Mutilated By The Hutu 'Interahamwe' by James Nachtwey

Mutilated By The Hutu 'Interahamwe'

World Press Photo of the Year, prize singles

00-06-1994

A Hutu man at a Red Cross hospital in Nyanza, Rwanda. His face was mutilated by the Hutu 'Interahamwe' militia, who suspected him of sympathizing with the Tutsi rebels.

Liberated from a nearby Hutu camp, where mainly Tutsis were incarcerated, starved, beaten, and killed, this man did not support the genocide and was thus subjected to the same treatment. Starved and attacked with machetes, he had managed to survive, though he was unable to speak and could barely walk or swallow when this photo was made.

The animosity between the Hutu and Tutsi population groups in Rwanda had been simmering for decades. In April 1994, Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana’s death in a plane crash near the capital of Kigali sparked murderous attacks on the Tutsi minority and Hutu moderates. The situation deteriorated further when the mainly Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) started pushing south from their stronghold in northern Rwanda. A mass exodus of people trying to escape excessive violence was underway by July.

Commissioned by: Magnum Photos for Time

Photo Credit: James Nachtwey

American photojournalist James Nachtwey (Massachusetts, 1948) graduated from Dartmouth College in 1970, where he studied art history and political science.

Photographs of the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights movement inspired him to become a photographer. While teaching himself photography, he worked as truck driver and as an apprentice news film editor.

In 1980, after working for several years as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues, photographing ordinary peope in the cause of history. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.