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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.
Ah, the Brits, of course, the only big country within the EU with a spine. Now I understand.
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.
Accck! Not Carla Del Ponte again! Doesn't that woman have enough to do in botching Slobo's trial and slowing down all the Rwandan tribunals?
"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 diplomats 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.

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 deep laid plots chronic miscalculation.

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.
Why do we have anyone working for Ms. Del Ponte?
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 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.
Yes, quite.
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 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 except cutting his pension, of course; too little, too late, say the Europeans.
Posted by:Steve White

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Posted by: Charles   2005-03-07 4:30:44 PM  

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Posted by: Aris Katsaris   2005-03-07 3:59:38 PM  

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Posted by: Cleamp Ebbereling9442   2005-03-07 3:49:44 PM  

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Posted by: RWV   2005-03-07 3:43:42 PM  

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Posted by: Aris Katsaris   2005-03-07 11:10:29 AM  

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