The New York Times

September 15, 1997

Making Sure War Crimes Aren't Forgotten

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

KIGALI, Rwanda, Sept. 15 - On a gentle hillside a few miles from here one afternoon this month, David J. Scheffer, the Clinton Administration's Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues, stepped slowly through a field of wooden crosses marking the spot where Hutu extremists slaughtered thousands of Tutsi in 1994.

In a light drizzle, he bent over and struggled to right one of several crosses, worn by weather and time, that had fallen into the weeds. It stood-for a moment, teetered, and fell again. Riding back to Kigali, he asked an embassy official if there might not be a way for the United States to pay for stone grave markers.

"Because they aren't going to last like that," he said.

It was a modest gesture but for Mr. Scheffer a fitting one. As Ambassador at Large, he has been handed the task of insuring that the sorts of atrocities carried out in Rwanda - and all too often in other conflicts around the world - do not fade into history like the crosses on the hillside.

His is, an entirely new position, the first devoted exclusively to the most egregious violations of humanity.

It was the brainchild of Secretary of State Madeleine K Albright, long an advocate of international justice, to give the issue of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity a higher priority in American foreign policy, separating it from the State Department's bureau overseeing human rights generally.

She even put Mr. Scheffer's office on the seventh floor of the State Department, which in the hierarchy of the place puts it very near the Secretary's - a sign seen all the way to embassies here in East Africa that his job has influence.

The question now is whether Mr. Scheffer - an earnest, talkative lawyer from Norman, Okla., who was confirmed by the Senate on July 31 and sworn in a week later - can make the job one of the signatures of Ms. Albright's tenure as Secretary of State, as she would like, and not just another well-meaning idea that gets lost in the pragmatic trade-off of diplomacy.

Diane F. Orentlicher, director of the War Crimes Research Office at American University Washington College of Law, said that by creating the position, Ms. Albright had committed herself to real results, not just symbolic ones. Otherwise, she said, she will face charges that the appointment was nothing more than a response to pressure in Congress to do more, especially in Bosnia.

"In the best sense, the Administration has stuck its proverbial neck out," she said.

On his inaugural trip as Ambassador, which was to take him from East Africa and Congo to the Balkans and then the Hague, Mr. Scheffer learned firsthand that mere Gestures, however heartfelt would go only so far in a country where more than 500,000 people died in one of history's worst episodes of genocide.

A day after his visit to the cemetery in Nyanza, he found himself sharply questioned at the American cultural center here in Kigali by an invited group of Rwandan dignitaries more interested in justice than symbolism.

"I don't think the problem is money," declared Tomas Ndahiro, a journalist with

Rwanda's quasi-official radio, echoing the doubts many Tutsi have about the world's zeal to punish those responsible for the massacre. "I think it is a lack of moral commitment."

Mr. Scheffer, for his part, acknowledges that he is starting his job fighting against the notion of irrelevance. "It if my responsibility to demonstrate this is more than symbolic," he said in an interview during his visit here.

His initial focus will be on the nascent war crimes tribunals now trying to prosecute those who carried t the worst crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, but his portfolio extends far beyond the Balkans and Central Africa, to Iraq and Cambodia, and any other place where war crimes may yet arise.

And it includes Ms. Albright's ultimate goal of creating a permanent international criminal court, a controversial idea in Congress and elsewhere because of its potential to reach over sovereign borders.

Mr. Scheffer, who is 44, is a lawyer who specialized in international law in private practice for seven years with Coudert Brothers of New York City, and later researched and taught the subject at Columbia, Harvard and Georgetown University Law Center.

More important, as Ms. Albright's top aide in Washington while she was the chief American delegate to the United Nations, he represented her at the regular "deputies committee" meetings of the top aides to President Clinton's foreign policy team.

As Ms. Albright's counsel, Mr. Scheffer was also a central player in the Administration's policy on war crimes, having a large hand in Security Council deliberations that led to the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the first international courts to try cases of war crime since the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals after World War II.

After the massacres of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, Mr. Scheffer helped pry loose aerial reconnaissance photos from the intelligence agencies that Ms. Albright used to warn Bosnian Serbs publicly not to tamper with evidence of war crimes. "We will be watching," Ms. Albright said at the time.

In June, after he was nominated but not yet confirmed for his new job, Mr. Scheffer led the Administration's scramble to find a way to bring Pol Pot of Cambodia to some international trial. It was Mr. Scheffer who identified Canada's law on genocide as a possible avenue for trying the Cambodian. Nothing came of the idea, however, as Pol Pot is believed to remain under Khmer Rouge control after a brief show trial in July.

In debates in the Administration, as he struggles to bring attention to an issue that had been an after-thought, Mr. Scheffer must often juggle competing interests in the State Department and with other agencies, notably the Pentagon, which has clashed with the department over how aggressively NATO troops should pursue indicted war-crime suspects in Bosnia.

"The Administration consists of many people with many different viewpoints," said Ms. Orentlicher of American University. "He has the job of making the case for doing what must be done."

With the rank of ambassador, Mr. Scheffer now also has the authority to deal directly with foreign governments. In mid-September, he met with officials from Rwanda's Tutsiled Government to make the case for better cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. And he went to Burundi to warn President Pierre Buyoya's Government to stop summary executions and other abuses if it ever hoped to persuade the United Nations to create another international tribunal to prosecute those who killed 50,000 Tutsi in 1993.

"You have to deal with the issue of accountability," he said in Burundi, "or you will never end the violence here."

In his appearance at the cultural center here and over lunch with members of Rwanda's nascent bar association, Mr. Scheffer said he had started his inaugural trip as Ambassador in Africa deliberately because Rwanda's tribunal has received far less attention and support than the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is based in The Hague.

"The most challenging test for the rule of law in our generation is the genocide of 1994 that consumed Rwanda," he said at the cultural center, promising to do more to give the victims a sense of justice.

The gap between promise and reality, however, was clear when he visited a church in Ntarama, south of Kigali, where the decomposing bodies of more than 5,000 victims of the genocide remain to this day as a macabre memorial to the killing. Mr. Scheffer called it "a memorial to the living dead."

A Tutsi woman, Christine Mukaruyenzi, guided him through the church, strewn with bones and clothing stained with dried blood. It was in the church on April 15, 1994, that she and her eight children had gone to hide when the killings started. Only she survived. "We hope the world will never forget this," she told him.

But it was clear there was little chance that all those responsible for the killings would face justice. "It's not really a mass murder," Mr. Scheffer said as he stepped over shattered, decaying bones and skulls, many showing the machete blows that killed the victims. "It is individual murder, person by person, that becomes mass murder."

Mr. Scheffer said it was vital to create a greater sense of justice and thus, hopefully, reconciliation in Rwanda, by shoring up the tribunal for Rwanda. The tribunal's failure to complete a case, nearly three years after it was established, has created animosity with Rwanda's Government that Mr. Scheffer sought to ease during his meetings with Government officials.

To that end, he stopped at the tribunal's headquarters in a grimy cement conference center in Arusha, Tanzania, before coming to Rwanda.

In a series of meetings, Mr. Scheffer chided the tribunal's judges for moving cases too slowly only three trials under way, and they are in various states of suspension - and he deplored the dismal working conditions of the building itself, which lacks even reliable phone service.

At the same time, he sounded more sympathetic than critical, comparing its efforts to the effort made by the United States to try Timothy McVeigh. "What we're talking about in Rwanda," he said, "is more than 500,000 murder cases."

Beyond the two tribunals, Mr. Scheffer has long lists of priorities for an office that is just getting off the ground.

He said he wanted to focus attention on Burundi and Congo, to hold Pol Pot accountable for the killing fields of Cambodia and to establish at least "a record" if not a prosecution of war crimes that the United States believes Iraq committed against the Kurds and the Kuwaitis.

Mr. Scheffer's work has already clashed with Realpolitik. After leaving Kigali, Mr. Scheffer went to Congo, where he deliberately avoided a public confrontation with the Government of President Laurent Kabila, who is fighting with the United Nations over an investigation into atrocities committed during his alliance's overthrow of Mobutu Sese Seko. Eager to maintain ties with Mr. Kabila and avoid alienating his African allies, American officials have limited their public criticism of his opposition to the United Nations investigation.

"There are times," Mr. Scheffer said, "when I need to be low-profile to accomplish what we want."

Mr. Scheffer said he did not expect to be the last Ambassador at Large for War Crimes. "If human nature continues to be of the same character as it was in the 20th century," he said, "there will be more than enough work to do."