Canadians key witnesses in upcoming Croat war crime trial
The Vancouver Sun
December 14, 2005
Steven Edwards, CanWest News Service
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 Thursday that
Spanish police had arrested 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 Gotovina was being held in a Tenerife hotel
after authorities tailed him for several days. He disappeared in 2001
after hearing, it's believed, he'd been secretly indicted by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
An extradition hearing is expected to order 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.
Gotovina's arrest will help Croatia to proceed with its application to
join the European Union.
Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader called Gotovina's capture the
"final confirmation of Croatia's credibility," suggesting his
government had co-operated in the hunt for the fugitive.
With Serbia, too, seeking to eventually join the EU, Del Ponte used
her visit to that country's capital to call for stepped up efforts by
authorities to locate the tribunal's two most wanted men. Still at
large are former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military
commander, Ratko Mladic. Both are accused in the Srebrenica massacre
of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, and the siege of Sarajevo, which
killed more than 10,000.
But Del Ponte is expected to complain that Serb authorities aren't
doing enough to find the men when she reports to the UN Security
Council next week, a senior diplomat who has seen an advance copy of
her report said.
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
Afghanistan, 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 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 Forand, then a brigadier-general. "`There's no doubt in
my mind the Croats knew they were shelling civilian targets.''
Amid the attack, Forand sent a letter to Gotovina warning the Croat
his actions would be reported.
"I protest in the most vigorous manner the unprovoked artillery attack
on Knin EI demand the cessation of these attacks immediately ... This
(action) against unarmed civilians is completely against international
humanitarian law and I will document all attacks fully for
investigation by international authorities," Forand wrote.
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 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 Gotovina accuses him of failing to prevent the
murder of some 150 civilians, but 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.
"In the hospital itself, there were bodies stacked in the corridors.
There were bodies in almost every hospital bed. And there were bodies
lying in the foyer, the reception area and some of the corridors.''
He told how he and his men "checked the ones on top to see if they
were alive,'' adding that "in all cases, they weren't.''
While Gotovina once enjoyed widespread public support in Croatia, that
appears to have subsided.
"It looks like our general has lost his first battle. What remains is
a legal fight,'' Milivoj Kurtov, mayor of Pakostane, Gotovina's
birthplace on the Adriatic coast, told the state news agency.
Serbian News Network - SNN
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