All the Missing Souls
A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals
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- US$20.99
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The behind-the-scenes story of how today's war crimes tribunals came to be
Within days of Madeleine Albright's confirmation as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, she instructed David Scheffer to spearhead the historic mission to create a war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. As senior adviser to Albright and then as President Clinton's ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Scheffer was at the forefront of the efforts that led to criminal tribunals for the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, and that resulted in the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court. All the Missing Souls is Scheffer's gripping insider's account of the international gamble to prosecute those responsible for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and to redress some of the bloodiest human rights atrocities in our time.
Scheffer reveals the truth behind Washington's failures during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the anemic hunt for notorious war criminals, how American exceptionalism undercut his diplomacy, and the perilous quests for accountability in Kosovo and Cambodia. He takes readers from the killing fields of Sierra Leone to the political back rooms of the U.N. Security Council, providing candid portraits of major figures such as Madeleine Albright, Anthony Lake, Richard Goldstone, Louise Arbour, Samuel "Sandy" Berger, Richard Holbrooke, and Wesley Clark, among others.
A stirring personal account of an important historical chapter, All the Missing Souls provides new insights into the continuing struggle for international justice.
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A diplomat fights an uphill battle to bring the worst criminals to justice in this dogged memoir. Scheffer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes during the Clinton administration, recounts his efforts to establish U.N. war crimes tribunals to prosecute mass killings in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia. He had an insider's view of unfolding bloodbaths and provides anguished eyewitness testimony of victims' suffering and the Clinton administration's often feckless response. But mostly he describes his endless wrangling to set up the tribunals, a task that required delicate bargaining with U.N. potentates, Washington mandarins, shell-shocked postatrocity regimes, and the perpetrators themselves all of whom had reason to sacrifice justice to self-interest and political expediency. (He's especially scathing on America's "exceptionalist" refusal to accept International Criminal Court jurisdiction over possible American war crimes.) Scheffer's narrative is an epic diplomatic history that's lucid but often eye-glazing in its detailed reconstructions of years-long negotiations and mulling of the niceties of international law. At times his memoir gives a sense of diplomats and jurists dithering uselessly amid hurricanes of violence, but in it we see the birth of a more responsible and civilized world order. 36 photos.
