Incident

Home page

Incident

U.N. Court Convicts Former Croatian Generals

15 April 2011 23:48 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. A United Nations court on Friday found a wartime Croatian general, Ante Gotovina, guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in a campaign he led to regain Croatian land and drive Serbs out of the Krajina region in 1995, APA reports quoting â€œThe New York Timesâ€.
Mr. Gotovina was sentenced to 24 years in prison for shelling towns and killing and persecuting civilians.
The court sentenced Mladen Markac, another general involved in the campaign, to 18 years, but acquitted a third, Ivan Cermak, of all charges and ordered his release.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague was also an indirect verdict on the late president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, who died in 1999 as prosecutors were preparing to indict him. It said that Mr. Tudjman was the leader of â€œthe joint criminal enterpriseâ€ that aimed to drive Serbs from their ancestral lands in Croatia and block their return by repopulating the liberated area with Croats only.
During and after the operation to drive Serbian forces from Krajina, some 300 civilians were killed, often in their homes, and some 90,000 Serbs left Croatia. Thousands of homes were looted and burned.
The presiding judge, Alphons Orie, of the Netherlands, said that the case was not about earlier crimes in the region, or about the Croat forces resorting to war to take back their lands. â€œThis case was about whether Serb civilians in the Krajina were the targets of crimes and whether the accused should be held criminally liable.â€
In the center of Croatiaâ€™s capital, Zagreb, where several thousand people watched the court session on a giant screen, many jeered the verdict. In Croatia, the 4-day campaign to retake Krajina, known as Operation Storm, was widely seen as a just military victory and a powerful affirmation of the countryâ€™s national identity. The three generals on trial have been treated as heroes, with the government paying their considerable defense bills and providing experts and documents in support of their case.