Jan 22, 2009 Carla Del Ponte Madame Prosecutor. Visit The Economist e-store and you’ll find a range of carefully selected products for business and pleasure.

“THERE is no way tocushion the disappointment and sense of anticlimax,” writes Carla Del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the UN's Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, “because the simple fact of failure is the simple fact of failure.” These startling words conclude her book about the eight years she spent chasing Balkan war criminals. But perhaps they are not so surprising, after all. Ms Del Ponte, a Swiss prosecutor, was appointed to the tribunal in The Hague in 1999.

Prosim Plus Crack there. Ruthlessly harrying the former Yugoslavs into giving up those that the court had indicted for war crimes including genocide, Ms Del Ponte became the most loathed woman in south-eastern Europe. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this memoir, which was published in Italy last year and is now coming out in English, is to see that loathing so heartily reciprocated. There are no diplomatic niceties here. After one Bosnian Croat was acquitted of a massacre, Ms Del Ponte's colleagues discovered that crucial evidence had been doctored. The Croats set up a whole team specifically to thwart the tribunal's work.

Croatian leaders, she notes, always made bountiful promises before resorting to “stealth and deception and attack from behind”. Citing a colleague, she concludes: “The Serbs are bastardsBut the Croats are sneaky bastards.”. Related items • Jan 22nd 2009 Ms Del Ponte was wise to ask Chuck Sudetic to act as her co-author. A former journalist, Mr Sudetic's book, “Blood and Vengeance”, which described the killing of some 7,500 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995, was one of the best on the Bosnian war. His writing gives Ms Del Ponte's memoir crucial historical depth, which is what separates it from the dozens of others written by diplomats and soldiers who have tangled with the Balkans. In this story there are no heroes and Ms Del Ponte, attacked from all sides, is sometimes on the defensive. In 2007 Bosnia failed to establish in the International Court of Justice that Serbia was directly involved in genocide during the Bosnian war, though it was found guilty of not preventing what the court said was genocidal killing in Srebrenica.

Ms Del Ponte was accused of taking delivery of transcripts from Serbia, which many, including her, believe proved Serbia's guilt there, on condition that they were kept out of the hands of the court. She denies this. That Florence Hartmann, Ms Del Ponte's former spokeswoman, is now on trial at the tribunal, accused of contempt of court for writing about the same issue and allegedly revealing its confidential decisions, is clearly absurd and smacks of spite.