Prosecutor forbidden to discuss alleged Albanian atrocities
Carla Del Ponte is one fearless prosecutor. Her investigations of Sicilian mafia, Slobodan Milosevic, and Rwandan genocide earned her powerful enemies and death threats. Her memoir Madame Prosecutor is proving extremely controversial—so much so that she has been forbidden to talk about it.
She alleges that the United Nations and NATO failed adequately to investigate reports of Albanian atrocities against Serbs in Kosovo in 1999.
“Madame Prosecutor” created a sensation when it was first released in Italian last year, largely due to the passage about the alleged Albanian atrocities. She reports that her U.N. war-crimes team had received tips that some 100 to 300 Serbs who disappeared just after the Kosovo conflict of 1999 had been kidnapped, transported across an international border into Albania and killed. What’s more, she’s written that some of the younger, healthier captives may have had their organs removed as part of an international trafficking operation. Albanian prosecutors maintain that probes by local authorities and the United Nations yielded no evidence to support the charge. But the charges may have stirred anxiety within the Swiss government, which hired Del Ponte as the country’s ambassador to Argentina shortly after she completed the book. The Swiss banned Del Ponte from discussing the matter. As a result, Del Ponte’s tome is on tour—without its author.
A spokesman for the Swiss Embassy in Washington defended the decision to muzzle Ms Del Ponte, but refused to discuss the reasons for the ban. Ironically, censoring her confirms one of the memoir’s main contentions—that politics often trumps justice and fosters a culture of complacency and impunity.
The English translation of Madame Prosecutor was released in January.
[...] PROSECUTOR forbidden to discuss alleged Albanian atrocities …. [...]