Geyer: Remembering quiet crusader Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni

During and after the Iraq War, there seemed to be endless questioning about America's moral place in the world. One topic was the use of "enhanced interrogation," as they gingerly called torture in the picky corridors of State.

"OK, so you don't believe in torture" the interlocutor would begin. "Then what would you do if this one man could blow up your country and only torture would stop him?"

Mostly, we responded with silence and anger at such questions. For they were meant to be unanswerable.

But one night, during a long and philosophical talk, my brilliant legal friend, Dr. M. Cherif Bassiouni, had the principled - and practical - response at the tip of his tongue. "I would do what had to be done to save my nation," he told me, "and the next morning I would present myself at the courthouse and give myself up."

Most Americans do not know his work, or even his name, but Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian American born 79 years ago into a family of high-level diplomats in Cairo, has done extraordinary work in the unusual calling of extending national law into international law, calling dictators and mass murderers to task.

Call him an international jurist. Or, more precisely, name him as founder of the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University in Chicago. Never forget that he was the man who was crucial in discovering 151 mass graves in Bosnia in the 1990s or that, through his own soft-spoken cunning, he was able to free 734 dying prisoners in Libya.

Why did he do it? That is a different question.

"Why," he wrote in his memoir, only half-finished before he died in Chicago on Sept. 25, "would anybody drive five hours from a mass grave exhumation, carrying the terrible stench that comes from exhuming decomposed bodies, then get on a plane, change planes, run from one terminal to the other, to meet with the secretary-general of the United Nations? Suddenly, I started laughing, and said to myself, 'It's got to be your ego.'"

But in another part of the memoir, "ego," I think rightly, segues into "mission." He wrote: "I've had a sense of mission since I was 5 years old. ... It's just as if my soul came into this body to do that, and I'm sure there are many people who have this sense of mission."

I met Cherif in my hometown of Chicago, where today there's a street named in his honor, in the early '60s. He was always doing so many things - teaching full-time, writing a dozen books on the law (and a recent excellent one on Egypt), and starting an international law institute in Siracusa, Sicily, for starters - that it was hard for me to see where the overall mission (that word, again!) lay.

But now it all seems clear. To greatly oversimplify, the overarching purpose in all of his work was establishing an international court to try the world's war criminals. Bosnia fed his passion, as the Serbs brutally massacred the Bosnian Muslims without mercy. Remember Srebrenica? Cherif was one of those who found the bodies, and was horrified, most of all, by the Serbs' use of rape as a method of warfare.

Then he moved, a little faster and always with utter determination.

First came the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, established in 1993, but only for the Serb wars. "I was not interested in going after the little soldier who commits the individual crime," Bassiouni said in an interview in 1999, showing his basic philosophy. "I was after building a case against the leaders who make the decisions."

The next genocide of our times - the Rwandan, in which 900,000 were massacred in a matter of days - led to the imperfect but real International Criminal Court, now based in The Hague, endorsed by 120 nations (but still not the U.S.) and responsible for the apprehension, trials and convictions of some of the major war criminals of our time, including Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

It is only the second such tribunal in history, the first being the American Nuremberg war crime trials following World War II. In fact, at one point, Benjamin Ferencz, who is 98 and the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, once bestowed upon Cherif a medal belonging to the Romanian ambassador to the League of Nations, who in the 1930s called for an international court for criminal cases.

Ferencz said then, "Let the one who has done the most for international law have this medal."

Cherif remained modest until the day he died about his "sense of mission." As he said once, "I can place my little grain of sand and add to that very thin veneer of civilization. I'm a very firm believer in the incremental approach; things change because individuals move their little grain of sand."

Yet, I had a moment of immodest joy for my friend, even though I had just received news of his death. That moment came when I saw his obituary in The Washington Post. It was half a page! More important was the Post's headline: "He was called 'the father of international criminal law.'"

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at <URL destination="gigi_geyer@juno.com">gigi_geyer@juno.com.

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