Tell It to the World: International Justice and the Secret Campaign to Hide Mass Murder in Kosovo

Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction ― Finalist

On April 5, 1999, local police in Serbia found a truck floating half-submerged in the Danube River. When they pulled it to shore and opened the cargo hold, they found it filled with human bodies. Following orders, they hid the truck and its contents. Two weeks later, on the other side of Serbia, another truck containing bodies surfaced. Once again, it was made to disappear.

The full picture would only emerge years later, when the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia investigated and then prosecuted the chief architects of the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. These cases, which formally came to a close in 2014, exposed a secret campaign to hide these terrible crimes by transporting and concealing the bodies of the dead.

In Tell It to the World, Eliott Behar, a former war crimes prosecutor, tells the true story of what unfolded through the words and experiences of the eyewitnesses, victims, and perpetrators who testified in The Hague. With an incisive look at the nature and operation of international criminal justice, Behar examines the causes and consequences of mass violence, identifying a powerful and disturbing connection between the justice we seek and the injustices we commit.