Author: David Scheffer
Publisher: Princeton University Press – 533 pages
Book Review by: Anu Kampa
This book is an important segment of the personal story of David Scheffer, a lawyer, who helped change the popular belief that mass killers can get away from paying for heinous crimes against their fellowmen.
It is an account of his personal battle against mass murderers and how he helped write into law the provision that heads of state or government officials can no longer use ‘leadership immunity’ to protect themselves from prosecution, imprisonment or execution in international courts of law.
One of his most important contributions to humanity was that he created five war crimes tribunals from 1993 to 1996 to bring to justice dictators primarily responsible for large massacres in various parts of the world.
Those politico-military leaders, constantly and for many years, used the baseless defense of ‘leadership immunity’ to avoid prosecution, but Scheffer’s admirable efforts “brought to an end the presumption of immunity for atrocity crimes.” Schaffer in effect brought about the new era of ‘credible justice’ wherein punishment is the rightful end result of trials of dictators who became mass murderers. Saddam Hussein of Iraq, for example.
The courts of justice he created were: the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the International Criminal Court, the Rwanda Tribunal, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the Yugoslav Tribunal.
After the Holocaust in which some six million people were killed in gas chambers or through other means, many other mass killings of over 1,000 people have occurred over the decades, in places like Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Beijing (Tiananmen Square), Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burma, Burundi, Cambodia, Chechnya, the Congo, East Timor, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Yugoslavia.
This book deals with steps Schaeffer took to deal with the atrocities mentioned in the fifth paragraph. It is his story of how these war crimes tribunals were created and how his tribunal-building project and initiatives over eight years (1993-2001) radically changed the widely-held belief that the criminal leaders could get away with impunity.
David Scheffer was senior adviser and counsel from 1993 to 1996 to Madeline Albright, who was then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. When she became secretary of state, David Scheffer was appointed in 1997 by President Bill Clinton as ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. Some described his job as “ambassador to hell.” But his sole purpose was to prosecute criminals, he writes.
The various mass murders in which the responsible criminal leaders had not been brought to justice spanned more than two decades from the atrocities of Pol Pot in the 1970s when millions perished and Cambodia was devastated, to the numerous massacres after that.
Scheffer has organized this detailed account of his years as war crimes ambassador in a simple format of four parts containing 14 chapters. They cover subjects ranging from the Nuremberg trials to genocide to ‘credible justice’ in Rwanda to the 1995 massacre of over 8,000 Bosnians and Herzegovinans in Srebrenica, and other events and observations.
Some of those events were the crime scenes in Kosovo and fires in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
In his Postscript, Scheffer makes the important point that the 1990s presented to us two phenomena that “at first seemed beyond the will of humankind to defeat: the surge of atrocities and the impunity that shielded political and military leaders as they plotted Hell on earth. Neither reality disappeared on my watch. But they were boldly confronted in ways not seen since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials by tribunals that challenged master criminals seeking to destroy the lives of millions in their pursuit of power and dominance.”
Scheffer writes that one of the most powerful current legal defenses – against the claim that heads of state cannot be tried for mass killings because of their ‘official capacity’ – is Article 27 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which reads in part:
“This Statute shall apply equally to all persons without any distinction based on official capacity. In particular, official capacity as Head of State or Government, a member of a Government or parliament, an elected representative, or a government official shall in no case exempt a person from criminal responsibility under this Statute.”
Sheffer states categorically that heads of state are no longer shielded from prosecution and punishment for mass killings:
“The fact that a denial of impunity was reaffirmed in the tribunal statutes of the 1990s and is now accepted as perpetual law by the countries (now numbering 118 in 2011) that have joined the permanent International Criminal Court means something quite significant has occurred on the world stage. The end of impunity, and hence the end of amnesties fortifying impunity, is in sight for political and military leaders who commit atrocity crimes.”
The world is now a safer place and protected from mass murderers, thanks largely to the untiring efforts and legal moves of David Scheffer. We thank him for his unique contribution to mankind. I urge all readers to get this excellent book to learn why and how he did it.
