Elizabeth Neuffer

Career

Elizabeth Neuffer started out at The Boston Globe's Washington bureau, covering Capitol Hill and the Clinton administration's push for health care reform. She later reported from Moscow as the Soviet Union was breaking apart, and from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq during the Gulf War. From 1994 to 1998, she served as the paper's European Bureau Chief based in Berlin, covering the war in Bosnia and its aftermath—including the 1994 marketplace massacre in Sarajevo, the fall of the UN safe haven of Srebrenica, the deployment of American troops, and postwar elections.

Her reporting also spanned the rise of the far-right in France, economic troubles in Romania, civil unrest in Albania, violence in Kosovo, and the 1996 return of Hutu refugees from Zaire to Rwanda. She was the first journalist to report that indicted war criminals still held power in postwar Bosnia, and she spent close to a year focusing exclusively on war crimes in Bosnia and Rwanda. That work won her the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Award for Excellence in International Journalism and an Edward R. Murrow Fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 1998, she received a Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation. She wrote the book The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda, which was published in 2001.

Death and legacy

Neuffer died in a car crash on May 9, 2003, as she headed back to Baghdad after an overnight reporting trip to Tikrit covering the war's aftermath. Two years later, the International Women's Media Foundation, working with her family and friends, created the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship. The program continues her focus on human rights and social justice. Each fellow takes classes and does research at MIT's Center for International Studies, plus journalism internships at The Boston Globe and The New York Times.