Canadians to testify against Croat officers

Canadians to testify against Croat officers: War-crime suspects surrender to UN court at The Hague
The Ottawa Citizen - March 16, 2004

Written by: Steven Edwards

UNITED NATIONS - Two Canadian generals are expected to be called as key witnesses against a pair of Croatian officers who surrendered themselves to the United Nations war crimes court in The Hague yesterday.

Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac, both generals, denied any wrongdoing during military sweeps against Croatia's Serbs that included massive shelling of civilian areas in and around the Serb-filled town of Knin in 1995.

But a different version of events emerged from retired Canadian Maj.-Gen. Alain Forand and Brig.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, who were commanders in a United Nations force charged with monitoring a ceasefire in Croatia. They were there when the Croatian army launched Operation Storm to crush minority Serb resistance to the country's independence from Yugoslavia.

"Cermak boasted to me he was the master planner of all the artillery bombardment," Maj.-Gen. Forand said in a telephone interview. Maj.-Gen. Forand was in charge of the UN's Sector South, which included Knin. "They knew well they were hitting civilian targets because the shelling was so accurate they never hit our camp. The closest -- a dud -- fell about 10 metres away, and all other shells were at least 300 to 400 metres away."

Croatian President Franjo Tudjman appointed Gen. Cermak commander of the Knin garrison in August 1995, the month Operation Storm began. He had appointed Mr. Markac commander of Croatia's "Special Police" a year earlier. "After they retook the sector, I wrote to Cermak to complain about the looting, and the burning of houses, and about civilians being shot in the head. But he did nothing," Maj.-Gen. Forand said.

Gen. Cermak, 54, and Mr. Markac, 48, are accused of the murder of civilians, plunder, damage and outright destruction of Serb property. Their surrender marks the first act of compliance with the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia since a new government took office in December.

Co-operation with The Hague is a key condition of Zagreb's bid to start European Union entry talks next year. Croatia's national anthem was played as 200 war veterans and friends gave the Croat generals an emotional send-off at Zagreb airport yesterday. "I feelit is my duty to prove that I am innocent and that the charge is absurd and unjust," said Gen. Cermak.

Gen. Cermak and Gen. Markac are expected to plead not guilty today before being released pending trial. Operation Storm's overall commander, Gen. Ante Gotovina, remains at large.

The UN court, accused since its launch in 1993 of being inefficient, took until last month to indict the pair. UN investigators lost transcripts of their 1996 and 1997 interviews with Maj.-Gen. Forand, and had to return to Canada to repeat the process in 1999. "I thought if this is the calibre of people that they send, I am not very impressed," Maj.-Gen. Forand said.

The investigators also interviewed Brig.-Gen. Leslie, a colonel in 1995 who recently led Canadian forces in Afghanistan. The charges reflect both men's testimony. Croatia launched Operation Storm after the mainly Serb population of Krajina, where Knin is located, voted overwhelmingly in a referendum for integration with Serbs in Bosnia and Serbia. The military sweep resulted in the expulsion of 200,000 Serbs from their homes.

Maj.-Gen. Forand reflected the common Serb complaint that the fate of the Krajinan Serbs is one of the forgotten stories of "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. "No one seemed to care about the Croatian Serbs because the international (community) had already depicted Serbs as the bad guys for what was happening elsewhere" in the Balkans, he said.

The indictment says the two accused "had a duty to restore ... order," but instead oversaw the murder of "at least 150 Krajinan Serbs," and subjected other Serbs to "inhumane treatment, humiliation and degradation by Croatian forces that beat and assaulted them." Croatian forces also "systematically ... destroyed villages, homes, outbuildings and barns belonging to Krajina Serbs, killed their livestock and spoiled their wells."

Brig.-Gen. Leslie told UN investigators Knin contained a handful of military targets, but only about 250 of the 3,000 shells fired at the city hit them.