Carla Del Ponte - the victims' avenging angel

By RUPERT CORNWELL

Nemesis must have taken many forms in the dark and tortured mind of Slobodan Milosevic, during the long decade of disaster he inflicted upon his country.

A Nato bomb, perhaps, striking one of his secret hideaways during the Kosovo war.

Or maybe an assassin's bullet, fired by an aggrieved nationalist or a hitman sent by a Belgrade underworld faction to settle a financial score with the corrupt Milosevic family.

Finally, as his power was being swept away on the streets of Belgrade last year, he must have had visions of his own Serbian people taking a belated physical vengeance on the leader who had held them in such ruinous thrall.

But never, until the endgame approached, could he have imagined that the avenging angel would be a woman, an international civil servant. And one from Switzerland, even - a country famously fond of the quiet life and known for turning a blind eye to unpleasant events.

Has there ever been a person who so defies the stereotype of her nation as Carla Del Ponte?

This chain-smoking, firebrand lawyer and defender of the oppressed is as small in stature as she is relentless in the pursuit of justice.

Since September 1999 she has been chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

With the consignment of Milosevic to The Hague court, these are heady days for the notion of international justice. Never before has a former head of government been arrested and arraigned for alleged crimes committed in office.

For this, much of the credit belongs to Del Ponte. True, it was the prospect of desperately needed financial aid that ultimately forced Belgrade to hand over its most infamous resident. But Del Ponte helped to create the moral climate in which the unthinkable became first possible, and then real.

From the moment she was selected for the job by the UN Security Council, Del Ponte insisted Milosevic would not escape justice. Few believed her - but they did not know her. For the hallmark of her career is an unswerving, undeflectable, all-consuming determination to achieve what she sets out to do.

Piergiorgio Mordasini, cantonal prosecutor in Italian-speaking Lugano where Del Ponte was born in 1947, and later her colleague there, put it this way: "When she has a goal she just charges straight ahead like a battle tank, and to hell with the obstacles."

She dresses elegantly, with a taste for smart accessories such as Christian Dior pens and diaries. But this is a woman devoured not by fashion but by her calling.

After studying law in Bern, Geneva and Britain, Del Ponte took a master's degree in law and joined a private law practice in Lugano.

In 1981 came the change which mattered, when she left private law to become servant of the state. First as an investigating magistrate, then as public prosecutor she delved into some of Europe's dirtiest business.

Combining Swiss banking secrecy, close proximity to Italy, and an agreeable Italianate micro-climate, Lugano was a safe haven for Mafia money and dubious Italian financiers.

Del Ponte rapidly made a name as a hard-charging prosecutor, adroit at using press leaks to help her cause. Money laundering and its upstream industries of drug trafficking, racketeering and fraud became her stock in trade.

She worked on the celebrated "pizza connection" case, and in 1988 narrowly escaped assassination when she was working in Sicily with the courageous anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone.

Four years later, a car bomb killed Falcone, and two years after that Del Ponte was appointed Switzerland's federal attorney general, moving from Lugano to what would become known as the "Bern Bunker".

Every time she stepped from her armour-plated Mercedes, her diminutive figure was surrounded by bodyguards. Even when she saw her mother, she did not breathe word of where she had come from or where she was going. There were at least two explicit Mafia death threats.

But the Mafia money launderers and the secretive Swiss financial establishment were about to get the full Del Ponte treatment.

Barely eight months into the job, she appalled the banking fraternity by sending letters to a clutch of venerable institutions informing them that about 60 of their customers were suspected of being involved in drug trafficking and money laundering.

At the time, Swiss bankers had no obligation to report whatever suspicions they might have of a client, and the courts later ruled implicitly that Del Ponte had overstepped the mark.

But four years later came the law which effectively brought Switzerland into the international mainstream of the fight against financial crime.

The episode perfectly illustrated her modus operandi. You create fear by creating waves.

One high-profile case followed another. She named then Russian President Boris Yeltsin in a money-trafficking inquiry and froze accounts belonging to the former Pakistan prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. This sort of thing was not supposed to happen in Switzerland.

When she arrived at The Hague, Del Ponte set the tone immediately by naming as her spokeswoman Florence Hartmann, an aggressive former Belgrade correspondent of Le Monde who was expelled from Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s.

By June 2000 she was multiplying her demands for the extradition of Milosevic, and Moscow was publicly accusing her office of being the cats'-paw of Nato.

True to form, the chief prosecutor fired a counter-salvo at the Russian ambassador to the UN, charging that Moscow had helped not one whit in arranging access to the Serb victims of the Kosovo war. The Russians quickly became more co-operative.

Del Ponte cared little who she upset. In January 2001, at a stormy session in Belgrade, she reportedly accused President Vojislav Kostunica of being the accomplice of war criminals after he refused to extradite his predecessor to the Hague - an outburst which earned a rebuke from her boss, the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Before that she had twice crossed swords with Washington, first when she announced a preliminary investigation into possible war crimes by Nato during the 11-week Kosovo bombing campaign, then when she declared that the US "zero-risk" policy for its troops in the Balkans was delaying the arrest of war suspects.

The same no-nonsense approach applies when she wears her other hat, of chief prosecutor at the parallel UN criminal court in Arusha, Tanzania, pursuing war crimes relating to the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

This time, the scourge of ethnic war crimes found herself accused of racism when she declined to renew the contracts of seven African investigators at the court. Outraged, they sent a memo to Kofi Annan demanding their reinstatement, and claiming Del Ponte was seeking to create a white, all-Western team.

Nonsense, she retorted, they were simply not up to the job. "Instead of directing their energies in the furtherance of international justice, they are just caught up in their own little games."

And so, without a shadow of doubt, it will continue, in Arusha and the Hague. Del Ponte has kept at bay the bureaucratic torpor to which all institutions of the UN, even one as highly charged as a war crimes tribunal, is prone.

By common consent, she has steered skilfully between the two dominant, frequently antagonistic currents at The Hague tribunal - the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition that pulls few punches and the more formal, less sharp-toothed Napoleonic code that prevails in the Francophone world.

Some would argue that her sex has given extra edge and purpose to the court. Del Ponte is a woman and a mother who surely feels a special outrage at the rapes and yet more unspeakable sexual abuses which occurred in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda alike.

That surely helps explain the ferocity and singlemindedness of her pursuit of the guilty.

Convictions alone will not satisfy her. Even before Milosevic's guilt has been established, she is looking further ahead, seeking to recover money looted by tyrants and war criminals from their victims, and wondering aloud whether the tribunals should be empowered to hear civil complaints as well.

She says of her job: "Not to forget the victims, that's the important thing. In these trials we focus so much on the people who have been charged. I want to be a voice for the victims, so they can see justice being done."

In the final judgment in the case of Slobodan Milosevic, she will be precisely that: a voice for justice, for those who have been unimaginably wronged, that will not fall silent.

- INDEPENDENT