Ottawa Citizen December 9, 2005 Friday
HEADLINE: Canadian generals key witnesses in upcoming Croat war crime trial:
Military commander arrested, faces trial for killing civilians
BY: Steven Edwards, The Ottawa Citizen
DATELINE: UNITED NATIONS
UNITED NATIONS - The testimony of two Canadian Forces officers who commanded
a UN peacekeeping contingent in the Balkans is key to the prosecution case
against a Croatian general just arrested by Spanish police on an
international war crimes warrant.
As commander of a 1995 Croatian offensive called Operation Storm, Gen. Ante
Gotovina is accused of allowing his 150,000-strong force to persecute and
murder civilians as it moved to crush Croatian Serb resistance to the
country's independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.
Carla Del Ponte, the UN's war crimes chief, announced yesterday that Spanish
police had arrested Gen. Gotovina, 50, in the Canary Islands the night
before, describing him as the last wanted war crimes suspect from Croatia.
"He is now in detention, finally," she said during a visit to Belgrade,
capital of Serbia and Montenegro.
Spanish officials said Gen. Gotovina was being held in a Tenerife hotel
after authorities tailed him for several days. It's believed he disappeared
in 2001 after hearing he'd been secretly indicted by the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
An extradition hearing is expected to order Gen. Gotovina's delivery to The
Hague, seat of the tribunal, where former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic
is the most high-profile war crimes suspect currently being tried.
Gen. Gotovina, a former soldier with the French Foreign Legion, had eluded
capture despite being spotted in Italy, Ireland, Bosnia and South Africa
during his years on the run.
One admiring biography -- titled Warrior: An Adventurer and a General --
describes him as a brave soldier and lover of women.
Telling a different story are Canada's Maj.-Gen. Alain Forand, now retired,
and Maj.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, who led Canadian Forces in Afghanis-tan, but is
now Ottawa-based director general of strategic planning.
They were commanders on the UN force deployed to monitor a ceasefire in
Croatia preceding Operation Storm, which saw the Croat army shell the town
of Knin as it swept through Krajina, the ancestral Croatian Serb homeland in
western Croatia.
Their assessment of Gen. Gotovina's soldiering ethics come in testimony they
gave the tribunal about what they saw from their station in Knin.
"Why they shelled Knin is still hard to believe ... unless they wanted to
create a form of panic to ensure that the civilian population would flee,"
said Mr. Forand, then a brigadier-general. "There's no doubt in my mind the
Croats knew they were shelling civilian targets."
Maj.-Gen. Leslie, then a colonel, told of what he saw as he ventured into
the battle zone from Aug. 4, 1995, onwards, and said he held Gen. Gotovina
responsible for the mayhem.
"The shells were impacting ... on residential areas, and there were quite a
large number of casualties," he said.
"Maj.-Gen. Gotovina's headquarters was the co-ordinating headquarters for
the various brigades which launched the attack, and he was the officer
responsible for all military activities, both air and ground."
The indictment against Gen. Gotovina accuses him of failing to prevent the
deaths of about 150 civilians, but Maj.-Gen. Leslie estimated the death toll
to be around 500.
"I personally saw about 50 dead," he said. "Fifteen of those I saw en route
to the hospital on the morning of the 5th of August. Several men, the rest
were women and children."
GRAPHIC:
Photo: Cristin Schmitz, CanWest News Service; Maj.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, shown
above as he led Canadian Forces in Afghanistan, is one of two Canadian
generals who will testify against Gen. Ante Gotovina. The Canadian generals
were commanders on the UN force deployed to monitor a ceasefire in Croatia.;
Photo: The Associated Press; Suspected Croatian war criminal Gen. Ante
Gotovina is shown in handcuffs at a Spanish airbase yesterday.
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Inc.
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