The Key to My Neighbor's House

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.

“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

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.