The Key to My Neighbour's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda
Elizabeth Neuffer
Bloomsbury £18.99, pp492
Published the day before the trial opened last week of indicted former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosovic, Elizabeth Neuffer's timely analysis of the Bosnian and Rwandan war-crimes tribunals examines the international community's often amateurish efforts to seek justice in the two countries that saw genocide in the early to mid-1990s.
As European bureau chief for the Boston Globe in 1994, Neuffer was sent to the Balkans when renewed fighting broke out. Rebel Bosnian Serbs were advancing on UN-designated 'safe areas', and Gorazde was one of the first to fall in moves that highlighted 'the fact that the UN and Nato did not have the political will to defend' the protected zones.
By 1995, plans devised by Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and carried out by General Ratko Mladic (two men indicted but still at large), brought about the fall of Muslim-populated Srebrenica. The Yugoslav tribunal's forensic expert, Bill Haglund, and his team unearthed five graves in Bosnia for the purposes of the investigation; 650 bodies were exhumed - around half the number Haglund had dug up in Rwanda just a few months before.
It was he who suggested Neuffer go to the central African state. Back in April 1994, she had been unable to make much of the news of mass killings in Rwanda, during which an estimated one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slain with machetes in around 100 days. Two years on, however, the idea of covering parallel war-crimes tribunals intrigued her.
Neuffer tells the story of a handful of survivors, including Hamdo Kahrimanovic, a Bosnian-Muslim former school principal who was held at the Serbian-controlled Omarska concentration camp. There he came face-to-face with one of his ex-pupils, Dusan Tadic, a man who later became the first person since Nuremberg and Tokyo to be convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal.
We read about Petko Grubac, a Serbian psychiatrist stunned by the violent, nationalistic ascent of his colleague, Karadzic. And about Hasan Nuhanovic, the Muslim student who, despite his appointment as a UN translator in Srebrenica, was unable to protect his family from the Bosnian-Serb army's mass graves.
In Rwanda we meet Anonciata Kavaruganda, whose husband, the former Hutu priest-turned-judge Joseph Kavaruganda, enjoyed a high-ranking position in the Rwandan government as attorney general. Kavaruganda was taken from his home one day following his insistence that Hutus and Tutsis work together towards peace. The next Anonciata heard of her husband was the gleeful announcement on local radio that he was dead.
Then there is 'Witness JJ', a Tutsi woman placed under the Rwandan tribunal's witness-protection programme. Her testimony led to the Hutu mayor Jean-Paul Akayesu being convicted in the first trial that defined rape as an act of genocide. This was one of only a few successes in the early days of the Hague and Arusha tribunals, when it seemed unlikely that either would offer any form of justice to the survivors who eagerly awaited compensation for their losses.
As far as Neuffer could see, 'the Rwandan tribunal had the high-profile problems: allegations of corruption, fraud, blatant mismanagement. The Yugoslav tribunal's were more ordinary: poor management, bad planning, incompetence.' Clearly, she would have indicted not only war criminals but also the international community's judicial system.
It is in these passages that Neuffer is at her most engaging, and where her story as a foreign journalist comes to life. But although immaculately researched and readable, Neuffer virtually ridicules the gravity of the genocides by not allowing those who experienced them a voice of their own. Instead, she offers fictionalised dialogue which does little to bring closer to readers these two individual and very complex stories.
