Exonian Profiles
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Kathy Ward’s work as a war crimes lawyer has taken her all over the world, to countries plagued by civil wars—and by wars against their own civilians. But for the past year, she has had a stateside address, at least figuratively speaking: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Ward is one of 15 White House Fellows, a select group of Americans—attorneys, educators, physicians, military officers and public advocates—who have, according to fellowship criteria, demonstrated both “remarkable achievement early in their careers [and] a proven commitment to public service.” Each fellow works as a special assistant to a cabinet member or senior presidential adviser. “Basically, we’ve spent the year shadowing [this official], watching, at a very high level, how decisions are made and how government works,” says Ward, who was assigned first to U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and then, following the presidential election, to Secretary of State Colin Powell, himself a former White House Fellow. The access, and the responsibilities, are real: assigned to handle the AIDS portfolio for the State Department’s policy planning office, Ward accompanied the secretary of state on his May trip to Africa, where Powell made AIDS topic A in each country he visited. This was far from Ward’s first exposure to Africa; in fact, much of her work as a war crimes lawyer with the Coalition for International Justice (CIJ) has been with Rwanda, where she worked with the government to bring an alleged hate-radio leader to trial. She has also worked on war crimes accountability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sierra Leone. In the former Yugoslavia, she served as the CIJ’s liaison to the war crimes tribunal; in Croatia, she worked as a caseworker with Bosnian refugees and as country director for the International Rescue Committee. It was in the summer of 1989, while working in Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand, that Ward—then a student at the University of Chicago Law School—first became interested in the deliberate targeting of civilians during wartime. Civilian casualties were relatively low during conflicts like World War I, notes Ward, when most of the fighting consisted of trench warfare. “But if you look at war today, it’s a very different situation,” she says. “There’s been a proliferation of civil wars, many of which drag on for 20 or 30 years. Neither side is strong enough to take on the opposition directly, so this back-door form of war has become much more prevalent.” Holding war criminals accountable—be they government leaders who promote genocide or private citizens who commit atrocities against their neighbors—has been the theme of much of Ward’s work. So has preventing the conditions that lead to war crimes in the first place. In fact, she says, the two go hand in hand. “After bad things happen, being able to turn to the courts, instead of revenge killings, helps break the cycle of violence,” she says. “And when an individual person is put on trial, that individual, rather than an entire ethnic group, can be held responsible.” If Ward’s experiences have brought her face to face with the worst in human nature, they have also offered her frequent glimpses of heroism, and hope. “You meet the most amazing people all the time,” she says, “people who’ve endured so much, and done so with grace.” —Beth Brosnan |
