Former Denver prosecutor Ken Scott’s new mission is confronting ethnic cleansing in South Sudan

Ken Scott pursues South Sudanese mass rapists and killers the same way he once prosecuted drug traffickers in Denver and war criminals in Bosnia: by first meeting victims and their families.

“You’ve got to hear their stories. You always have to see the crime scene. There is nothing like being there,” Scott said during a recent interview at his Capitol Hill home.

In a legal career spanning four decades, Scott prosecuted crooks including Ponzi schemers in Denver U.S. District Court and Bosnian genocide perpetrators at the Yugoslavia Tribunal at The Hague in the Netherlands. He is now a member of a three-person commission that made recommendations Dec. 14 to the United Nations to confront ethnic cleansing in South Sudan.

Scott, 63, says his past prepared him for the battle many people compare to the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, Hutu tribal members slaughtered about a million Tutsis. But Scott said he is frustrated with recent U.N. decisions that further endanger 3.7 million Sudanese refugees. Scott told his story to confront increasing global complacency about genocide.

“In many ways I’m a classic product of the ’60s,” Scott said. He has always found meaning in public causes such as protecting the environment, welfare reform and discrimination, issues that came to the forefront in the 1960s, he said.

Candy Scott, a retired school teacher who taught disabled children, said her husband often works around the clock. Even his vacations are packed with challenging outdoor quests, she said.

Often accompanied by his two adult sons, Ken Scott has scaled Mont Blanc, Western Europe’s highest peak, climbed 19 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks and rafted 225 miles through the Grand Canyon. But his life’s calling is serving everyone from the underprivileged in Denver to torture victims in Juba, the capital of South Sudan.

While Scott was earning a degree at Harvard Law School in in the 1970s, he voluntarily filed lawsuits on behalf of needy people who couldn’t afford an attorney, including a disabled man who repeatedly had been rejected for social security benefits.

As an assistant U.S. attorney in Denver from 1985 to 1998, Scott went after white collar criminals. One of the victims was an elderly woman, who told Scott that after retirement she was forced to get a job.

From 1998 to 2011, Scott prosecuted war criminals at The Hague, eventually winning convictions against 13 high-profile political leaders and generals at the Yugoslavia tribunal.

He first reached out to the victims, staying in homes that had been shelled during the war. Scott and his wife visited the office of an elderly engineer in Mostar, Yugoslavia. The man had lost the use of his legs because of war injuries and witnessed torture and rapes in barbed-wire detention camps.

But what troubled the engineer was how Bosnian politicians had targeted symbols of Muslim culture in their goal to carve out the western third of Bosnia for themselves, Scott said. The engineer spoke of a large arching bridge built by Muslims 800 years ago over the Neretva River . It had been bombed and destroyed during the war.

Scott had the engineer in mind as he led a large staff  while prosecuting six men who conscripted hoodlums to do their dirty work, including burning people alive, he said.

“They loosed the dogs of war,” Scott said.

A Herzegovina newspaper quoted Scott’s Feb. 18, 2011, closing argument in the case: “Mankind has a problem: After every round of horrible massive violence, we say, ‘Never again. We cannot forget this. We will not forget this.’ But we do. We do. We do forget. Never again, until the next time, and the next time. The Holocaust, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Darfur …This is your best chance to say, never again, and really mean it … We couldn’t stop, we didn’t stop the last one, but we can hold these men accountable.”

Since his work at The Hague, Scott has become a highly sought authority in prosecuting international war crimes. He has trained Syrian, Kurdish, Croatian, Middle Eastern judges and prosecutors about complicated and restricting guidelines of international humanitarian law. Scott prosecuted pirates targeting shipping vessels and defendants linked to the February 2005 bombing assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Baha El Deen Al Hariri and 21 others.

Before he and fellow South Sudan commissioners offered recommendations to the U.N. last year, Scott repeatedly went to the nation and met victims in refugee camps. A civil war between Dinka and Nuer tribes broke out in December 2013, Scott said. One woman described how her house was burned to the ground and her husband taken away, never to be seen again. Some estimates place the number of murdered Nuer tribal members at about 50,000, he said.

“But no one really knows,” he said.

There are no judges or functioning courts to bring charges of murder in many areas of the country, Scott added. After soldiers raided a town near Juba, a tribal chief ordered the payment of a single goat as punishment, Scott said. Women who were gang raped and gave birth to the children of their attackers have been rejected by their husbands and shunned by their communities, Scott said. One woman said she was unable to love her child because he resembled his rapist. Children as young as 2 years old have been raped.

A survey by the U.N. found that 70 percent of women in refugee camps have been raped, mostly by police and soldiers. The soldiers say they take their pay by looting homes and raping women and men, Scott said.

One male journalist sobbed as he told Scott about the soldiers who gang raped him to intimidate him from writing about the country’s calamities, Scott said. He said social problems are rife in South Sudan, which has an 837 percent inflation rate. About 3.7 million citizens face starvation after soldiers torched crops and livestock. Children contract cholera at filthy camps, Scott said.

“More than a third of the nation has been displaced,” Scott said.

In December, Scott and fellow U.N. commissioners recommended an aggressive action plan. They argued that an additional 4,000 international peacekeepers were needed in rural areas where ethnic cleansing goes unchecked. They asked that independent courts be set up to bring soldiers to justice. But Scott said China and Russian delegates to the U.N. vetoed their proposal and the U.N. passed watered-down measures.

Scott said he believes people across the world have become desensitized about atrocities in South Sudan, where corpses litter main roads. Refugees ask him why the U.S. hasn’t responded.

“I hope to continue to shine a light on this,” said Scott, who is in Ethiopia meeting with Sudanese refugees.

At a time of global criticism of refugees, Scott said he has a different perspective.

“I’ve been amazed from my time in South Sudan with the number of Sudanese people who came to the U.S. over the past 20 or 30 years, even obtained U.S. citizenship and have, with eyes open, gone back to South Sudan in the past several years because they really want to make a difference there,” he said.