Boston Globe
reporter Neuffer ably, sensitively humanizes two of the worst tragedies of the 1990s. By retelling the atrocities through her on-the-ground interviews, she coaxes readers more deeply into these two ghastly, complex tales. While she interviews victims and perpetrators, Neuffer focuses primarily on the victims and their search for relatives and justice once the violence has subsided. One particularly poignant story concerns Hasan Nuhanovic, a Bosnian Muslim whose family disappeared at the hands of Bosnian Serbs; while searching for them, Nuhanovic learns details of their deaths. Neuffer is honest about the difficulties faced by war crimes tribunals—in 1996, the Rwandan tribunal was "an institution in disarray" and "strangled by a huge bureaucracy; riven by political infighting, nepotism, and incompetence"; the Bosnian tribunal, too, the author reports, is far from perfect, but general opinion allows that it's better than no justice at all. But buoyed by the courage of people like Witness JJ, a Rwandan woman whose testimony helped convict an official of complicity in rape, Neuffer is optimistic about the courts' ultimate success. The people she interviewed, though, are less satisfied by the search for justice. This comprehensive study lends an immediacy to these two conflicts and the vicissitudes of the growing movement for international justice. Five maps not seen by PW. Agent, Michael Carlisle.(Nov.)
Forecast:American attention has certainly been drawn away from Bosnia and Rwanda, but the questions Neuffer asks about the boundaries between justice and revenge remain highly relevant. Readers concerned with international justice will be drawn to this book.
