A popular Croatian general who led a brutal operation that drove the Serbs out of eastern Croatia near the end of the Balkans War went on trial in The Hague on Tuesday for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
General Ante Gotovina, working closely with US advisers, was the commander of a military campaign in the summer of 1995 that put an end to the Serbian occupation of eastern Croatia and forced more than 150,000 Serbs to flee towns and villages where they had lived for generations.
The four-day operation, in the Krajina region, was a turning point in the war, celebrated by Croatia as the heroic recapturing of its homeland and mourned by Serbia as the single largest instance of "ethnic cleansing" of the 1991 to 1995 wars that broke up Yugoslavia.
Prosecutors at the war crimes tribunal, while not disputing Croatia's right to retake its land, have accused Gotovina and his two codefendants, Generals Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac, of crimes including knowingly shelling civilian targets, allowing their forces to go on violent rampages during and after the campaign, terrorizing civilians, and looting and burning Serbian homes.
In his opening statement on Tuesday, prosecutor Alan Tieger said that more than 350 civilians were killed in August and September 1995, most of them not in the heat of the battle, but executed in revenge actions.
Lawyers familiar with the trial believe it may also shed more light on the little-known covert US role took during that decisive Croatian counteroffensive against Serbia.
US military advisers, including retired and active personnel, helped plan the operation, and Americans directed drone aircraft over the battle zone to gain real-time intelligence for Croatian forces, Croatian government officials have said.
The US is not implicated in any of the criminal charges related to the operation.
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