Court Hears Operation Storm Documents Missing

Lawyers of the former Croatian army general Ante Gotovina claim that 95 reports pertaining to events during the Operation Storm military offensive are missing from a European Union, EU, archive.



They say they discovered the key documents were missing after Hague tribunal judges ordered the EU Monitoring Mission to grant the Gotovina defence access to its archives on February 28, 2008.



Gotovina is accused – along with Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac – of ordering the shelling of civilian areas, murdering Serb civilians and destroying their property during and after Operation Storm. About 200,000 Serb civilians are estimated to have fled their homes in the days leading up to the offensive.



Gotovina’s defence lawyer Luka Misetic told IWPR that the files in question are crucial to the case because they can provide insight into “what really happened” during the brief 84-hour offensive, which was launched on August 4, 1995 to retake the Serb-controlled Krajina region of Croatia.



Misetic said that throughout the war, three ECMM teams would write reports chronicling events on the ground each day, which were then sent to regional monitoring centres in Knin and Zagreb, and on to EU headquarters in Brussels.



The daily output was exact, explained Misetic, so it was not difficult to calculate how many reports were missing.



The documents could help to corroborate the defence assertion that Operation Storm was conducted in accordance with international law and that the shelling – particularly in the town of Knin – was not excessive or targeted at civilians, explained Misetic.



“It was the European Union… [which] publicly stated the most serious allegations, that, in fact, there had been an indiscriminate attack against Knin,” Misetic told IWPR. “Now the underlying reports [supporting] that assertion are missing.”



The “serious allegations”, continued Misetic, were originally made by Carl Bildt, who served as the EU special envoy to the former Yugoslavia at the time of Operation Storm.



He has been a vocal critic of the offensive, and was quoted in the Wall Street Journal in 1999 as saying that Operation Storm was "the most efficient ethnic cleansing we've seen in the Balkans”.



Bildt’s assertions contrast with those of Peter Galbraith, the former United States ambassador to Croatia from 1993 to 1998.



He appeared as a witness for the Gotovina prosecution last June and told the court that the shelling of Knin “was relatively brief… not very destructive, and took place in the context of an operation aimed at capturing the town”.



Misetic said that while his team has a few of the ECMM reports drafted between August 4 and 6, all the documents that “would assess the shelling of Knin” are missing.



“We don’t know why,” he said. “We now have access to the archives, but we don’t have a means of investigating why documents are not [there].”



The defence filed a motion on March 20 requesting that judges order Javier Solana, Secretary General of the Council of the European Union, to provide all of the documents requested.



“The European Union has consistently refused to cooperate voluntarily with the Gotovina defence over the past two years,” wrote Misetic in the filing, referring to the fact that they had to request a court order to gain access to the archive.



He further requested that the judges order the EU to open an investigation into what happened to the missing documents if it cannot produce them.



The judges are expected to make a ruling on the matter within the next 10 days.



Cristina Gallach, the spokeswoman for the EU Secretary General, insisted that there is “excellent cooperation” between The Hague Tribunal and the EU.



She added that “all that [the Gotovina defence] has asked for has been provided [to them]”.



When pressed about the missing documents, she declined to comment further, citing the ongoing court proceedings.



Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.