Historians save the world...one human rights violator at a time

Time magazine has interesting background on some of the people who work for the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit in Meet the Historians Who Track Down War Criminals for the U.S. Government. This group works with the FBI and the Justice Department to track down human rights perpetrators living in the US so that they can be prosecuted and deported for immigration violations. They just finished contributing to the recent case against El Salvador's former general Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova.

Historians have the background in the culture, language and politics of particular regions of the world; they know where to look for the sources that might prove who was responsible for particular crimes. This kind of research relies on personal testimony, written records, photographs — and today, social media.

An important part of their work is creating the narrative, the story that the U.S. Attorney can present in court. This means putting together the threads that link pieces of evidence, building a full picture of a person’s role in human rights abuses. A particular challenge is state-sponsored abuses, where historians must contend with (in some cases) decades of cover-ups and silencing.

For perpetrators from some countries, the U.S. immigration trial will be the only trial they face. That decision, in a U.S. court, may be the only legal acknowledgment their victims ever receive. The ICE team knows this, and they want to make very case count. “Our historians are absolutely critical to getting these cases moving forward,” Shaffer told me.

It's great that the unit has three historians who are looking into human rights violators from Africa, the Balkans, and Latin America who might have relocated to the US. On the one hand, I see the skills that they possess as those that make a liberal arts education at the undergraduate level so valuable. Perhaps there's nothing special about history however.

At the graduate level, historians seem to have the skills that are needed. Anthropologists probably certainly do as well. Political Science? I don't know. When I was finishing graduate school ten years ago, I can't say that there would have been many people capable of carrying out the tasks required of people in the ICE unit. However, I'd like to think that has since changed. My general impression is that the discipline values scholars with a strong understanding of research methods (both qualitative and quantitative) and theory and in-depth knowledge of content and language more so than it did when I was in school. Maybe not as much as it should but still more than it used to in the recent past.

Over the last four years, the war crimes unit has "issued more than 67,000 lookouts for people from more than 111 countries and stopped 140 human rights violators or war-crime suspects from entering the United States." They have also helped to deport 650 known or suspected human rights violators since 2003.