Remembering Elizabeth Neuffer

Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen offers a heartfelt tribute to the late Elizabeth Neuffer today. Neuffer and her Iraqi translator, Waleed Khalifa Hassan Al-Dulaimi, were killed in a car accident in Baghdad in 2003.

Cullen notes the occasion of accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic’s arrest to remind us that Neuffer made her deepest, boldest mark as a foreign correspondent when she covered the genocide in the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s.

The International Women’s Media Foundation, which offers a fellowship in Neuffer’s memory, puts it this way:

Her coverage of the Balkan wars of the 1990’s was vivid and intense. And when a tentative peace finally came to Bosnia, she risked her life to track down those responsible for genocide as they returned to civilian life. Her dispatches, sent to members of Congress by human rights groups, helped persuade the U.S. government to make the arrest and prosecution of war criminals a top priority.

The Globe could pay tribute to Neuffer’s memory by restoring her coverage of the Balkans to its Web site. The paper does have a nice page here, gathering her Iraqi coverage. But with the Yugoslav tragedy in the news again, it’s time to dig into the archives.