David Scheffer - Böcker

The Sit Room brings you inside the secretive Situation Room of the White House, the most important deliberative room in the world, during the early 1990s when the author was one of the policymakers who framed the Clinton Administration's policy towards the bloody Balkans War. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and his own notes, David Scheffer, who later became America's first Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, weaves the true story of how policy options were debated in the Sit Room among the highest national security officials. The road to a final peace deal in late 1995 came at the high price of the murderous siege of Sarajevo and ethnic cleansing of mostly Bosnian Muslims from their homes and towns, including the genocide of Srebrenica's men and teenage boys. The Sit Room reveals the behind-the-scenes story about how American policy evolved--often futilely--to try to stop an intractable war and its shocking atrocities. Main actors in the Sit Room include: the assertive Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright; the State Department's ace negotiator, Richard Holbrooke; the cerebral National Security Adviser, Tony Lake; the immigrant Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili; the bulldog Deputy National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger; and White House moralist, David Gergen. For almost three years, the Sit Room was littered with shattered proposals to end the war-until armed force backed up diplomacy to compel a fragile peace deal. The Sit Room reveals authentic policy-making at the highest levels, with a unique journey into the arena of war and peace where spirited debate guided America's foreign policy.

Within days of Madeleine Albright's confirmation as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, she instructed David Scheffer to spearhead the historic mission to create a war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. As senior adviser to Albright and then as President Clinton's ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Scheffer was at the forefront of the efforts that led to criminal tribunals for the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, and that resulted in the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court. All the Missing Souls is Scheffer's gripping insider's account of the international gamble to prosecute those responsible for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and to redress some of the bloodiest human rights atrocities in our time. Scheffer reveals the truth behind Washington's failures during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the anemic hunt for notorious war criminals, how American exceptionalism undercut his diplomacy, and the perilous quests for accountability in Kosovo and Cambodia. He takes readers from the killing fields of Sierra Leone to the political back rooms of the U.N.Security Council, providing candid portraits of major figures such as Madeleine Albright, Anthony Lake, Richard Goldstone, Louise Arbour, Samuel "Sandy" Berger, Richard Holbrooke, and Wesley Clark, among others. A stirring personal account of an important historical chapter, All the Missing Souls provides new insights into the continuing struggle for international justice.