"With clarity and precision, Eliott Behar peels back the layers of deceit, cover-up, and atrocity that surround the ethnic cleansing of predominantly Muslim Albanians perpetrated by Serbia in the province of Kosovo. Tell It to the World reads partly like a mystery novel and partly like a courtroom drama, while still providing a plea from the heart to reconsider how ideas of “justice” and “injustice” have been used to enflame hatreds and political violence from the former Yugoslavia to Rwanda. A powerful and important book."
Jury Citation, Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Prize, 2015
"Tell It to the World is a haunting and poignant and remarkable book. To read it is to gain some greater understanding of humanity."
Blacklocks Reporter
"A profound meditation on the implications of justice."
Winnipeg Free Press
"...to paraphrase Life magazine’s rationale for publishing Robert Capa’s graphic 1930s Spanish Civil War photographs, the dead need to be spoken about so that they did not die in vain."
Quill & Quire
On April 5, 1999, Serbian police found a truck half-submerged in the Danube River. When they looked inside, 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 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 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 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.