Crimes committed in a just cause

Last week, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found former Croatian General Ante Gotovina and a fellow officer, Mladen Markac, guilty of war crimes during the Yugoslav Wars. The news has been greeted with dismay in Croatia. Tens of thousands of war veterans and citizens rallied under the slogan “For the Country” in Zagreb’s main square, Trg Bana Jelacica, over the weekend to express their outrage against the verdicts. The Croatian government has followed suit, calling the verdict “unacceptable” and vowing to “do everything in our power to change it.”

The verdicts are understandably difficult for some Croats to bear. Their struggle for independence against Serbia has, like all such conflicts, been shrouded in mythology, and it is difficult for some to accept that while the Croatian struggle may have been right and justified, its execution was illegal, cost many civilian lives and amounted to a war crime. Two hundred thousand Serbs were forced to flee their homes and 324 civilians were killed by “shooting, burning and/or stabbing” by General Gotovina’s forces in the summer of 1995.

General Gotovina was convicted on nine counts, including murder, deportation, persecution and inhuman acts. He had a fair trial and was well defended. There can be no doubt about his guilt. The sooner the Croatian government accepts this and moves on, the quicker it will build a democratic society and join the European Union. The longer they refuse to accept the crimes of the past, the longer they will remain outside of Europe’s gates.

But the ICTY verdict is not only important for Croatia; it has broader implications. Croatia’s war-time leaders have now either died or been convicted in The Hague. Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic is dead and Radovan Karadzic is in The Hague but Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader and the man most guilty of the Srebrenic massacre, remains at large. General Gotovina’s verdict should make the Serbian government redouble efforts to capture General Mladic.

Further afield, governments and rebel movements around the world should take notice of the Gotovina verdict and its import: namely, that even justified struggles have to be conducted legally.