In the wake of genocide, it is probably impossible to achieve anything that approaches justice--and Boston Globe journalist Elizabeth Neuffer knows it. Yet this heartfelt book describes how some of the people in war-torn Rwanda and Bosnia have sought after it anyway, and why the search is so important. The Key to My Neighbor's House is ultimately an anecdotal and impressionistic document, but therein lies its power. It's difficult to forget scenes that begin this way: "Photographs of mass graves can prepare you for what you might see--a jumble of skeletalized limbs, heads, bodies--but nothing prepares you for how it smells." The reportage is marvelous. For instance, Neuffer recounts how prosecutors at a Rwandan tribunal were forced to argue "over whose motion was the most important to be printed out from the scarce paper supply." She also describes the harrowing experience of a Bosnian soldier beginning to grope her--only to discover "the steel plate inside my bulletproof vest." This impressive book will leave a mark on you long after you've set it down. --John Miller


From Publishers Weekly
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.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Neuffer, an award-winning journalist, goes beyond the standard news reports of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia to present the victims and villains in this astonishing look at human cruelty and endurance. Following a brief review of the historical ethnic strife and more recent genocide of these two nations, Neuffer explores the search for justice via war-crime tribunals. In very personal and painful interviews, she talks to women longing for even skeletal remains that they can properly mourn, a black American judge serving on the Yugoslav tribunal who draws parallels with American racism, and a pathologist specializing in DNA who identifies the remains from unearthed mass graves. Neuffer also recalls the vanity, self-absorption, excuses, and self-justification of the torturers and rapists. Amid the human misery and cruelty, Neuffer asserts, the U.S and other superpowers waffle and equivocate; when the time comes for justice, the UN haggles over international politics, procedure, and budgets. This is a very graphic, disturbing look at the failure of foreign policy and the difficulty of administering justice. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“A subject of monumental importance...poignant personal stories...should prick our collective conscience.” —Christiane Amanpour, Chief International Correspondent, CNN

“Captures the human drama at the core of the trials...in intimate and sometimes painful detail....Prodigious research and exemplary reporting.” —The New York Times Book Review



Review
“A subject of monumental importance...poignant personal stories...should prick our collective conscience.” —Christiane Amanpour, Chief International Correspondent, CNN

“Captures the human drama at the core of the trials...in intimate and sometimes painful detail....Prodigious research and exemplary reporting.” —The New York Times Book Review



Review
“A subject of monumental importance...poignant personal stories...should prick our collective conscience.” —Christiane Amanpour, Chief International Correspondent, CNN

“Captures the human drama at the core of the trials...in intimate and sometimes painful detail....Prodigious research and exemplary reporting.” —The New York Times Book Review



Book Description
Examining competing notions of justice in Bosnia and Rwanda, award-winning Boston Globe correspondent Elizabeth Neuffer convinces readers that crimes against humanity cannot be resolved by talk of forgiveness, or through the more common recourse to forgetfulness

As genocidal warfare engulfed the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the international community acted too late to prevent unconscionable violations of human rights in both countries. As these states now attempt to reconstruct their national identities, the surviving victims of genocide struggle to come to terms with a world unhinged.

Interviewing victims and aggressors, war orphans and war criminals, Serbian militiamen and NATO commanders, Neuffer explores the extent to which genocide erodes a nation’s social and political environment, just as it destroys the individual lives of the aggressor’s perceived enemies. She argues persuasively that only by achieving justice for these people can domestic and international organizations hope to achieve lasting peace in regions destroyed by fratricidal warfare.



About the Author
Elizabeth Neuffer, an award-winning journalist and Edward R. Murrow Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, covers foreign affairs for The Boston Globe. A resident of New York City, she reported on the war on terrorism from Afghanistan.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Neuffer's ambitious book describes the complicated efforts to pursue justice in the aftermath of the Rwandan and Bosnian massacres, both of which she covered as a reporter for The Boston Globe. The first part recounts those chilling events themselves, using the experiences of several people as emblematic. The remainder of the book describes the arduous process of setting up international tribunals to try those suspected of involvement in the rapes, torture, and killings. Neuffer's own initiation into the senseless world of war had been sudden and surreal, but it sparked a desire to close a personal circle, confronting what happened next: the exhumations of mass graves, the slow return of refugees to their villages, and the creation of the tribunals.

The latter was an act of promising idealism, but for a long while the courts were neither adequately funded nor supported. And because they conducted their affairs in distant countries (Holland and Tanzania), those supposed to benefit from the trials rarely knew about them or did not understand their arcane twists and turns. The danger was that people began to see themselves "as victims of justice, not recipients of it. Collective blame, rather than individual responsibility, still reigned."

And who was this justice for, anyway? Clearly, a strong "legacy of Western shame" at having failed to stem the slaughter prompted eventual action. The UN's abandonment of Srebrenica, a "safe haven" for Bosnian Muslims, and its nonintervention in Rwanda's gruesome genocidal massacres, created an international guilt complex. A Bosnian Serb's taunt as he separated targeted Muslim men from their wives and children in front of international peacekeepers said it all: "The world is allowing us to do this." Hasan, a Bosnian Muslim whose painful story Neuffer recounts, uses the metaphor of a lifeboat, manned by the UN, which threw its desperate passengers into a shark-infested sea.

Most of the victims and their relatives want a reckoning -- which can never undo the past but can provide those bearing its weight with some measure of resolution. "Too much truth is a dangerous thing," one former Serb militia leader tells Neuffer. In fact, she argues, more of it is necessary for everyone involved. "That tyrants are punished, that societies heal, that individuals find justice is the responsibility of us all -- in order that it not become our fate." The tribunals finally started to make headway in 2001, putting some people in jail for shocking and well-documented crimes. Justice will always be imperfect and slow, Neuffer concludes, but it matters now as much as ever. (Jonathan Cook)

Jonathan Cook lives in New York City.

From Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
In a groundbreaking book, The Key to My Neighbor's House, Boston Globe reporter Elizabeth Neuffer has sharpened the focus of the political lens of the 1990s, and what she brings into view isn't exactly pleasant -- nor is it meant to be. For what Neuffer has done is expose the genocidal atrocities committed in both Bosnia and Rwanda within a few, short years of each other, and lifted the veil on the failure of the UN peacekeeping mission to do its job.

But Neuffer doesn't stop there. Rather, in the aftermath of these parallel stories of ethnically fueled violence, she follows the path of the international war crimes tribunal, interviewing war criminals and their victims and explaining, through the voices of the survivors, how such horrific acts of violence are justified by their perpetrators. She also details the complicated search for justice in the wake of unspeakable acts -- acts committed by one's neighbors.

For fans of Philip Gourevitch's landmark book on Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (a Discover selection in Fall 1998), Neuffer's book -- winner of a Courage in Journalism Award -- takes readers further along in the wake of heinous crimes against humanity. She describes how the war crimes tribunal is "strangled by a huge bureaucracy; riven by political infighting, nepotism, and incompetence." However, with her superb research and honest writing she ultimately shows us that while the search for justice in a courtroom is often inadequate and incomplete, perhaps it is better than no justice at all. (Winter 2002 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"From her unique vantage point as a reporter directly covering the reality of genocide and its aftermath in Bosnia and Rwanda, journalist Elizabeth Neuffer tells the compelling story of two parallel journeys toward justice in each country - that of the international war crime tribunals, and that of the people left behind." Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes blood-chilling, sometimes inspiring, and including accounts from victims and perpetrators, forensic experts, and tribunal judges, three stories form the backbone of this book. We follow Hasan Nuhanovic, a young Bosnian Muslim student determined to discover the fate of his family lost at Srebrenica, as he matures over the years from a gangling youth to a man with the authority to testify before Congress in Washington, D.C. In counterpoint, we follow Witness JJ, a shy Tutsi woman of immense courage, who overcomes her modesty and the dictates of her culture to testify about her rape - an act that resulted in wartime rape being classified as a war crime. And we get a revealing inside look at the workings of the newly created international tribunals through the eyes of Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, an African-American judge appointed to the court.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

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. Copyright 2001Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews