She received a message ordering her to immediately return to her position as ambassador to Argentina, and banning her presence at the launch of her new book, "The Hunt: Me and War Criminals," which was scheduled for early April in Milan. "Any public presentation of this work is incompatible with the author's status of a Swiss ambassador...Carla Del Ponte's book...contains statements, which are unacceptable for a representative of the government of Switzerland," department spokesman Jean-Philippe Jeannerat said in a special statement to the press on April 8.
Any other diplomat would have been knocked out for a long time by this public reprimand, but not the Swiss Iron Lady. She calmly left Italy, and is supposed to have arrived in Argentina by now. Indeed, how does this pinprick compare with numerous awful nicknames that Del Ponte is bizarrely proud of? They were coined by all those she punished as a former Swiss Attorney General, and head of the ICTY (from 1999 to 2007). In her latter position, she was dubbed "New Gestapo," Italian Cosa Nostra called her "La Puttana," and Swiss bankers gave her the name of "Unguided Missile."
But Del Ponte does not find these labels insulting because they only show how good she is at her job. Her former Italian colleague Giovanni Falcone called her the "incarnation of stubbornness," but she was unabashed. She has a strange attitude toward these assessments, but it is enough to see her in flesh and blood once, and many questions will disappear.
Ponte's 416-page book about her work as the head of the ICTY was published in Italian by the Milan-based Fertinelli publishers, and has already been translated into English and French. For 20 euros, one can get an insight into the prosecutor's inner world. In general, her book is dry and would have been even drier if she had not had a co-author - New York Times reporter Chuck Sudetic.
In principle, Del Ponte has not revealed any secrets. Serbian refugees reported that Kosovo Albanians cut the organs out of live Serbs, and shipped them to the West as donor organs for transplantations. But Serbs were not supposed to be trusted in the 1990s. The prosecutor's voice sounds more convincing, but suggests the following question - why didn't she do anything in order to find the culprits and punish them?
Del Ponte claims that she could do nothing because it was next to impossible to collect evidence in Kosovo, which was swarming with criminals. Witnesses were intimidated, and even judges in The Hague were afraid of the Kosovo Albanians. She writes in her book that some of the tribunal's judges were afraid that Albanians would come deal with them.
Yelena Guskova, a leading expert on the Balkans and head of the Balkans Crisis Center at the Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, is not the only one to find the tribunal a rather strange formation. She took part in its work during the trial of Serbian Gen. Stanislav Galic in 2003. This is what she said on the topic, "The tribunal was set up to justify NATO actions in Yugoslavia. Aggression was outlawed, but law was tantamount to punishing the 'guilty side,' which had been determined in advance. The tribunal's high-ranking members did not understand the gist of the process, but were juggling with the facts to accuse one of the sides. I had the impression that they were not competent enough. Some judges heard about the Balkans for the first time in The Hague. The tribunal's verdict, at least for the Serbs, was predetermined - all would be found guilty."
It is hardly surprising that Del Ponte was chosen to deal with Yugoslavia in order to kill the Serbian reputation. There was no room for the "Unguided Missile" in Switzerland by the late 1990s. This is only natural considering that this tiny woman has enormous ambitions. She has always been aggressive in reaching her goals, and has brought the execution of law to the point of absurdity - even her colleagues wondered how she could eliminate even the smallest margin for common sense and justice between law and reality.
Her career is filled with major cases, many of them political and bearing on scandals. Evil tongues say that Del Ponte could not conceal her delight in taking them over because they would give her a name. Some even insist that she was commissioned (Serbs had to be demonized), or passed biased verdicts (she does not conceal her dislike of Serbia and Russia), and that she was not the first fiddle in really serious cases.
Del Ponte inquired into the Mabetex case in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin and his two daughters were accused of accepting payments for their personal expenses from that company - supposedly, more than one million dollars was spent on this.
She also froze Swiss accounts of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. These cases would probably reveal interesting details if reviewed, but nobody wants to investigate them now.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
