Love her or hate her - there seems to be no middle way - the world has suddenly become a colder place with the unseasonable retirement of Carla del Ponte, the diminutive Swiss prosecutor who works under the surprising legal ethic of "guilty until proved innocent". At the end of the year, her reign as chief prosecutor at The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) comes to an end, and no doubt a group of Balkan war criminals will be breathing sighs of relief in whatever hidey-hole they happen to be inhabiting.
Her time at ICTY has been quite a rollercoaster. There have been successes: 91 war crimes suspects found themselves facing the music and 63 were served with indictments. Those are impressive figures, more so given the lack of backing she received from the Serb authorities, but, even so, two of the biggest criminals remain at large. Between them, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic face 16 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and violation of the laws of war, all committed in Bosnia-Herzogovina in the 1990s. But in spite of being indicted by ICTY, their whereabouts remain a mystery.
So, Carla del Ponte leaves office with the uncomfortable thought that for all her successes the really big beasts remain on the run. Small wonder that she feels unfulfilled and laments that international justice has been diminished by the failure to bring the two fugitives to book. There's also the not-so-little matter of Slobodan Milosevic, who avoided his just desserts by fortuitously dying in his prison cell in 2006 during the course of a trial that had become a legal marathon.
More than anything else, that rankles. Del Ponte likened his passing to the way Herman Goering cheated the gallows in 1945 by cracking open a cyanide capsule. She was said to be "furious" about Milosevic's death, and in low moments would blame herself for not speeding up the proceedings and allowing her adversary to turn it into a show trial. She had a point. Four years was far too long for any hearing and there were blunders in preparing the citations, but from the outset she was stymied by the West's dithering over the implementation of the Dayton Accords, which started the whole process in 1995.
Inevitably, del Ponte will go to her grave with the Serb leader's name engraved on her heart, but that setback should not cloud the many achievements that are the lasting monuments to her career. By any account she is an astonishing woman, one of the great figures of our age, and her tiny stature belies a massive heart. She came to the fore two decades ago when she found herself embroiled in the "pizza connection", which linked Sicilian Mafia barons to the secretive world of Swiss banking. Together with the equally stout-hearted Italian judge Giovanni Falcone, they uncovered a shady world of money-laundering, extortion and international financial crime. For years, the Swiss banking world had resisted interference in its shadowy modus operandi, arguing that any investigation would be bad for business and would ruin its reputation for integrity.
This was like saying that the Inquisition tortured heretics for their own good and del Ponte was having none of it. During the course of her investigation she gathered a number of important scalps such as Boris Yeltsin, Benazir Bhutto and Raul Salinas, brother of the disgraced Mexican leader Carlos Salinas, all of whom were involved in illegal money trafficking. For his pains, Falcone was blown up in a car bomb and del Ponte was given the kind of personal protection that made Alcatraz look like a holiday camp. It also earned her the Mafia nickname of La Puttana - "the whore" - but, being the kind of woman she is, del Ponte accepted it as a badge of honour. (It would not be the last time that name-calling was used to intimidate her: Milosevic said that she was "the new Gestapo".) As a result of her investigations, the Swiss banks were forced to clean up their act and, while that was done with bad grace, it cemented del Ponte's reputation.
When she received the call from ICTY the relief in Berne was palpable and she was soon hard at it. She showed neither fear nor favour to anyone, at one point warning Nato that she might investigate its commanders for war crimes as a result of the bombing campaign in 2000. That's what makes her demise so disappointing: not many people on the international stage are so willing to speak their minds.
You might ask, what is this bonny fighter going to do next? On the first day of 2008 she becomes Swiss ambassador to Argentina, hardly the most fitting outcome for someone who has done so much to put so many bad guys behind bars.
