UN prosecutor says Vatican aiding war criminal

ISN SECURITY WATCH (21/09/05) - The UN’s chief war crimes prosecutor for the former Yugoslavia, Carla del Ponte, suggested on Monday that Croat war crimes suspect General Ante Gotovina was hiding out in one of the country’s Catholic monasteries and blamed the Vatican for aiding and abetting a fugitive.

“I have information he [Gotovina] is hiding in a Franciscan monastery and so the Catholic Church is protecting him. I have taken this up with the Vatican and the Vatican refuses totally to cooperate with us,” Del Ponte told the British Daily Telegraph.

She said the Vatican could determine Gotovina’s exact location within a few days, but had failed to cooperate with the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Del Ponte had apparently decided to publicly chastise the Vatican after her growing disappointment over the Roman Catholic Church’s reluctant to cooperate.

On Tuesday, Croatia's Catholic Church denied it was sheltering Gotovina and said it had no knowledge as to his whereabouts.

“We reject the accusations of Carla Del Ponte against the Holy See and the Catholic Church in Croatia,” Church spokesman Anton Suljic told reporters.

Suljic took his statement further, publicly attacking the ICTY chief prosecutor.

“We believe that they [accusations] bring a whole series of unacceptable theses, which are unusual even for colloquial conversations, not to mention such a high institution that she represents,” he said.

The Catholic Church in Croatia has made no secret about its sentiments towards the retired general who is wanted for war crimes against Serb civilians in Croatia in the 1990s. In a recent public statement, Croatian Bishop Mile Bogovic referred to Gotovina as a “hero” and said his prosecution was politically motivated.

“This is not about Gotovina himself, but as a symbol of resistance against Serbian aggression … the Hague tribunal wants to humiliate Croats, its victims and its fight,” Bogovic told local media.

General Gotovina, a former French foreign legion officer, is accused of being responsible for the murder of at least 150 Serb civilians and of being in charge of the forced deportations of between 150,000 and 200,000 people in 1995. The majority of Croats view him as a national hero.

In July, del Ponte traveled to Rome to share her intelligence with the Vatican’s “foreign minister”, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo.

According to del Ponte, he refused to help, reportedly telling her the Vatican was not a state and thus had “no international obligations” to help the UN hunt war criminals.

Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader said he was at a loss to determine who was del Ponte’s source for information that Gotovina was hiding out in a monastery, and said the government had no such intelligence.

“Each prosecutor would like to see the indicted one captured, and we can understand that. But I am not sure if what she is saying is true or if it just reflects her desires,” Sanader told a press conference in the Croatian capital, Zagreb.

More than a year ago, Croatian police received information that Gotovina was hiding in a certain monastery but the government later said the tip-off appeared to be false.

Del Ponte has also repeatedly accused the Serbian Orthodox Church of sheltering Europe’s most-wanted war crimes suspect, Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic.

Del Ponte and Bosnian media have claimed that Karadzic has sought shelter in Orthodox churches in Montenegro and eastern Bosnia, which is dominated by Bosnian Serbs and borders Serbia proper. Church officials denied the accusations, but conceded that Karadzic would be a welcome guest.

As far as Gotovina is concerned, Del Ponte has been pressing Zagreb for months on information on his whereabouts.

Cooperation with the ICTY is one of the conditions for Croatia to begin EU membership talks, which were originally supposed to begin in March but were postponed after member states decided that Zagreb had not been fully cooperative.

Since then, Zagreb has pledged to raid any monastery sheltering the general, but the Vatican is refusing to assist in narrowing down which of Croatia’s 80 monasteries is allegedly offering him refuge. (By Anes Alic in Sarajevo)

The Croatian argument is that the Croat government took back land that had been illegally confiscated from Croats by the Serb-favoring, Serb-majority government of Yugoslavia. They also argue that the 150 individuals referred to were not civilians, but members of an armed partisan group.

The Serb argument is that the Croatian government took land which was legally Serb, since the government of Communist Yugoslavia was the legitimate government at the time and that some of the land in question had previously been inhabited by Serbs centuries before, and that other portions of the land had been Serb before the Pavelic regime. They also argue that the 150 people mentioned were noncombatant civilians.

I'll also point out that the Roman Catholic Church does not have full control over the Franciscan order in Croatia - a large portion of the order in Croatia broke with the local bishops in the early 90s and have refused to even let the bishops or their representatives set foot in a number of Franciscan friaries.

Ante Gotovina From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. General Ante Gotovina in his army uniform General Ante Gotovina in his army uniform Ante Gotovina (born October 12, 1955) is a Croatian professional soldier and currently a fugitive general. Gotovina was born on the island of Pašman near Zadar. He was a member of the French Foreign Legion beginning in the early 1970s. When the war in Croatia began in 1991, he became a commander in the Croatian Army. He advanced from brigadier in 1992 to major general in 1994. He was the commanding officer of the Split military district between 1992 and 1996; including the 1995 Operation Storm. In 1996 he became the Chief of the Croatian Army Inspectorate, but was dismissed from the active service in 2000. Gotovina was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 2001 for crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war that the court claims troops under his command committed over the Serbs in the self-proclaimed Krajina region during and after Operation Storm (during which the Serb-occupied territories of Croatia were restored). Gotovina, however, fled and remains at large, reportedly out of reach of both Croatian authorities and the Interpol. Rumours abound as to his present whereabouts. Some suggest he is hiding out in Franciscan monasteries in Bosnia and Herzegovina, others that he is in Ireland, some say Austria. A suitcase with personal items and news clips had been found in southern Italy allegedly meant for Gotovina, but the authorities could not confirm this. Gotovina has also been linked to several organized crime groups, notably those helping one Hrvoje Petrač who is wanted for questioning on unrelated matters. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands and some Scandinavian states currently oppose Croatian ambitions to join the European Union if the Croatian Government does not fully cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal. The Croatian government has declared that it does not know the current location of Gotovina and that the authorities are doing their utmost to find the General and to extradite him to the Tribunal. Accession negotiations with the EU, scheduled to start on March 17, 2005, were postponed because Gotovina was not located. President Stjepan Mesić commented that the Croatian accession to the EU cannot be delayed indefinitely because of Gotovina, because if he was one day found in Patagonia, the injustice and the irrepairable damage to Croatian reputation and economy would already have been done. Mesić did point out that if the Croatian government had any clues whether Gotovina is on Patagonia or anywhere else, that it was its duty to promptly submit it to the ICTY investigators. Amongst the Croatian population, Gotovina is seen in certain circles as a meritorious character of the war. Croatians are divided over the issue of extradition to the ICTY because of several issues: whether trying an important general casts a shadow on what is mostly perceived as a just and lawful operation Storm, and on the other hand whether it's correct to flee from a legal institution when others in similar position (such as general Rahim Ademi) have submitted themselves to the authorities. Furthermore, the extreme right in Croatia has portrayed Gotovina as a hero, not only because of his war actions, but also because he ran from a court and avoided being extradited while the left-wing coalition was in power. They consider him a leader and adore him, similar to a cult of personality. Many individuals and parties use hostility towards the ICTY to benefit their public support numbers. Many posters of Ante Gotovina have been placed on privately-owned land in Croatia, mostly by veteran unions. In the region of his origin, in and around Zadar, even the buildings owned by city government were plastered with Gotovina's pictures at one point. Some posters have been removed by the authorities, while some were subject to vandalism. The newspapers in Croatia have also investigated into Gotovina's whereabouts, and the editor of Nacional Ivo Pukanić claims to have met him on an undisclosed location in the EU, and that weekly published an interview in 2003 from that occasion. In 2003, the weekly Feral Tribune ran a story about Gotovina quoting several French court records saying that Gotovina was convicted of a 1981 robbery and that he served five years in prison between 1986 and 1991. In February 2005 the Croatian daily Jutarnji list published facsimiles of those documents. There is some discussion whether, as a former member of the French Foreign Legion, Gotovina was during this time in the employ of François Mitterrand's extra-legal secret service. Another document stated that in 1993 he was convicted to two years in prison due to participation in an unlawful arrest, kidnapping and extortion, and another yet said that he was sentenced to 30 months for extortion in 1995. Gotovina's attorneys denied these allegations saying that the documents are falsified because he was given a French passport in 1995 and had it renewed in 2001, something the French authorities would never have done had he actually been a convicted criminal on the run.

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