Former Croatian general Ante Gotovina in 1999 in Zagreb.
Indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, the former Croatian general Ante Gotovina has been on the lam for four years. He is blamed for the murder of 150 civilians by troops under his command, during the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Gotovina is also held responsible for the forced deportation of up to 200,000 Serbs living in the Krajina region of Croatia in 1995. His efforts during the country’s war for independence have made him extremely popular in Croatia, but his flight presented one of the biggest hurdles to Croatia’s desire to join the Europe Union.
Brussels had made Gotovina's capture a main condition for starting membership talks, which finally started in October. German newspaper commentators believe his arrest should greatly help Zagreb in its ambitions to join the EU.
The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wonders whether chief UN prosecutor Carla Del Ponte already knew that the police were closing in on Gotovina when she recently presented her positive report on Croatia’s cooperation. “So maybe there wasn’t a link between the EU ministers’ haggling over Turkey and Croatia? The only thing that is certain is that (Croatian Prime Minister Ivo) Sanader’s government tried to resolve the Gotovina case -- the last political hurdle on the path towards the EU -- as quickly as possible,” the paper writes. The FAZ takes heart in the fact that Zagreb appears to be giving priority to the rule of law over the populist temptation of taking people’s nationalist feelings into consideration. That is new in Croatia and shows that it is fit for Europe, opines the paper.
The left-wing Frankfurter Runschau isn’t quite so generous to Zagreb, arguing that much of the progress should be credited to Brussels. “Above all, the arrest of one of the main suspects for the Yugoslavia tribunal is a success for the European Union. The arrest of Gotovina shows that the EU’s Balkan strategy is working,” contends the paper, adding that whoever wants to be a member must credibly show that they belong to the European community of values. “Europe has thus demonstrated that there cannot be gray areas in international law.”
Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung also believes the arrest brings Croatia a major step closer to joining the European Union, but the paper warns that the country still hasn’t completely dealt with the darker chapters of its past. “This will ease the country’s path into the EU. However, not all Croats have come to terms with the war's past. Many still venerate the commanders of operation 'Storm' that re-conquered Croatian territory in 1995.” And the paper points out that the war crimes trial will be uncomfortable for Zagreb, because it could show that the military campaign was criminal expulsion.
Berlin-based Der Tagesspiegel is also concerned there is more work to do in convincing Croatians that Gotovina is not the national hero he is often still made out to be. “Zagreb’s political elites also contended Gotovina was ‘abroad’ and nobody knew where he was. But hardly any critical observers believed the denials from the government of premier Ivo Sanader,” writes the paper, explaining that such talk means little when billboards across Croatia have often featured large pictures making Gotovina out to be a national idol. “Veterans' groups and parts of the Catholic Church have always defended the suspected mass-murderer.”
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