrator’s lingering doubts. The eliminationist regime’s character, and the specific eliminationist institution’s character, can affect the per­petrators’ understanding of their deeds and their lives’ quality while killing, expelling, torturing, and immiserating their victims. Some regimes and killing institutions, such as the Germans’, were organized and hierarchical, and relatively lax and understanding toward the per­petrators. They were also characterized by considerable off-duty com­radeship and conviviality.

Some, also organized and hierarchical, are harsher, as the Guatemalan mobile killing squads could be. Others have more variable, fluid, and intermittent qualities, such as that of the far less formally organized and hierarchical Hutu. The Hutu’s killing operations’ character de­pended on whether the villagers were left on their own for a given day’s killing expeditions—villagers not feeling up to joining that day’s hunt staying behind—or they were under the supervision of the Intera­hamwe, which sometimes forbade a day off. But for the reasons already established and more addressed below, the various eliminationist insti­tutions’ other features—from their hierarchical structures, the actual or implied coercion that might exist, the normative world of support for killing and elimination—have not been the perpetrators’ prime movers, and could not have been given their actual conduct. Sometimes when killers speak frankly, they, in a jumble, adduce a host of factors and circumstances that composed the mass-murderous complex of their actions. But when doing so, there is an assumption, explicit or clearly implicit, of underlying consent to the deed, born of their shared con­ception of the targeted peoples as noxious or threatening, of deserving their fate. Some Rwandan perpetrators speak in such a logically inco­herent but psychologically plausible muddle. At one moment they dis­cuss how they got drunk on their greed for looting. At another moment they mention that the Interahamwe—dedicated executioners—would not permit them to take a day off or would reproach them for not killing an acquaintance, or would fine them for not going into the bush to kill (hardly a plausible burden as it was easily paid from their looting’s proceeds), or would threaten them with death for not killing. At yet another moment the same perpetrators openly state that they and their comrades and all Hutu hated the Tutsi, thought the Tutsi were not human beings but snakes, cockroaches, and vermin who wanted to enslave all Hutu, so they believed it imperative to free their country of the Tutsi scourge, so they “cut them.” Elie Ngarambe, in a work camp prison when I interviewed him, also speaks in such a vein, asserting among other things that he was coerced, as were other Hutu, but then, when trying to convey to me the character of the genocide and the various facets of what really happened, says and indicates in many ways that he and ordinary Hutu, perpetrators and bystanders alike, hated the Tutsi, thought them not to be human beings, wanted to destroy them, and pursued or supported these goals with amazing and cruel vigor. When asked, “Were most Hutu happy to get rid of the Tutsi in one way or another, even if they themselves didn’t want to do the killing?” he replies, “They felt like they should be eliminated and wiped out,” explaining that Hutu shared the government’s “bad ideology,” which told them to “start from a small child, continue with a pregnant woman, kill her with her husband, her in-laws, and all her families, eliminate them all, eat their things, after you finish everything take their land, take their cars. Think of how long they have been fighting against us.” Ngarambe is emphatic. “They [the Hutu] wanted to eliminate all of them [the Tutsi]. They did not want to see anyone surviving.” Ngarambe has confessed to participating in the killing of only two peo­ple, but similarly in the course of his own testimony (some quoted here) betrays himself, repeatedly making it clear that he was daily in the thick of the mass murder, participating in the butchery of many more.*²⁵

The complex interactive effects of various influences upon some per­petrators, and yet their willingness and conviction in the rightness of the principle of eliminating the targeted people and of the killing itself that are the foundation of the perpetrators’ deeds and the members of their enormously supportive societies or groups’ views about what ought to be done, are captured also by others. Pancrace Hakizamungili discourses in a jumble about having no choice, having hesitations including those born of what will happen should they fail (which a “good organizer” can quell), and about his and the other Hutu’s hatred for the Tutsi, their en­thusiasm in going on the hunt, and their relief at finally ridding them­selves of the Tutsi. And so, from Pancrace’s mouth come words that could serve as a motto for our age’s willing executioners, whether ordi­nary Germans, ordinary Serbs, or ordinary Hutu, “you obey freely.”²⁶

The local community: A group of German soldiers and civilians looks on as a Jewish man is forced to cut the beard of another in Tomaszow Mazowiecki, Poland, September–October 1939.

The second kind of community, the communities physically encom­passing or abutting the perpetrators while at their eliminationist tasks, forms the perpetrators’ immediate social context. These communities vary enormously. If the perpetrators are killing in their own country but not near home, they live as visitors or temporary residents. If in a con­quered or colonial area, their government or they and their compatriots construct a local perpetrator community (the nearby victim peoples usu­ally being communally irrelevant). These can vary from settler commu­nities, as the British had in Kenya, the Japanese founded in Korea, the Germans created in Poland, and the Chinese established in Tibet, to im­perial garrison communities with impromptu human and institutional infrastructural support, as the Japanese and the Germans had in some of their conquered areas. Everyone in such communities knows about the perpetrators’ deeds. They see them. They mingle with the perpetrators. They work with them. They often revel in the perpetrators’ deeds. They service and supply them, and collaborate with them in nonelimination­ist activities. Such people are not formally perpetrators (some do cross the line), yet they implicate themselves in the deeds, or they so intimately rub shoulders with the perpetrators that they belong to the perpetrator community. Everything suggests they are consensual communities.

The third community, consisting of the perpetrators’ families, neigh­borhoods, and towns, powerfully exists for all mass annihilations and eliminations’ perpetrators, though differently depending on where the perpetrators work their violence. Perpetrators, usually sooner than later, visit or return to their families and home communities, to loved ones, friends, and others, who often, probably usually, know at least the ba­sics of the perpetrators’ deeds. The perpetrators must inevitably con­sider how these people will judge their deeds. In many mass eliminations perpetrators operate in their home environs. As they brutalize, expel, and kill people, they, embedded in those communities day and night, do not have to wonder what their families and communities will someday say. This was true of those in Turkey attacking Armenian death marches as they trudged by impromptu perpetrators’ towns, of the enormous number of Germans guarding or servicing camps in their own cities, towns, and neighborhoods, of Indonesians slaughtering communists, of Serbs in Bosnia, Tutsi in Burundi, Hutu in Rwanda, and more.

Beyond their local communities is the larger reference group of the nation, the people, the political movement, the tribe, or the religious group, in whose name perpetrators act. Perpetrators kill, expel, and in­carcerate their victims to secure the future for themselves and their fam­ilies by reconstituting society. As we repeatedly see, they also understand themselves to be acting for their larger communities. What will be their personal legacies to their people? How do they expect their people to see and judge them, to thank and celebrate or to shun and punish them? Such considerations unquestioningly affect many perpe­trators, potentially all of them.

The national community: Austrian Nazis and local residents look on as Jews are forced on hands and knees to scrub pavement, Vienna, Austria, March-April 1938

Finally, there is the international community or humanity—the real human beings, not the abstraction of humanity moving many commu­nists, or the Germans’ and the Japanese’s restricted racist conceptions of humanity, consigning peoples to subhumanity. Perpetrators facing their victims likely do not think much about the international community. Yet, as much testimony indicates, the perpetrators are aware of a larger world, which they usually understand will condemn their actual and prospective eliminationist violence. In the past several decades, the spread of telecommunications has made perpetrators increasingly aware their acts will receive international scrutiny. Nevertheless, most perpe­trators appear but tenuously connected psychologically to these distant and rather abstract community considerations. After all, when perpe­trators face the “work of demons who wage their battle against us” or other putatively threatening or problematic subhumans, people across an ocean, or over a border or two, must seem irrelevant. Political lead­ers initiating and overseeing eliminationist assaults, however, are acutely conscious (if often ultimately dismissive) of the international commu­nity. The critical issue, taken up in Chapter 11, is how to vastly increase the international community’s psychological and moral centrality, and relative weight among the perpetrators’ various more immediate com­munities, for actual or prospective perpetrators—from the man on the ground, gun or machete in his hand, to his immediate commanders, to those running eliminationist institutions, and especially to the political leaders unleashing and orchestrating the eliminationist assaults.

Few, if any, perpetrators likely self-consciously disaggregate their embeddedness in various communities, or regularly assess how each community and its many members (even leaving aside the distant inter­national community) judge or will judge their deeds and ultimately them. For many, especially those working at home, no difference exists among some of their communities. For some, such as the Indonesians slaughtering communists and, even more so, Serbs in Bosnia and Hutu in Rwanda, the communities of killers, of immediate locale, of home, and even of the nation collapse into an integrated mass-murderous and eliminationist consensual community. In addition to these instances, the judgment of communities, except the international one, is obviously gen­erally a non-issue for killers, expellers, and guards. The perpetrators move in overlapping or intersecting communities approving their deeds, so acute moral doubt and existential discomfort do not arise.

In addition to the expressed approval and acceptance various rele­vant communities give them, the perpetrators know that those be­longing to their country, people, ethnic group, political movement, or religion, having been party to their society’s conversation about the dehumanized or demonized victims, widely share their views. The per­petrators know they similarly believe the perpetrators’ deeds are right and necessary, support them, are even thankful the perpetrators are eliminating the people they commonly hate or fear. Because the elimi­nationist logic of the perpetrators’ beliefs applies equally to the many others sharing those beliefs who have not been asked to act upon them, it is abundantly clear that many other people in the perpetra­tors’ communities and societies would also have brutalized, incarcer­ated, expelled, and killed the victim groups had they been asked or put in the position to do so. This, that the vast majority of ordinary Germans would have also been Hitler’s willing executioners, I demon­strated for Germans during the Nazi period.²⁷ Though for other elim­inationist assaults the data do not lend themselves to the same methodologically inescapable, surefire generalization to the perpetra­tors’ societies and communities (exceptions notwithstanding), we can still say, for various reasons, that so many others from those commu­nities would have willingly acted as the perpetrators did. The perpe­trators know this very well. The perpetrators do not necessarily ponder how the members of their various communities work through the logic of their beliefs and what they therefore think about the perpetrators’ deeds, or what they would do if mobilized for the eliminationist as­sault. Neither do soldiers in war. Absent demonstrable opposition at home, soldiers do not wonder about their countrymen’s support or readiness to join them. They naturally assume both. So too the elimi­nationist perpetrators, conceiving of themselves, like soldiers, to be con­ducting a war against their people’s dangerous enemies. The public discourse—more intensified, explicit, and public immediately preceding and during eliminationist assaults—about the need to exterminate-the­brute or to eliminate-the-plague, merely confirms to the perpetrators what the same discourse had already prepared them and their commu­nities for. When governmental organs, civil leaders, media, intellectuals, and religious leaders repeatedly publicly proclaim—as they have so often done—people’s noxiousness and threat, and even call for their elimination, they further affirm what the perpetrators already know, having watched family, friends, and others nod in agreement or ap­provingly repeat what is in the air. “The Jews are our misfortune” was one of the German public sphere’s most oft-repeated phrases in the 1930s and 1940s. British colonial officials and ordinary settlers alike casually and reflexively spoke of the putatively savage, bloodthirsty, murderous Mau Mau. Ladino Guatemalans called Maya “animals.” Serbs as a matter of course referred to Bosnian Muslims as “Turks,” constructing them as the Serbs’ historic and eternal enemy, and as Bosnia’s rightless alien invaders. The Rwandan airwaves coursed with, and Hutu newspapers and popular publications printed, hate-filled ac­counts of the Tutsi “cockroaches” and calls to exterminate them. These and other commonplaces solidify the sense of a community of like-minded thought, values, hatreds, and actions among the perpetrators and those around them. As Pancrace, echoing so many others, ex­plained: “The radios were yammering at us since 1992 to kill all the Tutsi,” which found echoes in an activated and intensified Hutu con­versation, as Christine reports: “In the cabarets, men had begun talk­ing about massacres in 1992” with the president of their commune visiting their houses “to see that the tools behind sacks of beans were well sharpened.”²⁸

A striking feature of prejudices and hatreds, of the dehumanizing and demonizing conceptions one group’s members have for another’s, is their intellectual and social leveling—within communities and, what­ever the specific beliefs’ differences, across societies and civilizations.

In given eliminationist communities, university professors and high school–educated janitors share common murderous views about tar­geted people. The same talk animates the lecture hall and the beer hall, the principal difference being the little separating highfalutin nonsense from plain nonsense. The “people of poets and thinkers,” as the Ger­mans, Europe’s most highly educated people, liked to call themselves, were no different from illiterate Hutu farmers (Rwanda’s adult liter­acy rate, at around 50 percent, was among the world’s lowest). Intel­lectuals, lawyers, teachers, doctors, and clergy—the opinion leaders and in some cases, especially the clergy, moral leaders—validate the elimi­nationist beliefs and acts of their societies’ ordinary members and prospectively further sustain the perpetrators’ confidence in their peo­ple’s solidarity. We have already explored how Serbian writers and in­tellectuals, including the country’s most influential body of thinkers, the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, laid down the common ideational foundation and even provided the political leadership for the Serbs’ eliminationist assaults. German intellectuals, doctors, jurists, teachers, clergy critically contributed to spreading eliminationist anti­semitism and other racist and dehumanizing views in Germany before and during the Nazi period. Shelves of books, including some of the very early scholarly works on Nazism and the Holocaust, bear such ti­tles as Hitler’s Professors, The Third Reich and Its Thinkers, The Nazi Doctors, Hitler’s Justice, Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner.²⁹ Such socially and culturally crucial people analo­gously prepared the ground for our time’s other mass slaughters and eliminations, including those done in the name of Marx and the prom­ised land he and his intellectual epigones promised. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and others, who laid the foundation for and initiated the communists’ long-term eliminationist assault on many portions of So­viet society, were extremely intelligent men and authors of learned Marxist works. Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders were also rel­atively highly educated, having imbibed their foundational Marxism in Paris. In Rwanda, intellectuals prepared Hutu for what was to come, as Innocent Rwililiza, a Tutsi survivor, explains: “Genocide is not really a matter of poverty or lack of education. . . . In 1959 the Hutu relent­lessly robbed, killed, and drove away Tutsi, but they never for a single day imagined exterminating them. It is the intellectuals who emanci­pated them, by planting the idea of genocide in their heads and sweep­ing away their hesitations.”³⁰ After the fact, some perpetrators, finally seeing their deeds through the outside world’s condemning eyes, reflect on how their intellectuals, elites, and clergy led them astray.

Intellectuals, doctors, teachers, lawyers, and clergy are also part of their societies. They too participate in the hateful discourses, in which they are no less, and often more, embedded than the communities’ other members who also create and sustain them. They too act or support the acts that follow on their logic. No significant part of the German elites thought the Jews wholly innocent and therefore dissented from the fundamentals of the eliminationist project against the Jews (though some would have preferred a nonlethal eliminationist solution). Even the leading German resistance groups to Hitler were profoundly anti­semitic, which informed their future plans for Jews. One of the resis­tance’s central documents, prepared by leading Protestant theologians and university professors, contained an appendix called “Proposals for a Solution to the Jewish Problem in Germany,” which, referring to Jews, stated that a post-Nazi Germany would be justified in taking steps “to ward off the calamitous influence of one race on the national community.” Yet thanks to the highly effective exterminationist pro­gram, they could perhaps tolerate Jews in Germany, because “the num­ber of Jews surviving and returning to Germany will not be so large that they could still be regarded as a danger to the German nation.”³¹ German elites were active, willing, and leading participants in the an­nihilationist assault on the Jews and in the Germans’ other elimina­tionist projects. Einsatzgruppen leaders slaughtering Jews in the Soviet Union were academically trained, as did the principal author and oth­ers working on the murderous and eliminationist anti-Slav General Plan for the East. Church leaders and clergy the world over, from Turkey, to Germany, to Croatia, to Indonesia, to Serbia, to Rwanda, and to the Political Islamic religious leaders and clerics in different countries, have actively and tacitly blessed mass murder. (Where, we should ask, have religious leaders opposed their countrymen’s or clansmen’s elimina­tionist assaults? If they had, such as the Bulgarian Orthodox Church leaders who were instrumental in preventing the Bulgarian Jews’ de­portation, or Pastor André Trocmé, who led an effort in Le Chambon­sur-Lignon in France that saved five thousand Jews, we would know and they would have prevented countless deaths. Yet we know of so few.) Local dignitaries often organized and led the Bosnian Serbs’ para­military or local killing institutions. In Rwanda, the local intellectuals were in the thick of the mass murder. Jean-Baptiste Munyankore, a Tutsi teacher and survivor, explains: “The principal and the inspector of schools in my district participated in the killings with nail-studded clubs. . . . A priest, the burgomaster, the subprefect, a doctor—they all killed with their own hands. . . . These well educated people were calm, and they rolled up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes.”³² Well-educated people, leading professionals of one society after the next, together with those looking up to them, have closed ranks in a community of murderous consent.

After eliminationist assaults, after the massive death toll and the vast suffering the perpetrators have inflicted become clear, in country after country, in town after town, the perpetrators return to their people, whose names they have blackened in the world’s eyes, but evidently not in their own. In every mass murder and elimination’s aftermath, the broader community in whose name the perpetrators acted has not socially or politically rejected, let alone punished, the perpetrators. (Punishment has occasionally been meted out by those defeating per­petrators or those replacing the perpetrating regime.) The perpetrators have not been turned into outcasts, not shunned, not treated in any way as a community would ordinarily treat murderers, let alone mass murderers in their midst. It did not happen in Turkey, in Germany, in Indonesia, in Serbia or among Serbs in Bosnia—who after the elimina­tionist assault continued to celebrate the Bosnian Serbian elimination­ist architects Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić as heroes—in Burundi, in Rwanda among the Hutu themselves. Communities wel­come the perpetrators back and, when necessary and feasible, have pas­sionately risen to defend them. The social and communal solidarity the perpetrators find in the posteliminationist era merely continues the sol­idarity they experienced while assaulting their victims.

We do not know the percentage of each community’s people who have supported the exterminationist and eliminationist politics perpe­trators practiced in their name. Everywhere—among Turks, among Serbs, among Hutu—there has been some communal dissent. Even in Germany, where the evidence of broad and deep popular support for the eliminationist assault against the Jews is overwhelming, some dis­sent existed. (The ready knowledge we have of it and, often by the dis­senters’ own admission, of their exceptional nature and isolation, further confirms Germans’ overwhelming support for the elimination.) Nevertheless, in our time’s lethal and non-lethal eliminationist assaults, we find among the broader relevant national or ethnic communities lit­tle credible evidence of widespread dissent from the eliminationist con­ceptions of the victims and the thinking underlying such politics, or of actual opposition to the eliminationist onslaughts themselves. But we have abundant evidence of active communal support and encourage­ment for the perpetrators, of the perpetrators’ comfort within their var­ious communities and among their countrymen, and of the perpetrators’ smooth reintegration into their accepting communities when the mass killings, expulsions, and incarcerations end

*Another example: “We peasants, we were using our traditional weapons. It is for that reason that when you were hacking you were supposed to cut [the Tutsi] into two pieces. There was times where you would hack him and not cut him into two pieces and you hurt him only and think that he was dead. . . . Let’s say that we are going in the squad that is going to kill and loot, we meet someone and we are almost five of us, one of us says, ‘Let’s see who is going to be the first to hack him.’ The one who hacks the first runs, and the second one also hacks and runs.”

19. John Hughes, Indonesian Upheaval (New York: David McKay, 1967), p. 175.

20. Alisa MuratOauš, author interview, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzego vina, July 12, 2008.

21. Hatzfeld, Machete Season, p. 9.

22. Ibid., p. 93.

23. BA Koblenz, ZSg. 101 Sammlung Brammer zur Pressepolitik des NSStaates, no. 41, pp. 55–57.

24. Quoted in Alf Lüdtke, “The Appeal of Exterminating ‘Others’: German Workers and the Limits of Resistance,” in Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer, eds., Resistance Against the Third Reich, 1933–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 73.

25. Ngarambe, author interview.

26. Hatzfeld, Machete Season, pp. 71 and 219.

27. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), especially pp. 450–454.

28. Hatzfeld, Machete Season, pp. 219 and 170.

29. Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in the Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People (New York: YIVO, 1946); Léon Poliakov and Joseph Wulf, eds., Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker (The Third Reich and Its Thinkers) (Frankfurt, Germany: Ullstein, 1983); Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1991); and Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

30. Quoted in Hatzfeld, Machete Season, pp. 153–154.

31. Quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 115.

32. Quoted in Hatzfeld, Machete Season, p. 68.

About the Enough Project

The Enough Project is helping to build a permanent constituency to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity.  Co-founded by Africa experts Gayle Smith and John Prendergast, Enough launched in early 2007 as a project of the Center for American Progress.

Enough conducts intensive field research in countries plagued by genocide and crimes against humanity, develops practical policies to address these crises, and shares sensible tools to help empower citizens and groups working for change. Our initial work has focused on grave challenges in a number of African countries: Sudan, eastern Congo, northern Uganda, Somalia, Chad and Zimbabwe.

Ongoing projects and campaigns

Darfur Dream Team –  www.darfurdreamteam.org

The Darfur Dream Team is a dynamic partnership of organizations and professional basketball players working together on the Sister Schools Program, an initiative to connect American middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities with sister schools in 12 refugee camps in eastern Chad.

The objectives of this campaign are: (1) to provide a quality education to every refugee child from Darfur; and, (2) to develop connections between students from Darfur and the United States and promote mutual understanding.  This is accomplished through the use of video technology to link the schools, social networking, and innovative fundraising initiatives that help create this link and give students a personal connection to a crisis which is too often summarized by numbers and statistics.

Raise Hope for Congo / Conflict Minerals campaign – www.raisehopeforcongo.org

Since 1996, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has played host to the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II. Today, eastern Congo is caught in an epidemic of appalling sexual violence, as militias use rape as a military tactic to destroy communities and exert control over natural resources.

The Raise Hope for Congo campaign aims to bring awareness and relief to this crisis by highlighting the link between our demand for electronics products which contain minerals from Congo and the violence that is fueled by a multi-million dollar trade in these resources profiting human rights abusers.  Using the very technology which contain the 3 T’s of tin, tantalum, tungsten, as well as gold, Enough is leading a campaign to raise awareness and influence consumer electronics companies like Apple, Dell, Sony, and others to clean up their supply chains and stop the trade in “conflict minerals”.

Sudan Now Coalition – enoughproject.org/SudanNow

Formed by a diverse coalition of organizations working to address the crisis, SudanNow has used a range of innovative and unconventional paid media ads as well as targeted online activism and social networking to successfully put pressure on elected government officials to address the issue.

In 2002, Daniel Wilkinson, the Human Rights Watch deputy director for the Americas, published Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala which examines the impact of political violence in Guatemala through a narrative account of an investigation into atrocities committed in the country’s coffee-producing region and won the PEN/Albrand Award for nonfiction. The following excerpt from the book details Wilkinson’s time spent in the Sacuchum region and how he first heard accounts of the massacres. Read reviews of the book and learn more at the book’s Web site.

I

When La Patria burned down, Sara Endler was living in the United States, where her husband was a university professor and where she had raised her three children. During her years there, she had visited her parents regularly. She hadn’t lost touch with Guatemala, but as the civil war developed during the 1960s, she had come to feel increasingly isolated in the middle of a polarized society. She did not share the extreme anticommunism of people like her father. Nor did she identify with their critics on the left. “I was very much aware of the fact that workers were misused, mistreated, poorly educated, and suffered from poor health. And that allowed me to be responsive to the ideals of the left. I was with the revolution in 1944. I was for that. But by 1954, I had serious doubts. I personally found Arbenz very appealing — an upright, imaginative man. But I think he was misled, badly used. When they started talking about expropriation, giving a piece of land to everyone, it just freaked me out. I saw personal property as the basis of any sane government. I never regained confidence in the left.”

Then the assassinations began. In the late 1960s, leftist guerrillas killed several U.S. officials. Perhaps the most disturbing incident for Sara was the 1970 abduction and murder of a German ambassador. She was in Argentina at the time and saw the story on the front page of the newspapers there. “There was a photo of him in a street in Guatemala City, on his knees, pleading that they spare him. And they shot him. It was grotesque.” The Argentine press denounced the act, she recalled, saying that “‘only savages in Central America could kill a man in cold blood like that.’” (The Argentines would, of course, discover their own capacity for savagery a few years later.) “All sympathy I had for the left was wiped away by those assassinations.” And as the levels of violence escalated in the following decade, her aversion to the left only intensified. By 1980, bodies were appearing on the roadsides regularly. And like the rest of her Guatemalan friends, she “believed that the left was doing all the killing.”

But then she had a revelation. It was 1982, and she was crossing Lake Atitlán in a motorboat driven by a man who had worked for the family for many years. In the middle of the lake, the man suddenly slowed the boat and turned to her. “Doña Sara,” he said, “there’s something that I think you should know.” He then told her that the army had massacred an entire village. He explained what had happened, and, when he finished, he continued their trip to the other side of the lake.

At first Sara wasn’t sure what to make of this news. She confided with a Guatemalan friend, who said that she too had heard about the military killing large numbers of civilians. They wondered if it was really possible. “It was difficult for us to believe. You see, many people in the capital were sheltered from the massacres.” And they continued to doubt the mounting evidence that the army was killing civilians, until it became too overwhelming to ignore.

This knowledge did not change Sara’s views of the left, however. “It was a really dirty war on every level. I think the army was horrible. But the guerrillas were also responsible. Those people killed by the army were giving aid to the guerrillas. They had been warned not to.”

“Why did they aid the guerrillas?”

“As far as I know, everybody who gave the guerrillas anything did so because they were forced to by the guerrillas. I don’t know who was really supporting them.”

II

Who was really supporting the guerrillas? Two years after I began asking questions, I still didn’t know for sure. According to César and his friend Jorge Fuentes, everyone in the plantations supported them until “what happened in Sacuchum.” I had heard a similar account from the Guilléns in Guatemala City. And in La Igualdad — where I had gotten only vague answers and then had stopped asking — the stories also revolved around this place: Sacuchum.

I had often gazed up at the mountain above La Igualdad and wondered whether or not it was a volcano. Now I began staring up and wondering about this place Sacuchum. Sacuchum de los Dolores was its full name. Sacuchum of the Pains. Something awful had happened there that had changed the course of the war. Sacuchum of the Sorrows. It seemed to be the black hole of history, sucking everything around it into its darkness.

From below in La Igualdad, you couldn’t see any kind of clearing, no lights at night, no smoke rising, no movement except that of the clouds that drifted by and occasionally gathered around the peak. I knew that there was a path that left from the top of La Patria, climbed through the forest, and supposedly reached Sacuchum. It would be a beautiful hike. But the war was still going on, and that woods was one of its battlefields. I also knew that there was a road that climbed to Sacuchum from the San Marcos plateau on the other side of the mountain. And I often thought about taking the motorcycle up that way. It would be tough going — far worse than on the roads in La Igualdad, which were kept passable by the plantations. It would probably take hours. And once I got there, what would I do? Who would talk with me?

So all I could do was stare up and imagine and wait until I found someone who knew people there. I found that someone in an unexpected place.

I was in Cajolá, interviewing a group of old men about the history of the community’s lands. They were speaking Mam punctuated by words of Spanish — an unusual combination, like someone playing two different instruments simultaneously: Spanish consonants formed at the very front of the mouth, while the guttural clicks and rasps of Mam came from back in the throat. A younger man was translating for me. Or rather he was interrupting the men’s stories every now and then, condensing what had been spoken in Mam, and pushing it into Spanish syllables at the front of his mouth — and in the process, it seemed, passing the stories through a sieve that yielded only fragments of the original.

They were talking about a man who, in times long gone by, had petitioned the government to protect the community’s lands. His name was Pe’t Chum, and it was said that he had possessed special powers. One of these was the ability to travel long distances in little time — so, for instance, the trip from Cajolá to the capital, a walk that took others several days, he could do in just a few hours. These powers were somehow linked to the fact that although he was human, he had a tail like an animal.

I asked if his name meant something in Mam. He was “Chum,” they answered, because his family was originally from a place called Sacuchum. “The Sacuchum in San Marcos?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

My translator was Pascual Huinil. I had known him for over a year, since before traveling to La Igualdad, when I had lived in Cajolá for a few weeks. After I left Cajolá, we had continued working together in an effort to obtain international funds for a sewage system in the community. He put me up at his house numerous times and had stayed in my Xela apartment more than once.

After we left the old men, I asked Pascual if there was much contact between people in Cajolá and Sacuchum. “No,” he answered. “Pretty much none.”

And then after a moment he added, “But I’ve been there.”

“Oh, really? Why did you go?”

“I was just passing through.”

Passing through? The road up from San Marcos came to a dead end at the town. “Where to?” I asked.

“Just around there.”

Just around the top of a mountain? I didn’t press for an explanation, and only much later would Pascual offer one. Now he told me that he had stayed with a family there and had heard about the massacre a few weeks later. He had never gone back. But he did know some people from Sacuchum, and he could arrange for me to meet one of them.

The meeting took place in Guatemala City, in the office of a national indigenous rights organization to which people from both Cajolá and Sacuchum belonged. The man from Sacuchum was named Fabián Ramos. He was working on a campaign to obtain land for the community. He said he could tell me about the massacre, but he thought it would be even better if I went with him to Sacuchum and talked with some of the survivors there. I immediately agreed. Here was my chance to finally see the summit of the mountain — and find out what had happened there.

III

“Why dig up the past?” the wife of one plantation owner had once asked me as we drove across town in her Mercedes-Benz. Her husband’s coffee plantation was to the east of La Igualdad, on the other side of the Sacuchum mountain. “Americans come here, and they just write about all the negative things we’ve been through. Why doesn’t anyone write something good about this country?” She was not denying that there were ugly things to dig up. “Those were terrible years,” she recalled. “You never knew if your husband was going to make it home from the office without being kidnapped. A lot of ugly stuff happened, but we need to move ahead, to get beyond all that.”

Later I rode with her husband. “Democracy doesn’t work here,” he told me. “This is the paternalist culture — you know, el señor presidente.” He was referring to the novel about Estrada Cabrera by Miguel Angel Asturias, Guatemala’s Nobel laureate in literature. “The paternalism hasn’t been all bad, you know. In some ways it has helped the workers. Even if the plantations paid them as little as they possibly could.”

“Why didn’t they pay more?” I asked.

“It’s the same as why the importers in the United States pay us as little as they can. They’ve said, ‘Let the Mexican’ — you know, the folks south of the border — ‘suffer a little so I can lead the good life, buy my car, etc.’ And the landowner here has done the same thing: ‘Let the Indian suffer a little, so I can lead the good life. I want to live well, to let my family live well, have a good car.’ It’s sort of a chain.”

His car was a Land Rover. The kind that I’d seen crowding up the Long Island Expressway as wealthy New Yorkers headed out to the Hamptons for the weekend. Unlike them, he actually drove regularly on the kinds of rugged roads its safari features were designed for. The CD player was an accessory.

As for benign paternalism, he offered his wife as an example. She had recently insisted that for their wedding anniversary, instead of giving her a present, he would fix up the workers’ quarters on the plantation. He would install electricity and running water in their homes.

I asked, “Would you ever consider giving them lands the way the government did during the Agrarian Reform?”

He shook his head. “I use all my land. There’s not an inch unused. And I tell you frankly I’m not going to give up any of it. I want more, in fact. You have some, and you want more.” In this respect, he pointed out, Guatemalan landowners were no different from people in other countries. And that was why they so deeply resented “the human rights” always singling them out for mistreating people.

The human rights. Like other wealthy Guatemalans, he used the term to refer not to a set of moral or legal principles, but rather an interest group intent on besmirching their country’s image abroad. “What’s screwed us over more than anything,” he had told me over lunch, “are the human rights.” His wife had tried to explain the source of resentment: by exposing the country’s old wounds, human rights advocates were preventing any healing from taking place. And what really pissed him off, he had added, was the way these foreigners came criticizing this country that they don’t really know.

So what did he know about Sacuchum, I wondered now as I prepared to visit the community. If he didn’t know what had happened there, how could he criticize the ignorance of “the human rights”? And if he did know, well, might that not be even worse?

IV

Fabián Ramos met me in the central square of San Pedro one Thursday afternoon. He was a small, quiet, busy-looking man, although he seemed more at ease here than he had been in the capital the week before. He had with him a hundredweight nylon sack, which he flung over his shoulder after shaking my hand, and stooping under its weight, he led me to the bus stop.

Thursday was market day in San Pedro, and the streets around the market filled with people coming and going like bees around a hive. San Pedro was the twin city of San Marcos. At least they looked like twins on the map — though, in fact, the two towns were separated by a lot more than the little creek that ran between them. San Marcos was the political center of the department; San Pedro was the commercial one. San Marcos was a Ladino town; San Pedro was an Indian one — or had been until Justo Rufino Barrios declared its residents Ladino by presidential decree. Few people in San Pedro still spoke Mam; few women still wore traje. But whether or not they considered themselves Indian, they took pride in at least one thing: they weren’t from San Marcos. On the other side of the creek, the feeling was mutual.

The bus bound for Sacuchum was overflowing with people and their cargo. Sacks and crates were stuffed under seats and into overhead racks and piled on top of the roof. People stood outside, waiting for the driver’s signal to cram themselves in with their things.

The majority of families in Sacuchum lived off commerce, Fabián explained to me as we waited. Every Thursday they came down to the San Pedro market, bought bulk quantities of vegetables and grains grown in the surrounding highlands, and brought them up to Sacuchum. Then during the weekend they fanned out over the other side of the mountain, selling their merchandise in the plantations and setting up stalls in the Sunday markets in La Igualdad and the three other towns. Sacuchum, it turned out, was the commercial hub of the mountain, the primary grocer in the subsistence economy of the plantation workforce. And in addition to agricultural products, it supplied lumber and the homemade liquor known as “cusha.” The forest around the mountaintop provided the wood, and it also hid their clandestine distilleries.

The women waiting around us wore traje — the green and gold pattern that few people in San Pedro still wore. But no one spoke Mam, and Fabián told me that few of the people in Sacuchum still did.

I asked about the name of the town. “Los Dolores” came from the Virgen de los Dolores. And “Sacuchum” was Mam for “dry throat.” Why that name? He guessed that it might be because, in the old days, before there were cars, people would carry their cargo up the mountain on their backs and arrive in town with their breath short and their throats dry.

The overloaded bus lumbered out of town, south toward the mountain, and began to climb. I expected the dirt road to deteriorate, but to my surprise it didn’t. In fact, the farther we climbed, the better it seemed to become. The ground was packed solid and smooth, without all the rocks and furrows that plagued the roads below on the piedmont.

The slope soon became too steep to take head-on, and the road swung eastward, climbing at an angle up the mountainside. Down to the left now were the twins, Marcos and Pedro, facing off against each other, a thousand feet below. As the bus made its way around to the eastern side of the mountain, they disappeared behind us. Now we could see the road to La Igualdad, three thousand feet below, and the ravine carved by the Naranjo River dropping another thousand feet farther. The mountainside alternated between sheer rock face, steep slopes blanketed with thick forest, and patches — wherever the ground was even remotely level — that were planted with rows of corn.

Climbing further, we were enveloped by clouds. The distances suddenly vanished. The ground below us disappeared. And we were left with only the hum of the engine. We might have been in an airplane. A cow floated by outside. We kept climbing. The cloud thinned around us and disappeared. And the bus pushed over one final ridge and slowed to a stop. We were at the top.

Below us was a small valley, walled in by steep ridges, like a crudely formed bowl with a jagged rim. The rim was broken in places. A gaping hole on the western side gave way to a thick tumble of clouds. A smaller break, directly across the valley, opened out onto blue sky and the top of a cloud that was climbing the mountainside above La Igualdad.

In the valley there was a little town. A white church with a small belfry overlooked an open square; two box-shaped buildings faced it on the other side, presumably the school and the town hall; a soccer field stretched behind them; a loose grid of paths extended outward, past small houses surrounded by corn and pasture land.

The mountain — eight thousand feet of rock, clay, and ash rising up from the coastal plain — culminated in this: a quiet hamlet, cradled within wooded ridges, held up to the sky like an offering.

Fabián left me sitting alone on a cot in one room of his two-room house. The pale light of late afternoon filtered in through a single window that opened onto a row of green corn stalks. We hadn’t had a moment alone since we met below in San Pedro. I hadn’t asked how we would arrange our interviews, and he hadn’t raised the topic himself. I assumed he would be taking me to talk to a select few people in their homes. I imagined hushed conversations behind closed doors. If people in La Igualdad had been reluctant to tell me about the violence, I figured people would be even more so here, where things had supposedly been so much worse. The interviews would take time. And night was approaching. We would have to get started soon.

Fabián came back after a few minutes and said, “The meeting is at eight.”

I looked at him. “What meeting?”

“To talk about the massacre.”

“Oh, good. Who will we be talking with?”

“Everyone.”

“Everyone who lost relatives?”

“Everyone who lost relatives and everyone else who wants to come.”

This was a surprise. A large meeting meant no anonymity, I thought. And it also meant anyone could find out what I was investigating. “You don’t think it might be better to meet just with a few individuals?”

“No,” he said. “And everyone already knows about it.”

“How do they know?”

“We sent a car around yesterday with a megaphone to announce it.”

“Oh really? And what did you say?”

“That an important person was coming to investigate the massacre.”

The clouds rolled over the ridges and sealed in the valley like a heavy lid. It began to rain. We got wet as we made our way through the darkness to the center of town. A dozen or so figures huddled under strips of plastic outside the town hall. The door was locked, and Fabián left to go look for someone with a key. I stood alone listening to the rain and wondering whether I had been a bit rash coming here with this person I barely knew. After the robachicos scare on that island two years earlier, I had promised myself never to get stuck alone in an unfamiliar community again. But here I was, on top of a mountain, surrounded by strangers, and with no way out until the next bus left in the morning. What’s more, the whole town knew I was here to investigate what might be the worst atrocity committed by the army in the region.

Fabián returned with a man he introduced as Apolinario. Apolinario opened the door and I followed him into a single large room with a table at one end and a series of benches facing it. Fabián and Apolinario led me to the table. The people outside filed in, others followed them, and soon the room was packed with some forty people. The two front rows of benches filled with old women in traje. The other rows filled with older men, and others stood at the back. The room was cold, and the faces looked ghostly in the pale light of a naked neon bulb. They gazed toward the front in silence, somber and impassive, waiting, as if before a mass.

Fabián spoke first. “It is a great honor to have with us tonight in our community of Sacuchum, this señor who has come to document what occurred in the massacre of 1982 . . .” I was sitting on the table with my notebook in my lap. And as Fabián spoke, I looked around the room, trying to read the crowd. I had no idea what they were thinking. What this meeting meant to them. What they expected of me. Fabián was describing me again as an “important person.” And it made me feel like an impostor. There was nothing important about me. I was here only to get some background information that would help me understand the history of La Igualdad. I tried to think of what to say: I wanted to dispel any illusions about my “importance,” but I also didn’t want to disappoint them. I wanted to hear about the massacre, but I didn’t want to impose upon them — I was so used to people being afraid to talk about the war, even in private, that I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to talk about it in public. I wanted to make people feel comfortable, but I myself was scared. I saw some young men standing in the far doorway and looked to see if any of them had military haircuts.

When Fabián finished, all eyes focused on me. I cleared my throat and spoke slowly, first thanking Fabián for inviting me here. I said I couldn’t offer the community anything other than to record what they told me and try to let people know about it. I said that my aim wasn’t to create any problems for anybody — neither the victims nor the perpetrators — but only to find out what had happened.

I stopped talking, and the room was silent, but for the pattering of the rain on the roof above. I opened my notebook. “So to begin . . .” I thought a moment, how should I begin? and opted for a specific question. “When exactly did the army arrive in town?”

Again there was silence. I looked around at the unfamiliar faces. They looked back at me. The question hung in the cold air between us. I glanced over at Fabián, but it didn’t appear that he was going to answer it. I saw one of the young men in the back step out the door into the rain, and I imagined he was off to report what I had said. My eyes wandered the room, and my mind searched for a way to wrap up this meeting as quickly as possible.

Then I saw an arm rise in the far corner of the room and a shadow of a man step forward. I nodded to him, and he began to speak.

“It was the first of January 1982, a Friday . . .”

There had been a battle in the woods below, and all day long they had listened to the army bombing the mountainside. Then on Saturday the soldiers came up the mountain from all sides and surrounded the valley. The people had no idea what the army intended to do. So they waited. And on Sunday morning the soldiers came down into the town.

“That wasn’t the first time we’d had trouble, you know,” the man said, hesitating as if unsure whether it was okay to backtrack. I nodded for him to go on. “Earlier in the year, four of us were stopped by soldiers when we were returning from La Igualdad. They kicked us hundreds of times, all over.” He put his hands now on his chest and stomach, as if massaging old wounds. “I was sick for four years after that. After beating us, they tied our arms to boards and made us walk uphill, like we were carrying crosses.”

Again there was silence. I had never heard anyone in Guatemala talk like this in public. I looked around the room to see if others would join him. But no one spoke. So I threw out another question: “How many soldiers came into town that day?”

This time it was Apolinario who answered. “There was an enormous number of them — a few hundred soldiers. And more in the hills around town. And there were helicopters — three helicopters — that circled overhead. The soldiers ordered everyone into the center of town. And they dragged people out of their houses.”

The man in the corner said, “They dragged some by their hair. They knocked people to the ground as they walked.”

Now an older man who was sitting in one of the back rows spoke up: “And they went into the homes and took whatever they wanted. They took radios, clothes, money, whatever they could find.”

From the corner: “And they raped the women.”

Silence again. I imagined the scene: soldiers swarming up over the mountaintop and down into the valley. What I couldn’t conjure up was what had gone on in the houses — the images that must have been playing back now in those eyes that were watching me.

“How many people were raped?”

“About twenty,” Apolinario said.

No one elaborated, so I moved on. “And what happened next?”

The man in the corner spoke: “They gathered us into the plaza in front of the church. And there a captain spoke to us from the belfry. ‘Today you will be punished,’ he told us. ‘It’s known that you are bad, that the guerrillas have been here, that they’re here because they’re fed by you. They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for your support.’ And he said, ‘Fish only live where there is water. You here are the water. When the pond dries up, the fish dies. We’re going to take care of you, so that the fish will die.’ Someone in the crowd spoke up: ‘Please, señor, God does not permit this.’ The captain yelled at him: ‘Here there is no God! Here there is only the Devil!’”

The soldiers then herded the people out to the soccer field and made them form a line and present themselves, one at time, before a group of officials who stood with a civilian wearing a hood. The officials had a list of names and occasionally they would ask the hooded person: “Is it this one?” The people who appeared on the list were taken by the soldiers. The rest were ordered to return to their houses. There were to be no lights or fires, and anyone who ventured outside would be shot.

The older man said: “People couldn’t cook. They couldn’t sleep. They passed the night worrying, waiting for their relatives who had been taken away.”

I looked at the women who sat in the front row like a silent chorus. It occurred to me now that they weren’t as old as I had first thought. Yet there was something that made them appear prematurely aged. Their faces had that parched look you see in people who are perennially exposed to the sun in the Andes and other high places. Which was strange since this mountain wasn’t that high, and the other people in the room didn’t have it.

The women gazed back at me, and when our eyes met they didn’t look away, as they probably would have under other circumstances. It was as if our gazes never really met, as if it wasn’t me they were looking at, but something I represented — something that, for some reason, was in fact important.

Apolinario spoke: “The soldiers left town on Monday morning. Before going, they announced that the people were not to leave their homes for the rest of the day or they would be killed. But as soon as the soldiers left, some of us went out.”

“Weren’t you scared?” I asked.

The man in the corner answered, “They said they’d kill us if we went out. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to find out where my brothers were. I was ready to die if I had to.”

Apolinario said, “Some people had seen the soldiers leading the prisoners into the woods. So we went to investigate, climbing up the ridge and down the other side. It was around ten in the morning that we found the first bodies. They were half-buried, in ditches, five or six people in each ditch.”

“There were my brothers. They had their throats slit.”

“Many of them had their throats cut. Like animals.”

“Some had been strangled. They put a cord around their neck, tied it to a stick, and turned the stick until they were choked.”

“Forty-four people had been killed. And no bullets had been fired.”

There was a moment of silence while I scribbled in my notebook. Then a new voice spoke. A woman’s voice. I looked up and saw her traje, and it suddenly dawned on me: of course, these must be the widows. Her chin was thrust forward, and her eyes were fixed intently upon me — first on my face and then on my notebook, as if she wanted to make sure I wrote down her words. I did write them, and I kept writing as the other people around her began to speak. Later I would remember the look on her face — determined and defiant — as if she were standing at a floodgate and, having just pulled the lever, was bracing herself for the deluge. And it came, from all around her, new voices, with new details, about throats and fingers and skin, but none so horrifying to me as what she had said: “They cut out their tongues.”

When the voices subsided and I was able to look up again from my notebook, I saw that the place had been transformed. The room seemed somehow smaller. There was color in people’s faces. And moisture in their eyes. And warmth in the air between us.

“What did you do after you found them?”

Apolinario described how some people went to San Pedro and spoke to the justice of the peace, who then sent the firemen to collect the bodies and bring them down to the morgue in San Marcos. How half the families went to collect the bodies and bury them in Sacuchum, while the other half — too scared to go — left their dead to be buried in a common grave in the San Marcos cemetery. How the army returned to the town regularly for the next few months. How eight more men were abducted. How the townspeople were prohibited from traveling to the piedmont to do business. “Those were months of fear and hunger and sorrow. There were fifty-two widows and more than one hundred orphans. Many of
them got sick with fear.”

I asked, “Could you denounce the killing to the authorities?”

“No, there was no one we could denounce it to,” Apolinario said. “And the newspapers and radio said that the dead were all guerrillas who had died in combat.”

“Were you ever able to tell the true story?”

“This is the first time.”

I had just one more question, I said. “After all this happened, how were people in the community able to get on with their lives?”

Apolinario answered, “We needed a lot of time. Each person has had to deal with this in his own way. As they say, the suffering of each is his own sentence. Some have suffered more than others, especially the widows. As a community we had to move ahead.We’ve worked on projects to improve the town.”

“What sorts of projects?”

“Building the road, for instance.We built it with help from the government. It took us twelve years.”

I nodded. “It’s an impressive road. I noticed when I came up today. I’ve been in many communities in this country, and the truth is I’ve never seen such a nice road.”

I now saw smiles around the room, like the first rays of sun peeking through the clouds after a storm. Someone said, “Just like the roads in New York, right?” And now people laughed.

“Well, almost!” I said. “Just needs some asphalt.”

They laughed again.

“So what other projects?”

“We have a health center, a school, this community hall. We brought electricity, potable water. In this way we’ve improved ourselves a lot. Even though you never forget, you have to live always with the memory, but we have come together as a community.”

Fabián closed the meeting with a short speech thanking me for coming to hear what they had to say. He called for applause. It came loudly and didn’t stop. Yes, I could see now, they were applauding an important person: the first outsider who listened to their story. It could have been anyone; it happened to be me.

When the applause finally petered out, one of the widows spoke up. She gave another speech thanking me for listening. Someone in the back called for more applause. And again, it was loud and long. When it died out, the people got up to leave. A widow who had been sitting in the front row, who had remained silent through the meeting, came up to me and offered a warm smile. “Gracias,” she said and walked away.

I left the meeting feeling more certain than ever that the history of the violence on this mountain needed to be told — and, at the same time, more perplexed about its impact on the plantations below. How could the owners have possibly kept themselves oblivious to events as horrific as these? And why were the workers more reluctant than the people here to talk about what they had suffered?

V

One afternoon, the middle-aged son of a wealthy cattle rancher gave me a ride from Coatepeque east on the coastal highway. The day was clear, and the crown of Sacuchum was silhouetted against the blue sky above us to the north. He drove a large American car, and he drove it fast, around sixty-five, which wouldn’t have seemed like much on another country’s highways, but Guatemala’s roads were not made for such speeds. This “highway” was really just a two-lane road with no divider and not much of a shoulder. The pavement was pocked with potholes. The holes forced most drivers to slow down. But they turned this one into a slalom racer. The only thing that slowed him down was the one-lane wooden ramp that spanned the space where a bridge had recently been blown up by the guerrillas.

“What are we to do with all those inditos blowing up bridges?” his seventy-something mother had complained to me earlier. “You foreigners don’t understand that human rights is one thing, but governing a country is something else.”

His brother, a businessman, had expanded on their mother’s comment “Guatemala isn’t ready for democracy,” echoing a line I’d heard from the coffee exporter. “It doesn’t have culture. It needs mano dura,” the iron fist. “You know how the father of la Menchú was burned in the embassy?” He was referring to the father of Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú, who, in 1980, had occupied the Spanish embassy with a group of indigenous activists and demanded an end to human rights violations in their communities. The government responded by firebombing the embassy and killing the protesters. “He was burned because if he hadn’t been, this country would have gone to hell.”

I suggested to him that the reason Menchú’s group had occupied the embassy was because they thought things were already pretty bad. “It’s true,” the brother conceded, “that there are landowners who treat their workers terribly. I always tell others that they shouldn’t flaunt their wealth. They shouldn’t wear expensive clothes around peasants in rags. They shouldn’t arrive at the plantation in expensive cars or planes.”

And what about trying to do something for them, like what the Arbenz government did with the Agrarian Reform? I asked this now to the brother who was driving, and he shook his head. “If we parceled up the land, this country would go to hell. Guatemalan peasants are lazy. They don’t like to work.”

He began to talk about the virtues of hard work. He told me proudly of his daughter, who was studying to be an architect. In this world, a woman needed to be able to fend for herself. She shouldn’t have to rely on any man. “Life is difficult,” he said, “life is difficult for everybody.” Then he began to tell me about his wife. She had cancer. She had been operated on once. Now they could only wait to see if the tumors would return.

He sped around a curve onto a stretch of road that was more populated than the rest. There were small cement houses and wooden huts thirty feet back from the asphalt, and people were going about their business by the roadside. My right foot was instinctively pressing the floor where the brake would have been if it were the driver’s side. His foot was on the accelerator. Up ahead a rooster stepped into the road. It was a large bird, two and half feet of muscle and magnificent plumage. It strutted to the center of the lane and stopped, surveying the asphalt as if it owned the place. When it noticed the car, it cocked its head to the side, started to strut in one direction, then panicked and darted back the other way. Too late.

His foot came off the accelerator. But he did not brake. There was a dull thud, and the bird disappeared under the front of the car.

We sailed ahead in silence, his foot hovering in the air. Then he shrugged. “What could I do?” He pressed down again on the gas and continued telling me about his family. Then he told me about a business venture he was hoping to undertake. He would import a chemical from Europe that could be mixed with asphalt to provide a more durable filling for potholes.With so many potholes to be fixed on Guatemala’s highways, there would be ample business.

VI

History wouldn’t be kind to that business venture. In December 1996, the Guatemalan government and guerrillas signed a peace accord, bringing an end to the thirty-six-year war. The government then cashed in its “peace dividend” — hundreds of millions of dollars from its wealthy trading partners — and bought asphalt. Asphalt flooded the country, filling the major highways and spilling over onto back roads that had never seen it (maybe even Sacuchum got some after all). Guatemala soon looked like a different country. The potholes were gone.

I had gone back to the United States and enrolled in law school, thinking that maybe I should get my life back on the course it had been on before I visited La Igualdad. But as I sat in those classrooms, listening as the smart young lawyers-in-the-making sought to outdo one another with the language of “slippery slopes” and “inefficient outcomes,” my mind would drift back to Guatemala, to that mountaintop valley, to that widow releasing the floodgates of memory. Unable to concentrate on torts and contracts, I applied for another fellowship, took a leave of absence, and in the fall of 1997 headed south.

Cajolá had shown me how much people could hide. Sacuchum had shown me how much they might want to tell — if they only had the right opportunity. And now, more than ever, I felt driven to find out what was hidden in La Igualdad and to find a way for the people who wanted to tell their history to do so.

Millions from that “peace dividend” had also gone to the formation of a truth commission — known as the Commission for Historical Clarification — which the government had reluctantly signed off on in the peace accords. Once back in Guatemala City, I met the commission’s head investigator. The investigation had been under way for several months now, and they had already collected testimony from thousands of people throughout the highlands and in the cities. I asked him if they had been able to get as much in the coffee region on the piedmont.

“No,” he said. “We’re getting nothing from the plantations.”

I said maybe I could help a little — at least in one community in San Marcos. He told me that the help would be appreciated and gave me the phone number of their regional office.

Before I called that number and before I returned to La Igualdad, I went to pay a visit to the people who had just emerged from the shadow world of the war — the former guerrillas now returning to civilian life. Perhaps they would know who in La Igualdad could arrange the sort of meeting that I had had in Sacuchum. And perhaps they could tell me themselves how their war had transformed the region.

Human Rights Watch does not endorse, and does not necessarily share, the views and opinions expressed in the film “Worse Than War” or other work contained or referenced therein. Human Rights Watch takes no responsibility for the accuracy or currentness of any information contained in the film “Worse Than War” or other work contained or referenced therein.