- Person
- Aryeh Neier
- Lived
- b. 1937
- Field
- Human rights
- From
- German-born American
The story
In the autumn of 1991, as Yugoslavia broke apart, Serb forces besieged the Croatian town of Vukovar, which fell in November. Patients and others at the town hospital had expected evacuation under international supervision, but the Yugoslav army refused the International Committee of the Red Cross access. More than 200 men, many of them wounded, were taken from the hospital to the Ovčara farm a few miles away, handed over to Serb paramilitaries and executed in a ravine.
A researcher working for Aryeh Neier at Human Rights Watch first uncovered the episode. Another human rights investigator then went with a forensic anthropologist to look for the site. In the woods they found trees marked by bullets, and on digging they uncovered a skeleton with a blindfold still around the skull and a small gold Catholic cross, showing the victim was Croatian. They persuaded United Nations troops to guard the spot until a larger team could carry out a full exhumation. Human Rights Watch had also identified the Serbian commander responsible for taking the men from the hospital.
The forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow led a preliminary investigation in December 1992 while Russian UN peacekeepers guarded the grave. In 1996 investigators for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, working with Physicians for Human Rights, recovered 200 sets of remains, most of them later identified through DNA analysis.
The evidence led to justice. In 2007 the tribunal convicted two Yugoslav army officers, Mile Mrkšić, sentenced to 20 years, and Veselin Šljivančanin, whose sentence was finally set at ten years. Serbian courts have convicted more than a dozen others. Neier, who spent much time in Bosnia during the wars and was involved in creating the tribunal, followed the Vukovar case closely to make sure the prosecution went ahead.
Today a memorial centre stands at Ovčara, and each November tens of thousands of people walk from the Vukovar hospital to the town's memorial cemetery to remember the victims.
Why it matters
Careful documentation of crimes like the Vukovar killings gave investigators and courts the evidence needed to hold perpetrators to account.
About Aryeh Neier
Child refugee from Nazi Berlin who led the ACLU, co-founded Human Rights Watch and for two decades ran George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
More about Aryeh Neier
- Aryeh Neier co-founded Human Rights WatchAryeh Neier, who fled Nazi Germany as a two-year-old in 1939, led the ACLU, co-founded Human Rights Watch in 1978 and headed the Open Society Foundations.
- Aryeh Neier helped build the machinery of accountabilityAryeh Neier was involved in creating both the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal and the International Criminal Court, and supported groups that pursue justice for victims.
- Aryeh Neier set up ACLU branches in Texas and OklahomaAryeh Neier's first ACLU job, in 1963, was strengthening its state branches; he organized new affiliates in Texas and Oklahoma, where the ACLU had none.
- Aryeh Neier grew the ACLU and defended the overlookedAs national director of the ACLU from 1970 to 1978, Aryeh Neier helped grow membership from 140,000 to 200,000 and led work on the rights of prisoners and psychiatric patients.
- Helsinki Watch began as a fight to free Soviet monitorsAryeh Neier co-founded Helsinki Watch in 1978 to press for the release of the Moscow Helsinki Group, whose members had been jailed for monitoring Soviet human rights promises.
- Aryeh Neier applied the laws of war to every sideUnder Aryeh Neier, Human Rights Watch began monitoring violations of the laws of armed conflict, holding governments and guerrillas alike to the Geneva Conventions.
- Aryeh Neier's NYCLU took up police and asylum abusesAs director of the New York Civil Liberties Union in the 1960s, Aryeh Neier pressed for civilian review of police and began defending people confined in mental institutions.
- Aryeh Neier's foundation backed Kofi Annan's Kenya peaceDuring Kofi Annan's mediation after Kenya's disputed 2007 election, the Open Society Foundations led by Aryeh Neier provided a monitoring staff to track the peace agreement.
Sources
- Biographical interview with Aryeh Neier Quellen zur Geschichte der Menschenrechte
- Aryeh Neier Wikipedia
- Vukovar massacre Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.