Ante Gotovina

Ante Gotovina (born 12 October 1955) is a Croatian retired lieutenant general and former French senior corporal who served in the Croatian War for Independence. In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted him on a number of war crimes and crimes against humanity charges for crimes committed in 1995 during and in the aftermath of Operation Storm. After spending four years in hiding, he was captured in the Canary Islands in December 2005. In April 2011, Gotovina was found guilty on eight of the nine counts of the indictment and sentenced to 24 years of imprisonment. On 16 November 2012, he was found not guilty on all charges by the appeals panel at the ICTY, and immediately set free. A Croatian government plane flew the general home, where he received a hero's welcome across all of Croatia.

Early life
Ante Gotovina was born in Tkon on the island of Pašman. His father Milan tried to move with his mother to Italy, but was caught by the Yugoslav border police. His mother was released while his father spent time in prison. When Gotovina was nearly four his mother was killed saving him from an explosion from a construction site. After that his father went to work in Zagreb, while Gotovina and his siblings went to his maternal grandfather Šime in Pakoštane. Around Easter of 1971, Gotovina and his friend Srećko tried to escape by sailing away. Soon they returned to Pakoštane after a storm caused troubles at sea. Gotovina hid his attempt to escape from his family and continued to attend school for electrical engineering in Zadar.

French Foreign Legion and after
At the age of sixteen, Gotovina left home to become a sailor. In 1973, before turning eighteen, he joined the French Foreign Legion under the pseudonym of Andrija Grabovac and became a member of the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e REP) after qualifying at the Training School in Pau before joining the elite Commandos de Recherche et d'Action en Profondeur (CRAP) now renamed as Parachute Commando Group (GCP). It was there he met Dominique Erulin, brother of the Colonel Philippe Erulin, who would be his friend and partner in future missions. In the next few years, he participated in Foreign Legion operations in Djibouti, the Battle of Kolwezi in Zaire, and missions in the Ivory Coast, becoming Colonel Erulin's driver. After five years of service, he left the Legion with the rank of caporal-chef; he obtained French citizenship in 1979.

He subsequently worked for a variety of French private security companies during the 1980s, among them KO International Company, a filial of VHP Security, known as a cover for the Service d'Action Civique (SAC), and was at this time responsible for the security of far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. In 1981, together with Dominique Erulin, he helped editor Jean-Pierre Mouchard (a close friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen) organize a commando operation to free his press in La Seyne-sur-Mer, occupied by CGT trade-union strikers.

According to French police records, he became involved in criminal activities, which led to arrest warrants being issued for robbery and extortion; it has been reported that he served at least one two-year prison sentence, though this has been denied by his attorneys. Dominique Erulin claims the accusations were a political ploy made up by the left-wing factions allied with President François Mitterrand. Towards the end of the decade he moved to South America, where he provided training to a number of right-wing paramilitary organizations, notably in Argentina and Guatemala. He met his future wife, Ximena Dalel, in Colombia and had a daughter.

Arrested during a trip to France (Paris), he was sentenced in 1986 to five years of prison by Paris' Cour d'assise. He was freed the next year, "in circumstances showing that he was benefiting from very particular protections". However, Gotovina's lawyers have submitted a brief to the International War Crimes Tribunal alleging that Gotovina was in fact framed by a criminal police group loyal to François Mitterrand, a group which was convicted of official misconduct by French courts in 2005.

Croatian War of Independence
Gotovina returned to Croatia in 1991 when the Croatian War of Independence was beginning, and enlisted in the Croatian National Guard (ZNG), the first organized military body of what would become the Croatian Army. He was an efficient commander and had the advantage – shared by relatively few other Croatian soldiers – of combat experience. He fought in western Slavonia: in Novska and Nova Gradiška, attached to the 1st Guards Brigade. He soon caught the attention of his superiors, and when the Croatian Army was established as such in 1992, Gotovina was promoted to Colonel. As a colonel he was, along with Janko Bobetko and Anto Roso one of the main organizers of Operation Maslenica, which restored Croatia's territorial continuity in Dalmatia.

By 1994 he had risen to the rank of major-general and, as a general-pukovnik and commanding officer of the Split military district he organized key military operations: the defense of Livno and Tomislavgrad from the troops of Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić, and the ten-month war of attrition which broke the Serb defenses in the Plain of Livno, the Dinara Ridge and the Šator mountain. He led the conquest of Glamoč and Bosansko Grahovo (Operation Summer '95), which enabled him to close from the east the encirclement of Knin, the "capital" of the self-proclaimed "Republic of the Serb Krajina" (RSK). This ensured conditions for the rapid success of Operation Oluja ("Storm") of 4–6 August 1995, during which forces under his command captured Knin.

Gotovina was then immediately put in charge of the combined forces of the Croatian Army (Hrvatska Vojska or HV) and the Croatian Defense Council in Bosnia (Hrvatsko Vijeće Obrane or HVO) in Operation Mistral, which defeated the army of the Bosnian Serbs and led the Croatian army, together with the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina, within 23 kilometres of Banja Luka and was only stopped under American pressure. His success is why he is seen as a hero by many Croats.

Post-war period
In 1996, he became the chief of the Army Inspectorate.

In September 2000, Gotovina was a signatory to the Twelve Generals' Letter in which the government of Ivica Račan was criticised. Because of this he was forcibly retired by the Croatian president, Stjepan Mesić, with an explanation that military officers shouldn't write political letters if not approved by the supreme commander and the president, respectively.

Flight
In July 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) issued sealed indictments to the Croatian government seeking the arrest of Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač for war crimes. Gotovina was indicted together with Markač, a former commander of the special police of Croatia's interior ministry, and Ivan Čermak, assistant defense minister from 1991 to 1993. The three were accused of aiding and abetting the murders of 324 Krajina Serb civilians and prisoners of war by "shooting, burning and/or stabbing" them and forcibly displacing almost 90,000 Serb civilians. Gotovina was charged with five counts of crimes against humanity (persecutions, deportation, inhumane acts, murder) and four counts of violations of the laws or customs of war (plunder, wanton destruction, murder, cruel treatment). He denied all charges.

For four years, 2001–2005, Gotovina remained at large despite intense pressure from the United States and the European Union for his surrender.

Foreign countries sought to track down Gotovina, and an Interpol warrant was issued for his arrest. The United States announced a $5 million (€4.2 million) reward for his capture. It was reported that the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) had sought to find Gotovina but that it had been thwarted after its intelligence officers were exposed in the Croatian media, allegedly at the behest of Gotovina's allies in one of Croatia' many intelligence services, the POA (Protuobavještajna agencija or "Counter-Intelligence Agency"). The resulting scandal led to the sacking and replacement of POA head Franjo Turek.

Several EU member states, including the United Kingdom and the Netherlands made the surrender of Gotovina a precondition for Croatia's accession to the European Union. This stance was criticised by the Croatian government, which claimed that it did not know where Gotovina was, that he was probably outside the country and that it was doing all it could to bring him to justice. Accession negotiations with the EU, scheduled to start on 17 March 2005, were postponed pending a resolution of the issue.

In September 2005, ICTY's chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte claimed she had information that he was hiding in a Franciscan monastery in Croatia or in Bosnian Croat territory. She went to the Vatican to ask for help in locating him, but told The Daily Telegraph that Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo had refused to help, telling her that the Vatican was not a state and thus had "no international obligations". Her comments infuriated the Church in Croatia as well as the Vatican, whose spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said the archbishop asked Del Ponte what evidence she had to her claims, but she didn't provide any. Del Ponte was later criticized for making self-contradictory statements about Gotovina's whereabouts in September 2005.

Croatia's bid for accession was finally accepted in October 2005 as part of a deal with Austria and some other countries, which gained Croatia's admission in exchange for dropping its opposition to Turkey's candidacy. The ICTY announced at the same time that Croatia was then "cooperating fully" with the tribunal, but did not provide further details.

Reactions


Many Croatians continued to regard Gotovina as a war hero and rejected the assertion that he was guilty of crimes. Both left and right-wing parties in Croatia have been accused of using Gotovina as a means of drumming up political support.

General Rahim Ademi's voluntary surrender to the ICTY raised the question in Croatia of why Gotovina did not follow suit.

During his flight, Gotovina became a prominent icon of Croatian popular culture. Marko Perković and Miroslav Škoro, two popular Croatian musicians known for their right-wing views, recorded songs with lyrics implicitly praising the general and his flight, and both songs became huge hits, especially among younger fans. In 2006, the two most popular football teams in the country, Dinamo Zagreb and Hajduk Split, played a game in which all proceeds went to help finance Croatian generals.

Gotovina's popularity can also be explained by how his flight fits the ancient Croatian stereotype of an outlaw, especially the hajduk - a person who defies distant and tyrannical authorities, this time embodied in The Hague, Brussels and other Western capitals whose governments demanded his arrest. There is an outlaw-celebrating culture of hajduks in Dinaric regions like the Dalmatian hinterland and neighbouring Croat-inhabited western Herzegovina and, in general, in all of the Balkans. Other Croats, regardless of their regional background, political persuasion or even attitude to wartime atrocities, praised Gotovina's flight as an act of defiance towards the Croatian political establishment.

In March 2005, a survey conducted on behalf of the U.S. Embassy in Croatia reported that a majority of those surveyed thought it was not in Croatia's interest to extradite Gotovina. Unofficial polls by television programs also showed strong support, with most callers saying that they would prefer Gotovina remain at large even if it meant not joining the European Union.

In 2001 the Croatian writer Nenad Ivanković wrote a biography of Ante Gotovina titled Warrior-Adventurer and General (A Biography). The Croatian filmmaker Dejan Šorak wrote and directed Dva igrača s klupe, a black comedy released in 2005 whose plot is inspired by the events surrounding the ICTY indictment against Ante Gotovina.

Capture and extradition
On 7 December 2005, Gotovina was captured by Spanish police and special forces in the resort of Playa de las Américas on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. He was said to have been traveling on two fake Croatian passports using the names, Kristijan Horvat and Stjepan Seničić. His passport contained border stamps of several countries, including Argentina, Chile, Russia, China, Czech Republic and Tahiti. A sum of money amounting to €12,000 was discovered in his room. He was immediately flown to Madrid, where he was imprisoned in advance of a court hearing to extradite him to the ICTY prison at The Hague. Spanish police were later reported to have been tracking him for several days, apparently following a lead supplied by the Croatian intelligence service, who had been tapping his wife Dunja's phone. The involvement of Croatian authorities has been backed up by the Carla's List documentary, a part of which is available on YouTube.

On 10 December 2005, Gotovina was flown to The Hague, where he appeared before the ICTY on 12 December. He pleaded not guilty to the seven charges brought against him, for acting individually and/or through a joint criminal enterprise in persecutions, deportation and forced displacement and other inhumane acts for a total of four counts of crimes against humanity; and murder, plunder of property and wanton destruction of settlements in three counts of violations of the laws or customs of war. According to his lawyer, Gotovina has declared that he is "not the man described in each and every count."

Reactions
After Gotovina's arrest in Spain, several rallies and protests took place in Croatian cities. On 11 December 2005 (the first Sunday after his arrest), a rally organised by war veterans attracted between 40,000 and 70,000 Croatians in the city of Split to protest the arrest. Several retired generals attended the rally and expressed their support for Gotovina. On the same day, rallies were held in several other cities in Croatia, but with smaller attendance (in Zagreb some 500 people gathered).

Polls taken by the PULS Agency after Gotovina's arrest showed that almost two thirds of the Croatian public saw Gotovina's arrest as bad news, and found the accusations against the general baseless.

Trial
At the end of 2006 Gotovina's case was joined with cases against Ivan Čermak and Mladen Markač as it relates to the same events (Operation Storm). The Trial of Gotovina et al was expected to begin in May 2007 but was postponed indefinitely due to conflicts between lawyers on the defence bench. Gotovina's lawyers were Luka Misetic, an American attorney of Croatian descent, Greg Kehoe, the American lawyer who advised the prosecution in the Iraqi Special Tribunal case against Saddam Hussein, and Payam Akhavan, former Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor's Office of the ICTY.

Following the 2006 death of Slobodan Milošević (who was imprisoned in ICTY prison cell just next to that of Gotovina), Ante Gotovina signed a condolence note to his family (together with Mladen Naletilić Tuta, Paško Ljubičić, Ivica Rajić and other Croat and Serb detainees, making the list 34 signatures long) which was published in Belgrade's Politika and Večernje novosti newspapers. Gotovina's attorney stated he signed because of his Catholic faith which stresses forgiveness.

The trial began on 11 March 2008, and concluded in September 2010 with the delivery of closing arguments. Misetic said he expected a verdict in two to 10 months' time, as has been the case with the tribunal's decisions to date.

First-degree verdict
On 15 April 2011, Gotovina was found guilty on 8 of the 9 counts of the indictment and sentenced to 24 years of imprisonment. He was convicted of "committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, deportation, persecution and inhuman acts", and the Presiding Judge Alphons Orie cited several distressing witness testimonies in the decision.

In the Gotovina Defence Final Trial Brief, a 315 page document, Gotovina's laywers rejected the accusation of mass expulsion of Serbian population as well as the accusation of unlawful shelling of civilian areas, saying that the "HV used artillery solely against military objectives in a highly professional operation consistent with well-established military doctrine."

In Croatia's capital Zagreb, thousands gathered to watch the sentence being given out live on large screens and loudly protested the decision. Croatian prime minister Jadranka Kosor stated that the idea of a "joint criminal enterprise" was "unacceptable" as many Croatians feel it was part of their war for independence. War veterans staged a march in the Croatian capital in protest. About 10,000 showed up to the march, chanting slogans against the Kosor-led government and the EU as protesters removed and ripped apart the European Union flag from a flagpole at the main square, replacing it with the Croatian flag.

A poll conducted immediately after the verdict showed that 95.4% of Croatians felt that the judgment against Gotovina was unjust, and 88% still saw him as a hero. Never in Croatia's polling history had such a consensus been reached. Support for Croatia's accession to the European Union plummeted to 23.8%. In June 2011, Ante Gotovina was ranked the second most creditable person for the creation of the sovereign and democratic Croatia in a large poll conducted by Večernji list. On 16 November 2012, he was found not guilty on all charges by the appeals panel at the ICTY.

Appeal verdict
On 16 November 2012, Ante Gotovina was found not guilty with a majority of three votes against two by the Appeals Panel of the ICTY presided over by Theodor Meron. The previous verdict had sentenced him to 24 years in prison, while Mladen Markač was sentenced to 18 years. Both of them were accused of being part of the "criminal enterprise", but Meron concluded that "there was no such conspiracy."

The night before candle-lit vigils were held across Croatia, including at Roman Catholic churches. Gotovina and Markač were supported by numerous Croatian veterans, and some marched from Zagreb's Mirogoj cemetery to the Zagreb Cathedral.

Gotovina's acquittal provoked mixed international reaction. Croatian prime minister Zoran Milanović reacted positively, as did the Croatian president Ivo Josipović. Meanwhile, Serbia's president Tomislav Nikolić reacted negatively, as did Serbian government minister Rasim Ljajić and the Prime minister Ivica Dačić and much of the Serbian media. The Government of Serbia subsequently froze its relations with the ICTY. On the other hand, Veselin Šljivančanin congratulated the generals on their release, placing blame on political leaders and not generals during war. Reactions in Bosnia and Herzegovina were mixed: positive reactions came from the President of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina Živko Budimir, and the Croatian politician Dragan Čović, while President of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik was negative. The Hungarian nationalist party Jobbik also welcomed Gotovina's and Markač's release.

Carla del Ponte was shocked by the verdict. Ivan Šimonović, former Croatian minister of justice and current UN Assistant Secretary-General for human rights, said that the verdict would have an important role in interpretation of some regulations of the international criminal law. Serbian politician Vuk Jeremić, President of the UN General Assembly, severely criticized the ICTY on Twitter. and in response scheduled a UN GA session to discuss the work of the ad-hoc Tribunals setup by UN.

After release
After their release, the Croatian government dispatched the governmental Bombardier Challenger 600 plane along with Minister of Defence Ante Kotromanović and Minister of Veterans Predrag Matić to return Gotovina and Markač to Croatia. In Zagreb they were greeted by the Prime Minister Zoran Milanović and the Speaker of Parliament Josip Leko. Around 100,000 jubilant people heard them speak at the Ban Jelačić Square, after which the Cardinal Josip Bozanić held a mass for them at the Zagreb Cathedral. The two generals were then received by the President at the Presidential Palace where Gotovina said that the "Homeland War is now clean, it belongs to our history, it is a basis on which we build our future."

The Minister of Veterans Predrag Matić stated that Gotovina and Markač are amongst the candidates for a new highest Croatian decoration.

On 19 November 2012, the Belgrade-based tabloid Kurir ran an interview on Monday with Ante Gotovina, who stated that Serbs displaced after Operation Storm "should return to Croatia". Serbian president Tomislav Nikolić, as well as most of the unions of Croatian Serb refugees described that call as mocking to Serbian refugees and Operation Storm victims.

On 23 November Gotovina become an honorary citizen of Split and the next day he become honorary citizen of Zadar. On 2 December he was named honorary citizen of Osijek along with Markač.

On 26 November, the Serbian government asked the ICTY to transfer the evidence against both generals to them for their own investigation. However, several weeks later Serbian prosecutor Vladimir Vukčević admitted that a review of the judgement was not possible.