Madame Prosecutor
Confrontations with Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Carla Del Ponte won international recognition as Switzerland's attorney general when she pursued cases against the Sicilian mafia. In 1999, she answered the United Nations' call to become the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. In her new role, Del Ponte confronted genocide and crimes against humanity head-on, struggling to bring to justice the highest-ranking individuals responsible for massive acts of violence in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo.
These tribunals have been unprecedented. They operate along the edge of the divide between national sovereignty and international responsibility, in the gray zone between the judicial and the political, a largely unexplored realm for prosecutors and judges. It is a realm whose native inhabitants–political leaders and diplomats, soldiers and spies–assume that they can commit the big crime without being held culpable. It is a realm crisscrossed by what Del Ponte calls the muro di gomma –"the wall of rubber"– a metaphor referring to the tactics government officials use to hide their unwillingness to confront the culture of impunity that has allowed persons responsible for acts of unspeakable, wholesale violence to escape accountability. Madame Prosecutor is Del Ponte's courageous and startling memoir of her eight years spent striving to serve justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Del Ponte, protagonist of this dogged, hard-nosed memoir, was chief prosecutor for the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the biggest war crimes prosecution since WWII. Her investigations had her ousted from the Rwandan tribunal and insulted in Yugoslavia ("Carla is a whore," Belgrade billboards proclaimed), and she lacked police powers to compel cooperation or even respect. Her mission became a battle between moral dudgeon and realpolitik. She repeatedly importunes government officials, especially the Serbs, to arrest and deliver up influential citizens for prosecution as war criminals; when they respond with evasions and stonewalling, she importunes world leaders to use their clout to force compliance with the tribunal's warrants. She accomplished much, including the prosecution of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, but the memoir wears itself out detailing her interminable, fruitless efforts to apprehend Serbian fugitives Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Del Ponte sometimes comes off as chief scold; even Vatican officials incur tongue-lashings. Her implacable quest for justice is admirable and at times illuminating, but it makes for a repetitive and exhausting read.
