Chuck Sudetic

Carla Del Ponte

The author describes her life and career as the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the United Nations, bringing those individuals to trial who were responsible for acts of genocide and violence in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo.

Confrontations with Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity : a Memoir

Madame Prosecutor

Carla Del Ponte won international recognition as Switzerland's attorney general when she pursued cases against the Sicilian mafia. In 1999, she answered the United Nations' call to become the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. In her new role, Del Ponte confronted genocide and crimes against humanity head-on, struggling to bring to justice the highest-ranking individuals responsible for massive acts of violence in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo. These tribunals have been unprecedented. They operate along the edge of the divide between national sovereignty and international responsibility, in the gray zone between the judicial and the political, a largely unexplored realm for prosecutors and judges. It is a realm whose native inhabitants–political leaders and diplomats, soldiers and spies–assume that they can commit the big crime without being held culpable. It is a realm crisscrossed by what Del Ponte calls the muro di gomma –"the wall of rubber"– a metaphor referring to the tactics government officials use to hide their unwillingness to confront the culture of impunity that has allowed persons responsible for acts of unspeakable, wholesale violence to escape accountability. Madame Prosecutor is Del Ponte's courageous and startling memoir of her eight years spent striving to serve justice.

Confrontations with Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity

David Rieff

Ron Haviv

Bernard Kouchner

"Chuck Sudetic provides an essay giving Haviv's photographs a historical, political, and cultural context. Sudetic sheds light on the forces behind the tragic cycles of war that have engulfed the Balkans over the past century. David Rieff offers an acute and impassioned defense of the document and the importance of witness. Bernard Kouchner, present-day governor of Kosovo, writes with vigorous morality and passion about the importance and implication of the past on the future of the former Yugoslavia. The images in Blood and Honey are further augmented by a chronology of the conflict and quotations from victims, perpetrators, political figures, and international observers that provide alternative and opposing voices about the war."--BOOK JACKET.

Chuck Sudetic

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