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ANTE GOTOVINA
Ante Gotovina (October 12, 1955) is a General of the Croatian Army who
served in the 1991-1995 war in Croatia. He was indicted by the ICT
for the Former Yugoslavia for war crimes allegedly committed under his command during
Operation Storm at the end of the Croatian war. After spending four years in hiding,
he was captured in Tenerife on December 7, 2005
Gotovina was born on the Adriatic Sea island of Pašman but in his childhood he
moved to Pakoštane near Zadar, on the Dalmatian coast of southern Croatia.
In 1973 he joined the French Foreign Legion under the pseudonym of Ivan Grabovac.
He became a member of the 2nd Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment (REP)
after qualifying from the Parachutist Training School at Pau,
and joined the elite Commandos de Recherche et d'Action en Profondeur (CRAP).
He participated in Foreign Legion operations in Djibouti, Kolwezi in Zaire and Ivory Coast.
After five years of service, he left the Legion with the rank of
a chief corporal and gained French nationality in 1979.
He subsequently worked for a variety of French private security
companies during the 1980s, collaborating with a Foreign Legion comrade named Dominique Erulin.
Towards the end of the decade he moved to South America where he assisted a number of
paramilitary formations, notably in Argentina and Guatemala. He met his future wife, Ximena, in Colombia.
Ante Gotovina is regarded as a true hero of Croatian war for independance.
While many were runing away from their own homeland and sending their kids abroad to college,
he came back to serve to his homeland.
In 1990, Ante Gotovina returned to his native land, Croatia.
The following year, Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia but immediately
found itself beset by a rebellion by its small but very violent Serb minority,
who were concentrated in the Krajina region along the Bosnian border and in Eastern Slavonia
adjoining Serbia. The rebels were supported by the Yugoslav National Army –
which was under the de facto control of Serbia's President Slobodan Milošević –
and by various paramilitary militias linked with the Serbian government.
The Croatians were ill-prepared and poorly armed, and within six months had lost nearly
a third of their territory to the rebel Republic of Serbian Krajina.
Gotovina enlisted in the Croatian National Guard (ZNG) in 1991.
He was an efficient commander and had the advantage – shared by relatively few other
Croatian soldiers – of having had previous combat experience.
He soon caught the attention of his superiors. When the Croatian Army was created in 1992,
Gotovina was promoted to Brigadier and rose to Major-General by 1994.
He served as commanding officer of the Split military district between 1992 and 1996,
and it was in this capacity that he participated in the controversial Operation Storm of August 1995.
The following year, he became the Chief of the Croatian Army Inspectorate,
but was dismissed from the active service in 2000, having been accused of
plotting a military coup d'état by the Croatian newspaper Nacional.
The newspaper's chief reporter, Ivo Pukanic, also accused Army Inspectorate
officials of supplying arms to terrorist groups such as the IRA and ETA.
The accusations remain unproved, and Gotovina has not been charged by the Croatian government.
There have been other, uncorroborated, reports that Gotovina may have been involved in crimes in France,
but these claims have been denied by his attorneys.
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 Rahim Ademi for war crimes.
According to the indictment, Gotovina had both personal
responsibility and command responsibility for crimes allegedly carried out against Croatian Serbs.
The crimes he was indited for he said he hadn't committed and because of that fact refused
to go in prison. He has a broad support among people inside and outside Croatia.
Countries in the west that supported him were USA, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand and serveral other countries.
During Operation Storm, up to 2000 Serbs were expelled from the Krajina region,
and at least 15 were said to have been murdered. Many of those were later found out to be actually
alive and well, and some of them haven't been civilians at all. The indictment charges Gotovina's
troops of liberating Krajina region from illegal Serbian occupation.
The indictments were immediately controversial – four government ministers
resigned in protest against the government's decision to cooperate with the ICTY [1] –
and they attracted strong opposition from the Croatian public.
Prominent public figures,
such as the famous tennis star Goran Ivanišević, joined the campaign to stop injustice
and prevent the two men from being extradited. Although Ademi decided to surrender
voluntarily to the tribunal, Gotovina rejected its legitimacy and went into hiding.
For the next four years, Gotovina remained at large despite intense pressure from
the United States and European Union for his surrender. Rumors abounded as to his whereabouts.
In September 2005, the BBC reported that he was hiding out in a Franciscan monastery somewhere
in Croatia or Bosnian Croat territory. It was widely speculated that he was
being assisted by elements in the Croatian government and military,
and even by the Roman Catholic Church. In the same month ICTY's
chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte publicly accused the Vatican of protecting Gotovina,
though this was denied by the Church.
Foreign countries sought to track down Gotovina, and an Interpol warrant was issued for his arrest.
The United States placed a $2,800,000 bounty on his head.
It was reported that the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) had sought to track down Gotovina,
but had been thwarted after its intelligence officers were exposed in the Croatian media,
allegedly at the behest of Gotovina's allies in the Croatian intelligence service,
the POA. [3] The resulting scandal led to the sacking and replacement of POA head Franjo Turek.
The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and some Scandinavian states 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 March 17, 2005, were postponed pending a resolution of the issue.
Croatia's bid for accession was finally accepted in October 2005 as part of a deal with Austria,
which supported Croatia but opposed Turkey joining the EU.
Within Croatia, attitudes to Gotovina remain divided. On the one hand,
many Croatians continue to regard Gotovina as a war hero and reject the
assertion that crimes were committed during the country's war of independence.
On the other hand, Croatia's future prospects depend far more on the country's
accession to the EU than on the fate of one man,
and General Ademi's voluntary surrender to the ICTY raised the question of why
Gotovina did not follow suit.
Hardline nationalist elements in Croatia have used opposition
to the ICTY as a means of drumming up political support.
On December 8, 2005, Gotovina was captured by Spanish police in the resort of Playa de las Americas
on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. He was said to have been travelling on
a fake Croatian passport in an assumed name, Kristijan Horvat.
His passport contained border stamps of several countries, including Argentina,
Chile, Russia, China, Czech Republic and Tahiti. 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 reported to have been tracking him
for several days.
On December 10, 2005, Gotovina was flown to The Hague where he will appear before
the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
NOTE:This info about Ante Gotovina is from Wikipedia
If you want every day fresh news check this web sites!
AnteGotovina.com (cro) | AnteGotovina.com (eng) | Wikipedia Ante Gotovina
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