Prosecutors aren't often known for their diplomacy, but Stephen Rapp owes some of his success to his irrepressible streak of Midwestern civility. He remained on good terms with now-Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, after losing two close House races to him in the 1970s. And when Rapp wanted to leap from the U.S. attorney's office in Iowa to the United Nations tribunals for Rwandan war criminals, Grassley threw his weight behind him.
After scoring convictions against media instigators of the Rwandan genocide, Rapp has spent the last two years trying former Liberian President Charles Taylor as chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. A verdict is expected next year.
Rapp's even temperament will serve him well in his new post. Last week, President Obama nominated the Iowan to be ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. He'll have to be part diplomat -- working with other governments, the International Criminal Court and NGOs -- and part enforcer, helping direct America's response to war crimes in some of the nastiest places on earth. After his appointment was announced, Rapp spoke with NationalJournal.com's David Gauvey Herbert about his unusual career path and the challenges of enforcing international law.
NJ: You went from working as a U.S. attorney in Iowa to taking down war criminals in Rwanda. What inspired you to make the leap?
Rapp: Well, I'd always been interested in accountability for war crimes, and -- particularly when I was younger -- read everything on Nuremberg and thought if ever there was a chance to get involved in anything like that it would be great. During the time I was United States attorney in Iowa from 1993 to 2001 -- when you're a U.S. attorney you're constantly getting e-mails from Washington that will say, "Can you lend one of your staff to go to Colombia, can you lend one of your staff to go here or there?" And in the mid-'90s it became, "Can you lend one of your staff to go to The Hague to help establish the ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia]?" And at one point [they] even wanted people for Rwanda.
And I had a longtime interest in Africa -- my wife's a professor of African history, we've visited a lot of African countries -- and was fascinated by that. I wrote back and said, "Well, rather than sending a staff, could you send me?" And the answer was, "No, we can't do that, you have to stay with your ship," so to speak. But particularly as things developed during the late '90s, watching the atrocities -- particularly what happened in Kosovo and Sierra Leone -- I decided to go to Washington and seek out people who had been involved in this process.
NJ: How big is the shift from being a U.S. attorney in Iowa to prosecuting radio stations in Rwanda?
Rapp: I think the fit is probably better than people who come from most other legal careers. Particularly that's a reflection of the role United States attorneys play in leading investigations....
You have people who -- from the English tradition, like a lot of those in Commonwealth countries, except Canada, in which the lawyers or barristers don't even talk to witnesses -- they're great in court, fantastic on their feet, but they're not at all developing that part of it. People who come from a civil law tradition, people who are prosecutors, come out of an entirely different career track.... They are quite actively involved because they move between prosecution roles and examining-magistrate kind of roles in leading investigations.
NJ: Working in Africa, have you ever butted heads with someone from a different legal background?
Rapp: I don't butt heads in my nature. (Laughs). I find common ground, and I take that common ground and I build on that common ground until it's more my common ground than their common ground. But I don't antagonize. That's why a great many Northern European types went to places like Rwanda and washed out and ended up not succeeding and got falsely accused of prejudice of one kind or another. Never happened to me.
NJ: Former special envoys that I've talked to complain that there can be confusion about where policy emanates from and who is the final arbiter on an issue or conflict. Where do you see yourself fitting into Sudan, Eastern Congo and other high-profile conflicts?
Rapp: I've been talking being a prosecutor. I can talk about Charles Taylor, who we're going to court against on Monday. I can talk about the fact that Obama was a key leader in getting him arrested and was a sponsor of getting money for the court in November 2006 -- and the Sierra Leone court and the Rwanda court. But I've been strictly instructed not to talk about the future post and what I might do and what policies this government might have to decide on, because that's reserved for the senators.
NJ: The Dutch foreign minister said recently that he'd like to see an international court set up to prosecute Somali pirates. What do you think about that?
Rapp: When you're talking about special courts -- the hybrid model that's worked for the last three years in Sierra Leone -- it does provide some advantages. You've got both national and international staff together, you've got justice closer to the scene of the crime than you do at places like The Hague or in Arusha, which are separated from the scene of the crime by, respectively, 1,000 miles and 500 miles.
You get the benefit of the independence that the international judges provide, and that's an antidote to the potential for victor's justice after a conflict, where one side has won and the other side's committed all the crimes though the side that won may have committed atrocities as well. You're going to have to deal with that. It may be very difficult for people from that system unless there are powerful incentives to get involved.
The disadvantages are that it's expensive to bring international people in and pay people according to U.N. scale that are internationals, and it will be very hard not to do the same thing for nationals. You have the question of how to fund all of that....
It strikes me that the situation with piracy is not a question of independence. It's more a question of capacity. And when it's a capacity question, I think my instinct is to go more with repairs of the national system.
NJ: Even if in the case of Somalia, where there is no established legal system?
Rapp: Kenya has a developed legal tradition but has a very small judiciary. I've looked at the number of high court judges they have, and it's nowhere near enough high court judges to handle all the ordinary crime that occurs in the country, so it seems to me that the judicial system is underfunded, under-resourced. And that's a challenge also when it comes to dealing with the political violence of January and February 2008.
NJ: Is there any country or conflict that you think merits more American attention?
Rapp: (Laughs). That sort of sends a signal about what I would want to press forward at. One of the interesting things about this job I can say is that there's a law... called the Advancing Democratic Values Act, and it has a section that talks about war crimes, atrocity crimes, et cetera, which requires the president, with the assistance of my office... to collect information and to potentially make recommendations about achieving accountability. For that reason, and because that law is there... my office will have the responsibility of dealing with that probity.
NJ: In the past you've talked about how you were the victim of a violent crime as a young man. What makes all this worthwhile for you? What's the moment that makes all the paperwork and the tedium worthwhile?
Rapp: As an attorney, you want the story told in court. The witness survives and he tells the truth about what happened, and it's a victory in and of itself. The delivery of the truth in the court process is extremely important even apart from its result in judgment.
The last witness in the Taylor trial, who was a double amputee... he described that he had been dragged from his hiding place by the rebels, and [they] dragged him forward to a stump and proceeded to hack off his left hand. And his four-year-old boy started screaming, "Don't do that to my Daddy! Don't do that to my Daddy!"
So they brought the boy forward to chop off his hand, and the father said, "No, take my right hand." And they took his right hand. And he said, "My son's with me here today, now 14, and he's my hands." [Voice cracks]. And the dramatic effect of this guy who gave his right hand for his son, in our view testifying against someone who sacrificed the lives of thousands and the hands of thousands for his own selfish ends, I thought was dramatic and effective. When that happens, when someone who has suffered can tell their story and tell it in the presence of someone, it's dramatic.
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