EU tells Croatia to find fugitive general, or forget about joining

By Ian Traynor
THE GUARDIAN , ZAGREB
Saturday, Mar 12, 2005, Page 9

"The EU and Croatia have painted themselves into a corner."

Peter Semneby, head of the Zagreb mission of OSCE

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 government in Zagreb is in a panic as it watches its dream of EU talks, scheduled to open on March 17, dissolve before its eyes. EU governments, amid bitter divisions, are struggling to maintain a consensus on Croatia's bid.

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.

"This is going to be a catastrophe for the government and for the country," says Zarko Puhovski, a Croatian political scientist and human rights activist.

European in Zagreb contest that, but many do say that both Croatia and the EU have managed to contrive an impasse in which everyone is a loser.

"Both the EU and Croatia have painted themselves into a corner," says Peter Semneby, the head of the Zagreb mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). "There is no good way out, just choices between bad and worse."

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 US$5 million 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 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 chronic miscalculation.

Croatian has been tapping the phones of British and American intelligence agents working for Del Ponte in Croatia, exposing their identities, and then claiming that MI6 (British intelligence), the CIA and the tribunal have concocted a plot to discredit Croatia.

Gordan Malic, a prominent Zagreb journalist clandestinely recorded repeatedly speaking to a named British agent, has effectively been accused of treason, though no action has been taken against him.

"You can hide Gotovina from the Croatian government but not from the MI6; it's a serious service," he says. "But I will not help Gotovina. It's the duty of our society, our government, and our media to get the fugitives.

"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 crystallizes 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.

On a private last-ditch mission to London last week, the Croatian foreign minister, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, handed over documents seeking to prove that Zagreb was doing its utmost to get Gotovina.

Denis MacShane, the Europe minister, was not impressed.

"It's unlikely to shift the judgments being made," said the British source.

European 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 defense 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; too little, too late, say the Europeans.

Blacklisted

Former senior government officials have been blacklisted by the EU because of their suspected roles in protecting Gotovina. Del Ponte (in an analysis shared by the British and other EU governments) says Gotovina is being shielded by an ugly coalition of organized crime rings, businessmen, senior military people, government officials and members of the security services, which may be more powerful than the prime minister, Ivo Sanader, and the pro-EU camp in the government.

"The information is leaking very rapidly from those doing the hunting to those in the network," says a senior European official.

"So what is stronger? The [Gotovina] network, or the part of the government that wants to cooperate? That's the key question."

In a seemingly vain attempt to change EU minds, the Croatian government is talking up the risks of an anti-EU backlash if entry negotiations do not open as scheduled on March 17. This tactic looks like another bad miscalculation by Sanader. But the risks are real.

Already opinion support for the EU is plummeting. Rightwing nationalists are mobilizing in expectation of what Semneby of the OSCE predicts will be their "fairly big victory." State television has taken to highlighting disadvantages of EU membership. The EU snub may threaten Sanader, who during 15 months in power has staked all on EU entry talks and now faces his biggest failure.

"Both prime minister Sanader and President [Stipe] Mesic thought they could get Croatia into the EU without transferring Gotovina ... They thought they could play out against Brussels," says the Croatian government official.

"They miscalculated badly. But the west also miscalculated."

Finding Gotovina

General Gotovina, the key Croat on the war crimes tribunal's most wanted list, is a special case, along with the other two most wanted, the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic.

All three have been selected for special treatment and will still be liable to prosecution even after the tribunal in The Hague closes down in 2010.

The two Serbs are accused of much graver crimes than the Croat, of genocide, the gravest crime of all, because of the Srebrenica massacre of up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in July 1995.

It was a month later that General Gotovina commanded the operations against Croatian Serbs that ended the war and resulted in war crimes charges for overseeing atrocities against Serb civilians.

Under US pressure and against the wishes of Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor in The Hague, the tribunal is to close down in 2010, with the last trials mounted in 2008. This helps explain the strong US pressure to arrest Gotovina. The tribunal's credibility and effectiveness will be seriously impaired if it closes without trying the three biggest names on the wanted list.

The trio, however, remain condemned to a life on the run, unlike other suspects not on trial by 2008, who will go free.