CROATIA:A CROATIAN offensive to retake a Serb-held enclave in 1995 had US backing and ultimately brought peace to former Yugoslavia, lawyers for former Croatian general Ante Gotovina said yesterday.
In what is arguably the most important trial staged at the UN war crimes tribunal since Slobodan Milosevic died in custody in The Hague two years ago, Gen Gotovina faces nine counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
He went on trial on Tuesday charged with orchestrating a campaign of murder and plunder to drive up to 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina region in Croatia, declared a Serb republic by ethnic Serbs in 1991.
Prosecutors said Gen Gotovina and his fellow accused - generals Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac - were responsible for the killing of hundreds of Serbs and the shelling and torching of towns as Croatian forces retook the Krajina region in 1995.
"Operation Storm", the Croats' military offensive to reclaim Krajina, was designed to expel Serbs and ensure they had nothing to which they could return, they added, leaving behind a wasteland of destroyed villages and homes.
All three have pleaded not guilty.
The campaign meant "the end for many Serbs of their lives on ancestral homelands", said the prosecutor, Alan Tieger, opening the case on Tuesday.
Mr Tieger said former Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, an authoritarian nationalist, dubbed the Serb minority "a cancer on the underbelly of Croatia", and told Gen Gotovina that the offensive would mean "the Serbs will, to all practical purposes, disappear".
The prosecutor said: "The Serb community was a scarred wasteland." For the Croats the 72-hour blitz was well-planned military brilliance that routed the Serb forces. Gen Gotovina was a key commander of the operation that led to the Croatian victory. The US was closely involved in it; the CIA used spy planes to expose Serbian plans.
Gen Gotovina's defence lawyers said attacks were not excessive and Operation Storm had the backing of the US. It sought to thwart advancing Bosnian Serbs who aimed to join Krajina with a "Greater Serbia" across former Yugoslavia.
"What is the bad act that Gen Gotovina committed?" asked defence counsel Luka Misetic.
The defence contrasted footage of the devastation wrought by Serbs on Croatian towns such as Vukovar with what they described as the minimal shelling of Krajina towns such as Knin.
They also played a video interview with a Catholic bishop who explained how Gen Gotovina had come to see him to seek guidance on Catholic teachings about ethical conduct in warfare.
"There was one person that brought about the demise of the Bosnian Serb army with Ratko Mladic at its helm . . . and brought the carnage in the former Yugoslavia to an end," defence counsel Gregory Kehoe told the court, gesturing to 52-year-old Gotovina.
"This was a man who never lost sight of what he thought was right or wrong in leading his men in battle."
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander Ratko Mladic, the tribunal's two top war crimes suspects who are indicted for genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, are still on the run.
Mr Kehoe said Gen Gotovina's defeat of the Bosnian Serbs brought them to the negotiating table and helped end a Serb "reign of terror". As an operational commander, he was not responsible for activities going on behind the front line, he added.
Years of international pressure on Croatia to deliver its last war crimes suspect ended in 2005 with Gen Gotovina's seizure in Spain's Canary Isles as he ate a scampi supper. He had been sheltered by associates in the Croatian security services and underworld, foiling efforts to seize him masterminded by Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. He was tracked down through a mobile phone call to Zagreb from Spain in 2005.
His capture triggered large protests in Croatia, where many see Gen Gotovina as a war hero, but also an invitation to Zagreb to start EU accession talks.
The mountainous Krajina region, which skirts the borders of Bosnia in southern and central Croatia, had been heavily settled by ethnic Serbs for centuries.
After Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, they drove out about 80,000 Croats in a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" that has also led to convictions in the Hague.
Now just over a quarter of Krajina's ethnic Serb population have returned. Most of those who have not blame poverty and discrimination. The EU has called on Zagreb to do more on minority rights.