The acquittal of two Croatian generals at the Appeals Council in The Hague removes responsibility from the regime of Franjo Tudjman from the 90s and has enormous significance for international law, writes the British newspaper Guardian on its website today.
In almost 20 years of gathering evidence about events in the Balkan wars, the Hague Tribunal has issued several judgments that shape contemporary international law and form the identities of the countries that emerged from the former Yugoslavia, the commentary to the judgment says. The biggest such verdict is that the Serbs committed genocide in Srebrenica in 1995, and the historically important decision is that rape is a war crime and was an instrument of Serbian terror against civilians.
The successful appeal of the two Croatian generals will go down in history as the third such judgment, according to the Guardian's editor for Europe.
Until today, Operation "Storm" - the military offensive in August 1995 that ended the war with the Serbs and brought victory and independence to Croatia - was labeled as a war crime. The myth of the founding of Croatian statehood was thus tarnished, the text states.
The Appeals Chamber of the Hague Tribunal acquitted Generals Anta Gotovina and Mladen Markač of the persecution of the Serbian population from Kninska Krajina in 1995, overturning the first-instance verdict by which Gotovina was sentenced to 24 years in prison and Markač to 18 years in prison.
At Gotovina's trial, the fate of one man was not decided, the Guardian states and adds that the first-instance verdict incriminated the entire regime of President Franjo Tuđman from the 90s and destroyed the Croatian myth about its founding, its liberation war.
The trial of Gotovina was a kind of trial of Tuđman's regime, the text states. The verdict also said that the same regime deliberately planned a systematic campaign of terror and violence with the aim of liberating Croatia from the Serbian minority, which caused up to 200.000 Serbs to flee Croatia. The decision of the appellate court radically changes everything. The judges of the appellate panel have now ruled that the Croatian shelling of four towns held by Serbs in Dalmatia was not illegal, and having established this, they concluded that there was no planned deportation of the Serbian minority and that there was no joint criminal mastermind or political conspiracy by a cold-blooded leadership. planned an ethnic pogrom, the text states.
At the first trial Tudjman's regime was incriminated, now he has been acquitted. The result is joy in Zagreb and bitterness in Belgrade.
There was also bitterness among two of the five judges on the bench who disagreed with the decision. Arguments will continue to be made, but it is unlikely that there will be another verdict that will overturn this one, allowing Croatia to say that the Serbs won in a fair and square manner, the text concludes.
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