The years from 1993 to 2001, when Bill Clinton occupied the White House, were the formative period in the contemporary development of international justice. Before then, there had been no international war crimes tribunals since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials in the aftermath of World War II. By the end of this time, international courts were hearing cases on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, negotiations on tribunals for Sierra Leone and Cambodia were far advanced, and the International Criminal Court was nearing its launch.
Throughout this time, David Scheffer was the Clinton administration’s point man on international justice. His book “All the Missing Souls” is a revealing and valuable record of the U.S. role in the effort to entrench accountability for mass atrocities as a central principle in international affairs.
(Princeton University Press) - ’All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals’ by David Scheffer
During Clinton’s first term, Scheffer was senior adviser and counsel to Madeleine Albright, who was then ambassador to the United Nations. After Albright became secretary of state in 1997, Scheffer was appointed as the first U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues. The creation of this position testifies to the growing profile that the prevention and punishment of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes came to assume in U.S. foreign policy during the 1990s. But, as Scheffer shows in his detailed account, the process of getting the world’s great powers to make a real effort to enforce accountability for international crimes was anything but smooth.
The horrific violence unleashed against civilians in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, combined with new expectations about an international role in policing war crimes after the Cold War, was enough to bring the U.N. Security Council to endorse the creation of war crimes tribunals for these countries. But this hardly amounted to a settled commitment to make international justice truly meaningful, either across the U.S. government or internationally. The launch of the Yugoslav tribunal was delayed for months as countries engaged in political horse-trading over the choice of a prosecutor. After a prosecutor was finally appointed, Scheffer had to fight doggedly within the Washington bureaucracy to persuade disdainful defense and intelligence officials to gather and deliver evidence to him. “Real men don’t do this,”one intelligence analyst told him.
Scheffer gives an instructive account of the political and diplomatic intricacies involved in transforming the tribunals from abstract ideals into effective institutions. Working to support an international court for Rwanda, the United States had a series of difficult negotiations with the country’s post-genocide, Tutsi-led government, which could not accept that the ringleaders of the genocide would not face the death penalty, or that the tribunal might also investigate the new rulers’ actions after seizing power. Later discussions with the Cambodian government over a court to prosecute mass killings by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s were equally fraught, leading to an imperfect tribunal subject to Cambodian influence that Scheffer nevertheless defends as a blow against impunity.
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