War crimes hunt turns heat on Croatia's ally
Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy Sunday July 8, 2001 The Observer
The Croatian government met in emergency session yesterday to decide how to respond to sealed indictments issued by the international war crimes tribunal this weekend against two former generals accused of murdering Serb civilians, threatening a new political crisis in a country still struggling to recover from war.
The indictments of the generals - for the massacres of hundreds of Serb civilians between 1993 and 1995 - is also threatening to lift the lid on one of the murkiest episodes of the Balkan wars: the secret arming of the Croats by the United States.
While neither Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the Hague tribunal nor Croat Prime Minister Ivica Racan has disclosed the names of those charged, the likely suspects are Ante Gotovina, a commander during the 1995 offensive, and Rahim Ademi, who is of Kosovo Albanian origin. Both men have now retired.
Ademi is likely to be charged with responsibility for the killings of dozens of Serbs during a 1993 offensive in central Croatia against the Serb rebels.
While the crimes allegedly committed by Ademi predate the period of US military assistance, those allegedly committed by Gotovina fall squarely into it. They came during a time of stunning military successes for the Croats on the battlefields of the Serb occupied Krajina and eastern Slavonia, in which US personnel were heavily implicated. The history of US assistance to the nationalist regime of former President Franjo Tudjman dated back to March 1994 when the Croatian Defence Minister, Joko Susak, approached the Pentagon to ask for help with military training.
While the Pentagon turned down the request it directed the Croats to a Virginia-based military consultancy firm, Military Professional Resource Inc (MPRI), staffed by former generals whose main client was the US army. A contract licensed by the Pentagon was signed with the Croatian army.
While MPRI denied that its advisers were involved on the ground during the Croatian offensives, UN officials in the Balkans at the time refused to believe it.
At the same time that US advisers were training Croat soldiers for Operation Storm - the drive to retake Krajina - in how to conduct large-scale operations, both the American Defense Intelligence Service and the CIA were building up their strength at the US embassy in Zagreb. Part of that operation, said sources at the time, was to provide the intelligence for the Croat assaults.
In 1995 The Observer reported claims by United Nations officials that American intelligence and forces were deeply involved in Bosnia and Croatia, and that the US breached the UN arms embargo with flights carrying arms to both the Bosnian and Croat forces.
The new indictments have come as as the war crimes tribunal has accelerated its efforts to bring to justice all those it believes responsible for directing atrocities in the wars of the former Yugoslavia.
Last week Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic led a delegation to The Hague saying his government, which has hitherto refused all co-operation with the tribunal, was 'ready to extradite' the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, now the Hague's most wanted fugitives. Ivanic was given short shrift from Del Ponte, who promptly lambasted the Bosnian Serbs, saying: 'At any given time, the authorities of the Bosnian Serb Republic know, or are in a position to know, the whereabouts of our most wanted fugitives.'
She added: 'It is a well-known fact that at any time, Ratko Mladic has been enjoying the protection of the Bosnian Serb military.'
The potential for embarrassment from the UN war crimes process is not limited to Del Ponte's accusations against the Bosnian Serbs, it also threatens to lay bare the conduct of the international community during a decade of Balkan crises.
Already Slobodan Milosevic has threatened to embarrass at his trial international negotiators he says 'rehabilitated him' in secret deals. And the hunt for Karadzic is threatening to expose French complicity in his evasion of arrest.
The pressure to deliver him falls not only on the Bosnian Serbs but on the French peacekeepers in whose zone he has moved freely for six years since the war's end. Indeed a last-minute French tip-off to Karadzic is alleged to have stymied an attempt by the British SAS to grab him in 1997.
The tribunal regards the capture of Karadzic and Mladic as crucial to the cases it is building, with some officials concerned that a trial of Karazdic and Mladic should precede that of Milosevic.
Karadzic is regarded as the crucial bridge connecting the captive Milosevic to three and a half years of bloodshed in Bosnia.