Former Iowa U.S. attorney probes Syrian mass murder
Stephen Rapp of Waterloo served as U.S. attorney in the 1990s, toured Syria in December.
WATERLOO — Stephen Rapp was the victim of a carjacking and abduction in Washington, D.C as a young college intern almost 55 years ago.
Rapp, then an intern for U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana, had a gun pointed to the back of his head and another jammed in his mouth while his three abductors went on a robbery spree. They then abandoned the vehicle and left Rapp locked in the trunk of his car until neighbors heard his cries for help.
That traumatic experience has never left him. But he also has used it as motivation to help other victims of such brutal acts, whether it was armed robberies in Iowa or atrocities around the world.
That includes his current work investigating government-sanctioned mass murder by the former government of Syria.
“This is the worst atrocity of this 21st century,” he said, standing at a mass gravesite in Syria in December. “It cries out, for one, for the truth, which is going to take a lot of work to establish, but then it cries out for justice.”
Rapp, 75, is a 1967 graduate Cedar Falls High School, who holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, where he graduated in 1971, and a law degree from Drake University. He spent eight years as U.S. attorney for the northern district of Iowa from 1993 to 2001, mostly during President Bill Clinton’s administration.
He spent most of the past quarter century investigating and prosecuting war crimes and government-sanctioned atrocities at the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands and other international tribunals, including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he led the prosecution of former Liberian President Charles Taylor on violations of international law.
Rapp was U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes from 2009 to 2015, during President Obama’s administration. He is currently a distinguished fellow at The Hague Institute for Global Justice and a Global Prevention Fellow at the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Center in Washington, D.C.
He’s successfully prosecuted everyone from Iowa leaders of the Sons of Silence motorcycle gang in the 1990s on racketeering and other charges, to media outlets in the African nation of Rwanda which incited the genocide and mass rape of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi tribal members.
Most recently, his travels took him to Syria, where he inspected mass graves of people murdered under the recently fallen regime of Bashar al Assad. Rapp believes Assad will be prosecuted for those crimes. A video he made of his findings, at a mass gravesite on behalf of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, can be seen here.
Rapp and his wife, University of Northern Iowa history professor emeritus Donna “Dolly” Maier, still have a home in Waterloo. He was back home for a few days over the holiday season, when he was interviewed for this column and for an oral history for the Grout Museum District.
Rapp’s work in the law was preceded by a run in politics. He served a couple of stints in the Iowa Legislature and ran unsuccessfully for Congress twice against now- U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley. The first time was in 1974, when they were vying to succeed retiring U.S. Rep. H.R. Gross. Rapp and Grassley each emerged their respective party’s nominee after hard-fought muti-candidate primaries on each side.
”He and I were quite on opposite sides of almost everything, but we got along fairly well,” Rapp said of Grassley. “Even in the primary there was one time we went out and campaigned in the same car, in fact. Extraordinary for times like these.” Grassley defeated Rapp in 1974 and again in 1976.
Rapp also served as Black Hawk County Democratic Party chairman and on the Iowa Democratic Party central committee while maintaining a Waterloo law practice — in which he was heavily involved on local civil rights matters.
He also worked in Washington for late U.S. Sen. John Culver and the Senate Judiciary Committee. He worked as a member of Culver’s staff on the Bankruptcy Reform Act, sections of which he would put into practice working with his own clients in the Waterloo area during the 1980s farm crisis.
“I was very interested in public life and public service,” Rapp said. “It was the generation that was inspired by John Kennedy — ‘ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ And that was inspirational to me.” He won speech contests as a youth and became more politically involved after President Kennedy’s assassination and carried that into college.
“Certainly, I saw if you weren’t successful in political life, you’d be able to serve the community in all sorts of different ways in the law,” Rapp said. “My career became much more involved in the law, and in ways the law can be used to protect people and vindicate human rights, not just in our home communities but around the world. My life has been defined much more by my legal work than the short political career I had, now more than 40 years ago.”
As a state lawmaker, he had pushed for a tougher drunk driving law and other measures promoting public safety, which served him well when he came up for appointment as U.S. attorney for the northern district of Iowa.
“I was ready for it as someone who believed the law should protect people from those selfish and brutal people who would take everything they have and take their lives,” Rapp said.
In that, he had firsthand experience from the 1970 carjacking. It happened on a hot summer Washington night when he had the car windows down, due to no air conditioning in the vehicle. He was accosted by three men, demanding money.
“I didn’t have a dollar in my wallet,” Rapp said He was in the middle of the front seat. “The guy behind me was pointing a gun at the back of my head. They guy beside me (on the passenger side) jammed a gun in my mouth and talked about the size of the hole he was going to blow in my brain.
“They stuffed me in the trunk and went on a robbery spree and left me after five hours on the road somewhere, with no way out of the trunk, at a time when Washington temperatures in late July get up to 100 degrees,” he said.
They left the car in Virginia, outside the District of Columbia. “I was fortunate I was on a part of the street where some folks on the fourth floor of a townhouse heard me and called the police,” Rapp said. Two of the three individuals, with his testimony, were successfully prosecuted. He was unable to positively identify the person behind him in the car.
“That whole experience made me very empathetic to crime victims,” Rapp said. “When I was U.S. attorney, I made a point of working with crime victims,” and pursued perpetrators of crimes in cooperation with community groups. He also tried to work with employers using undocumented workers to reform their practices and prosecuted them when necessary.
Rapp also successfully prosecuted the first conviction in the nation under a “three strikes and you’re out” law, which went into effect in September 1994. It required a life sentence for persons convicted in federal court of a third serious violent felony. The case stemmed from an unsuccessful armed robbery at the Logan Plaza Hy-Vee Food Store in Waterloo on Oct. 8, 1994. The person convicted of that crime had three prior serious violent felonies -- second-degree murder, armed robbery and conspiracy to commit murder.
Shortly after the change in administration following President George W. Bush’s election, in early 2001, Rapp was made aware of opportunities to work internationally in human rights. He resigned as U.S. attorney to be a prosecutor in the Rwandan genocide, with the blessing of family; his wife was a professor African studies at UNI and they had traveled to the continent before.
He’s been involved any number of cases of human rights violations and atrocities around the world.
”It’s very much a global effort,” he said, both in his role as U.S. war crimes ambassador through 2015 and his work as a senior fellow with the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
“I continue to be an ambassador at large, albeit without a government, and a board member of 12 different global organizations generally representing victims and survivors,” he said. He works on “the documentation of the crimes and the media advocacy that goes with it. That keeps me busy.”
He’s been involved in setting up the court involving the prosecution of the former dictator of Gambia, for example, and working on helping Liberian officials establish a war crimes court there for the prosecution of former president Charles Taylor for alleged crimes there, in addition to the ones in Sierra Leone. Rapp’s also been to Ukraine several times.
It was in the prosecution of crimes in Sierra Leone that he found an ally from his days in politics —- recently deceased former President Jimmy Carter, whom he supported and campaigned with in 1976 and 1980, and the former president’s Carter Center in Atlanta.
”His Carter Center was very active in Sierra Leone and Liberia in promoting democratic governance and human rights,” Rapp said. “Its officials cooperated in providing information about the situation during the civil wars in those countries that was relevant for the prosecutions that I led during 2007-2009 of those responsible for the atrocities including Liberian President Charles Taylor.”
”It’s the Syria one that’s now become the most exciting,’ Rapp said, “in the sense that we have horrendous crimes that have been committed. People, weeks after the overthrow, are still cheering in the streets” at the fall of the Assad regime. “On the other hand, there are the mass graves of people who have been tortured to death in the government’s dungeons.” The deaths are believed to be at least 600,000.
“The work continues,” worldwide, “and I can’t see it ending,” he said.
“There are really sad and difficult moments in the work. It’s certainly possible to be very depressed and very discouraged,” Rapp said. “On the other hand, we’ve seen situations where it’s possible to succeed — where powerful men who you thought would never be held to account are held to account. In part because of their crimes, because they’re pariahs, because they have (international) warrants against them, they lose power.
“We see that now with Assad, who ran a régime that, in our view, is responsible for the murder of 600,000 people, displacing half his population,” Rapp said. “It should soon be possible to charge him, and then, with the right sort of political pressures, maybe bring him to justice. So there is hope. We don’t give up on it.
“When you deal with mass graves, when you deal with relatives and survivors, you can be extremely sad. But I, frankly, out of that experience, draw a certain inspiration, pressure, to go on,” Rapp said. “When you level with victims, talk about what you’re going to do, you leave the meeting with them feeling better. And frankly, it gives me sort of an extra push of energy to take that grief and pain and channel it and push it forward toward justice.
“So I don’t become depressed,” Rapp said. “I just add it to the list of things I need to work on, continue to use whatever experience or talent God had given me to push for justice and find a way forward. When you are able to succeed, it’s all worthwhile. Never brings back the victims, certainly, never relieves all the pain people experience. But it at least shows there’s a system of law that can be applied even in the darkest places and eventually turn the tables. Instead of people being on the bottom, totally hopeless, put them on the top. That gives me enormous motivation to proceed.
“As long as I see myself adding to this effort, I don’t see myself retiring from this cause,” Rapp said.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. They are listed below. Clink on the links to check them out, subscribe for free - and, if you believe in the value of quality journalism, support this column and/or any of theirs with a paid subscription.
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Outstanding journalism about an outstanding man.
great to know what Steve Rapp is up to, Pat. Thanks for this great piece.