Elizabeth Neuffer (June 15, 1956 – May 9, 2003) was an American
journalist who specialized in covering
war crimes, human rights abuses, and post-conflict societies. She died at the age of 46 in a car accident while covering the
Iraq War.
She served as the European Bureau Chief from 1994 to 1998 in
Berlin. During that time, she covered both the
war in Bosnia and its subsequent peace, including the 1994
Sarajevo marketplace massacre, the fall of the UN “safe haven”
Srebrenica, the arrival of American troops, and elections in postwar Bosnia. In addition to general coverage of the European continent – from the rise of the
far-right in France to economic turmoil in
Romania – she reported on civil unrest in
Albania, violence in
Kosovo, and was dispatched to
Africa to report on the 1996
return of Hutu refugees from
Zaire to their native
Rwanda.
The first reporter to reveal that indicted war criminals remained in power in post-war Bosnia, Neuffer dedicated almost a year to exclusively reporting about war crimes in Bosnia and Rwanda. That reporting earned her several awards, including the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Award for Excellence in International Journalism. She was also awarded the Edward R. Murrow Fellowship at the
Council on Foreign Relations in
New York City, where she worked on a project about war crimes while on leave from The Boston Globe.
In 1998 Neuffer won a Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation (
IWMF).[1]
She was the author of The Key to My Neighbor’s House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda, published by
Picador in 2001.[2]
Death
On May 9, 2003, she was killed in a car accident while returning to
Baghdad from an overnight trip to
Tikrit where she covered the aftermath of the war.[3][4][5]