Gotovina in the dock

Dec 12th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

One of the world’s most wanted war-crimes suspects, Ante Gotovina, has appeared before a UN tribunal in The Hague and pleaded not guilty. As he joins Slobodan Milosevic and others being tried over atrocities committed in the 1990s Balkan conflicts, the hunt is being stepped up for two other “big fish” still at large

IT HAS taken years for justice to arrive for the many victims of the wars that followed Yugoslavia’s break-up in the early 1990s. But the United Nations’ war-crimes tribunal for the Balkans, set up in 1993 in The Hague, has now rounded up almost all of the 161 people it has indicted—most notably, Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, whose trial continues. And on Monday December 12th, Ante Gotovina, a former Croatian general accused, among other things, of responsibility for the massacre of 150 Serbs, was brought before the tribunal, following his arrest last week. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Mr Gotovina had been on the run since his indictment in 2001. He was caught last Wednesday on the Spanish island of Tenerife, though the stamps in his (fake) passports suggested he had travelled everywhere from China to the Czech Republic since his indictment.

Croatia’s efforts to join the European Union had been hampered by the failure to arrest Mr Gotovina, despite its protestations that it knew nothing of his whereabouts. Many Croatians still regard the general as a war hero, not a war criminal—and around 40,000 of his supporters rallied in the city of Split on Sunday. However, a senior Croatian official said late last week he was “extremely happy” to hear the news of the general’s arrest, since it would free his government of a problem that has dogged its foreign relations for years. Britain, which holds the EU presidency, said his capture would help speed Croatia’s entry into the Union.

Mr Gotovina, a former French foreign legionary, fought in both the Croatian and Bosnian wars of the early 1990s. But it was his part in the final stages of the war in Croatia that attracted attention from war-crimes investigators. In August 1995 he was in overall command of troops who retook the main part of the breakaway “Republic of Serbian Krajina”. The local Serbs, with a lot of help from Serbia and their Bosnian Serb neighbours, had prised this land away from Croatian control in 1991.

Mr Gotovina’s men took only a few days to crush what little Serb resistance there was. In the aftermath of the attack, almost all the region’s population, of up to 200,000, fled. But in the following weeks, hundreds of mainly elderly Serbs who had stayed behind were murdered, and thousands of buildings were torched and destroyed.

If the general had been arrested soon after his indictment on seven counts of war crimes, then that would, more or less, have been the end of the story. However, protected by elements of the Croatian security services, the general disappeared. In March of this year the EU, disbelieving the government’s claims that it was doing everything to track him down, blocked the country’s progress towards membership. But in late September things began to move: the Croatians (who might have had some American help) passed on a lead to the tribunal, which suggested the general was then in Spain.

The timing of this tip was fortunate in the extreme. A few days later, on October 3rd, EU leaders were to meet in Luxembourg, to discuss (among other things) whether to start membership talks with Croatia. In the hours leading up to the meeting, Carla Del Ponte, the UN tribunal's chief prosecutor, suddenly told the EU leaders that the Balkan country was now “co-operating fully” with her.

This prompted the EU government heads to agree to open the membership talks, though it was made clear to the Croats that further progress would depend on their continuing to co-operate and Mr Gotovina eventually being arrested. This relentless diplomatic pressure to assist in his capture has had the further, beneficial outcome of forcing Croatia's government to bring the recalcitrant parts of the security services under control, thereby strengthening the rule of law in the country.

Two big fish still to catch

Besides those indicted by the UN tribunal in The Hague, some Serbs facing war-crimes charges are being tried in special courts in Serbia itself. On Monday, one such hearing, in Belgrade, convicted 14 former Serb militiamen over the slaughter of almost 200 Croatian prisoners of war during the battle for the Croatian city of Vukovar in 1991.

Now that Mr Gotovina is in the dock, the UN tribunal only has six of its 161 indictees still at large—all of them Serbs. Of these, the most notorious two “big fish” are Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, and General Ratko Mladic, who commanded the Bosnian Serb forces during the war of 1992-95. Both of them have been indicted for even more heinous crimes than Mr Gotovina, including the tribunal’s most serious charge, that of genocide.

Both Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina recently began negotiating their first steps towards opening EU membership talks. But, like Croatia, they have been told they will not get far until Messrs Karadzic and Mladic are apprehended. So will the authorities in Serbia, and the administration in the Serb part of Bosnia, now deliver? Sometimes the Serbs claim that their remaining fugitives are no longer in their territory, as Croatia had insisted—correctly as it turned out—of Mr Gotovina. But there are suspicions that the Serbs’ security services know more about the suspects’ movements than they are letting on. And, unlike in Croatia, the pressure from the EU and the UN tribunal is not yet thought to have forced the Serbs to bring their security men fully under civilian control. Until this happens, and the remaining fugitives are in The Hague standing trial, the Serbs will remain out in the cold.

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