Spain arrests Croatian: Canadian officers' testimony to be key to prosecution

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 arrested by Spanish police on an international war crimes warrant.

As commander of a 1995 Croatian offensive called Operation Storm, General 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. He disappeared in 2001 -- apparently after learning he had 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.

The arrest of Gen. Gotovina, the tribunal's third-most-wanted war crimes suspect, will help Croatia to proceed with its application to join the European Union.

Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader called Gen. 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, Ms. 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 Ms. 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.

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 Major-General Alain Forand, now retired, and Major-General Andrew Leslie, who led Canadian forces in Afghanistan and 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 comes 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 Gen. Forand, then a brigadier-general.

"There's no doubt in my mind the Croats knew they were shelling civilian targets."

Amid the attack, Gen. Forand sent a letter to Gen. Gotovina warning the Croat his actions would be reported.

"I protest in the most vigorous manner the unprovoked artillery attack on Knin ... I 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," Gen. Forand wrote.

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. 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 murder of some 150 civilians, but 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.

"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 Gen. 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, Gen. Gotovina's birthplace on the Adriatic coast, told the state news agency.

© National Post 2005