Second paragraph of third chapter:

I was gratified to learn that so many African states, including some of the world’s poorest countries, in terms of material wealth but certainly not in terms of human pride and determination, had cooperated with the Rwanda tribunal, arresting and transferring to its custody leaders of the genocide. According to an American nongovernmental organization, the Coalition for International Justice, by the end of 2000, Benin had transferred two accused, Burkina Faso one, Cameroon nine, Ivory Coast two, Mali one, Namibia one, South Africa one, Togo two, Tanzania two, and Zambia three. Kenya had transferred thirteen of the accused; in one arrest operation engineered by Louise Arbour, the Kenyan authorities apprehended seven indicted Rwandan leaders on a single day and subsequently transferred them to the tribunal; the Kenyans knew, however, that they could have arrested and transferred several more; one of the fugitives in Nairobi was Félicien Kabuga, a wealthy businessman who allegedly helped nance Hutu militias and plan the genocide. In contrast, at the close of 2000, NATO, the most powerful military force the world has ever known, had been patrolling Bosnia for five years, and, within its borders, eighteen of the Yugoslavia tribunal’s accused war criminals, including Radovan Karadžić, were still roaming free. As I made my rounds of world capitals seeking assistance to secure the arrest of the Yugoslavia tribunal’s fugitives, I recalled the African states’ cooperation. I brought it up during private meetings with Western leaders. At the time it seemed that, thanks to these African countries, the Rwanda tribunal, much more than the Yugoslavia tribunal, stood to rival Nuremberg in its success at bringing surviving members of the top leadership to the dock.

A memoir by the Chief Prosecutor of the war crimes tribunals for both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, taking the story up to the end of her Yugoslavia work in 2008. It’s quite a personal story, as she takes us through her childhood in Switzerland and her legal career, and admits her fondness for expensive handbags (though these are also a practical tool of the trade). But the nuts and bolts of it are the difficulty of operating the prosecution side of the first big international criminal court since Nuremberg, and the difficulties that del Ponte experienced from all sides.

By her own account, del Ponte must have been a difficult person to work with, though also by her own account and from what I know myself, she was given very difficult working conditions – the promised political and financial support from the Western democracies who had pushed for the war crimes tribunals in the first place turned out to be very inconstant, staffing of the tribunals varied in quality, and co-operation with the post-conflict authorities on the ground began badly and did not always improve. She was the subject of vicious personal abuse in the media of the countries concerned, and although she claims to have a thick skin, it’s difficult to be completely unmoved by that kind of thing.

It is a bit frustrating that the Rwanda narrative ends in 2003 and the ex-Yugoslavia narrative in 2008 when she went to Argentina as the ambassador of Switzerland; it means that while the individual trees of prosecutorial processes are examined at great length, she doesn’t write as much about the forest of international justice and accountability, which would have been interesting.

I myself was engaged with a lot of the policy debates regarding the former Yugoslavia during the noughties, and there are several conversations in the book that I recognise, not because I was present myself, but because I heard about them shortly afterward from people who were. I don’t believe I ever met del Ponte in person, though I became friendly with several of her close colleagues. My then employers, the International Crisis Group, get a couple of mentions, mostly positive; our line then was unqualified support for the war crimes tribunals.

I’m no longer quite as sure. While there were some very important successes, del Ponte herself is upfront about some of the failures: the Rwanda process became victors’ justice, as nobody from President Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front was prosecuted; Slobodan Milošević, conducting his own defence, distracted the court from establishing the facts with his theatrics, and cheated the verdict by refusing to take the medication which would have saved his life.

I would add that the Kosovo prosecutions by the court did not seem as well founded as the others, and more generally del Ponte’s statements about Kosovo sometimes seem to me the wrong side of speculation rather than factual reporting. In fact Kosovo complied much more swiftly with the demands of the tribunal than did any of the other governments involved, but got and gets little credit for that. Former prime minister Ramush Haradinaj has now been acquitted twice, which also surely counts for something. (And never mind the current Thaçi trial, which is under a different structure.)

I also found a couple of puzzling errors. George Robertson, the NATO Secretary-General, is consistently referred to as Lord John Robinson. And when I checked out a reference to one of the Crisis Group reports that I had edited, I found that our report simply referred back to one of the prosecution documents, in other words by citing us, del Ponte was effectively citing herself. Perhaps this just reflects some haste in getting the draft off her desk as she prepared for her next assignment, in Argentina.

In a sense, those were more innocent days, when it was credible to state that those responsible for atrocities during the course of an armed conflict should, could and would be held accountable by the international community. I’ve seen a couple of interesting recent pieces on this. In The Economist, Rosie Blau looks at the difference between today and Nuremberg. On his own blog, my friend and former colleague Andrew Stroehlein looks at the implications for future conflict resolution. He admits that “international justice can seem like a faith-based community. We believe in it, but proof of its existence is rare, and almost miraculous when it happens.” You have to look for that proof pretty carefully these days, especially with the rule of law itself being so visibly demolished in and by the USA.

You can get Madam Prosecutor here.

This was the top unread book in my pile of books about Kosovo acquired in 2022. Next up there is Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo Daalder.