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| Europe | ||||
| EU flexes muscles against ... Croatia | ||||
| 2005-03-07 | ||||
The crimes of Croatia's past are holding the country's future hostage, a decade after the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia. Croatia's most wanted war crimes suspect, a 49-year-old general, has been on the run for almost four years. Unless he is located and arrested within 10 days, the EU, in a policy shaped mainly by Britain, will refuse to open membership negotiations with Croatia.
The US is pressing the EU to stay tough with the Croats. The British government is leading the EU hard line and, if need be, will block any moves to open talks. The referee in the dispute, Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor in The Hague, looks certain to declare that Croatia is not cooperating properly with the tribunal, meaning Zagreb cannot open talks.
According to the spies and diplomats trying to find him, General Ante Gotovina is a thug on the run with friends in high places in Croatia. He has a $5m bounty on his head and has been convicted in France of bank robbery, extortion, and kidnapping. But to four out of five Croats, the 49-year-old fugitive military officer and ex-foreign legionnaire is a war hero, the officer who commanded a 72-hour blitz campaign 10 years ago that won Croatia's four-year war against the Serbs. According to prosecutors at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Gotovina followed that military triumph by overseeing the murder of dozens of elderly civilians, the torching of their properties, and the "ethnic cleansing" of some 150,000 Serbs: crimes against humanity that make him the third most wanted suspect on the tribunal's list. Gotovina is nowhere to be found. Just before he was indicted in July 2001, Croatian government insiders tipped him off, and he vanished. The story of the subsequent battle of wits between Croatia and Europe entails murky espionage activities, a vicious media war, misinformation, and Croatian counter-intelligence has been tapping the phones of British and American intelligence agents working for Ms Del Ponte in Croatia, exposing their identities, and then claiming that MI6, the CIA and the tribunal have concocted a plot to discredit Croatia.
"Croatia does not yet deserve to be a European country. It's a question of the rule of law." That is pretty much the British position. "You can't dine a la carte on the rule of law," says one British source. "Gotovina crystallises a lot of issues about the rule of law which need to be addressed." If Britain has taken the lead role in shaping EU policy on Croatia, the position is controversial. At a closed meeting of EU ambassadors in Zagreb last week, the envoy from Austria - strongly pro-Croatia - rounded fiercely on the British, European diplomats say. "The British invented pragmatism, but now they're behaving like the Spanish Inquisition, squeezing the last drop of blood from us," says a senior Croatian official.
European diplomats and Croatian officials also claim Britain is doing Washington's bidding. Croatia got a green light for EU talks just under a year ago, a decision that the US opposed. Late last year the US administration told all EU governments that it "strongly believes" there should be no EU entry talks with Croatia until Gotovina is in the dock in The Hague. "The Americans have certainly made it clear that cooperation with the tribunal is very important to them," say British sources. The reason for the US insistence, say European diplomats, is that Washington has strong intelligence incriminating the Croatian government, which for years has been half-hearted at best and duplicitous at worst on the Gotovina case. It was only last week that the Croatian authorities put the general on the wanted list. The defence ministry continues to pay him his military pension. For months the government has been resisting EU pressure to freeze Gotovina's assets. The government argues vehemently it is doing everything to track down Gotovina | ||||
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #5 This could just be Al-Guardian trying to draw a US connection in case anything goes wrong. |
| Posted by: Charles 2005-03-07 4:30:44 PM |
| #4 Currently, USA is urging that EU membership be used as a means to pressure Croatia to cooperate with an international courts tribunal. If people who loathe both the EU and international courts tribunals (claiming them both useless or worse-than-useless) don't see the irony in that, I have nothing to say. |
| Posted by: Aris Katsaris 2005-03-07 3:59:38 PM |
| #3 What Aris and his ink don't recognize is the willingness of our governement and military to investigate incidents and charges of wrong doing by our own people. I doubt there is a comparative record of any other government doing as much to insure justice occurs effectively inhouse. We are already seeing reliefs [firings] and convictions of American personnel for actions which occurred less than two years ago. Where's the progress on crimes in the Balkans? Still mired in politics and pseudo-due process. We act, you talk. |
| Posted by: Cleamp Ebbereling9442 2005-03-07 3:49:44 PM |
| #2 Aris, America has no dog in this fight. We don't recognize the authority of the ICC and aren't particularly fond of most of the commanders of ethnic forces in the Balkans. That said, the ICC is a terribly flawed idea and should be left to wither away. The concept of crimes against humanity is just something that winners use to justify executing losers. That an international body can arbitrarily bring charges without any enforcement capability is an exercise in rhetoric and futility. I don't see the ICC bringing any actions against the UN peacekeepers who aided and abetted the slaughter in Rwanda. Nor for that matter, do I see any actions forthcoming against the heroic Belgians who abandoned the Tutsis to their fate and beat feet back to Belgium when danger threatened. |
| Posted by: RWV 2005-03-07 3:43:42 PM |
| #1 "The Americans have certainly made it clear that cooperation with the tribunal is very important to them" After all America has *always* supported international criminal courts, hasn't it? |
| Posted by: Aris Katsaris 2005-03-07 11:10:29 AM |