Ante Gotovina (born 12 October 1955) is a Croatian retired lieutenant general and former French senior corporal who served in the Croatian War for Independence. He is noted for his primary role in the 1995 Operation Storm. In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted him on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges in connection with that operation and its aftermath. After spending four years in hiding, he was captured in the Canary Islands in December 2005. After the 2011 sentence, following an appeal Gotovina was subsequently acquitted and freed of all charges against him in November 2012.
On 15 April 2011, Gotovina was found guilty on 8 of the 9 counts of the indictment and sentenced to 24 years of imprisonment. On 16 November 2012, Gotovina's convictions were overturned by an appeals panel at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and he was released from custody.
Ante Gotovina was born in Tkon on the island of Pašman. His father Milan tried to move with his mother to Italy, but was caught by the Yugoslav border police. His mother was released while his father spent time in prison. When Gotovina was nearly four, his mother was killed saving him from an explosion at a construction site. Subsequently, his father went to work in Zagreb, while Gotovina and his siblings went to live with their maternal grandfather Šime in Pakoštane. Around Easter of 1971, Gotovina and his friend Srećko tried to escape by sailing away. Rough seas caused by a storm forced them back and they soon returned to Pakoštane. Gotovina kept his escape attempt from his family and continued to attend school for electrical engineering in Zadar.
At the age of sixteen, Gotovina left home to become a sailor. In 1973, before turning eighteen, he joined the French Foreign Legion under the pseudonym of Andrija Grabovac and became a member of the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e REP) after qualifying at the Training School in Pau before joining the elite Commandos de Recherche et d'Action en Profondeur (CRAP) now renamed as Parachute Commando Group (GCP). It was there he met Dominique Erulin, brother of the Colonel Philippe Erulin, who became his friend and partner in future missions. In the next few years, he participated in Foreign Legion operations in Djibouti, the Battle of Kolwezi in Zaire, and missions in the Ivory Coast, becoming Colonel Erulin's driver. After five years of service, he left the Legion with the rank of caporal-chef; he obtained French citizenship in 1979.
He subsequently worked for a variety of French private security companies during the 1980s, among them KO International Company, a filial or subsidiary of VHP Security, known as a cover for the Service d'Action Civique (SAC), and was at this time responsible for the security of far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. In 1981, together with Dominique Erulin, he helped editor Jean-Pierre Mouchard (a close friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen) organize a commando operation to free his press in La Seyne-sur-Mer, occupied by CGT trade-union strikers.
According to French police records, he became involved in criminal activities, which led to arrest warrants being issued for robbery and extortion; it has been reported that he served at least one two-year prison sentence, though this has been denied by his attorneys.
Towards the end of the decade, he moved to South America, where he provided training to a number of right-wing paramilitary organizations, notably in Argentina and Guatemala. He met his first wife Ximena Dalel in Colombia, and they had a daughter.
Arrested during a trip to France, he was sentenced in 1986 to five years in prison by Paris' Cour d'assises. He was freed the following year, "in circumstances showing he had been benefiting from very particular protections".
Dominique Erulin disputed the verdict against Gotovina and himself, and claims Gotovina's criminal record was manufactured by left-wing factions allied with President François Mitterrand. Gotovina's lawyers submitted a brief to the International War Crimes Tribunal alleging that Gotovina had been framed by an alleged criminal police group loyal to François Mitterrand.
Gotovina returned to Croatia in 1991, at the dawn of Croatian War of Independence, and enlisted in the Croatian National Guard (ZNG), the first organized military body of what would later become the Croatian Army. He was an efficient commander and had the advantage – shared by relatively few other Croatian soldiers – of combat experience. He fought in western Slavonia: in Novska and Nova Gradiška, attached to the 1st Guards Brigade. He soon caught the attention of his superiors, and when the Croatian Army was established as such in 1992, Gotovina was promoted to the rank of colonel. As a colonel, he was one of the main organizers of Operation Maslenica, which restored Croatia's territorial continuity in Dalmatia.
By 1994, he had risen to the rank of major-general and, as a general-pukovnik and commanding officer of the Split military district he organized key military operations: the defense of Livno and Tomislavgrad from the troops of Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić, and the ten-month war of attrition which broke the Serb defenses in the Plain of Livno, the Dinara Ridge and the Šator mountain. He led the conquest of Glamoč and Bosansko Grahovo (Operation Summer '95), which enabled him to close from the east the encirclement of Knin, the capital of the self-declared (1991–95) Republic of Serbian Krajina. This ensured conditions for the rapid success of Operation Oluja ("Storm") in 4–6 August 1995, during which forces under his command captured Knin.
Gotovina was then immediately put in charge of the combined forces of the Croatian Army (Hrvatska Vojska or HV) and the Croatian Defense Council in Bosnia (Hrvatsko Vijeće Obrane or HVO) in Operation Mistral 2, which defeated the army of the Bosnian Serbs and led the Croatian army, together with the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina, within 23 kilometres of Banja Luka and was only stopped under American pressure.
In 1996, he became the chief of the Army Inspectorate. In September 2000, he was a signatory to the Twelve Generals' Letter in which the government of Ivica Račan was criticised. Together with some of the other generals, he was forced to retire by president Stjepan Mesić, with an explanation that military officers shouldn't write political letters if not approved by the supreme commander.
Flight and attendant political controversies
In July 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) issued sealed indictments to the Croatian government seeking the arrest of Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed between 4 August 1995 and 15 November 1995. Gotovina was indicted together with Markač, a former commander of the special police of Croatia's interior ministry, and Ivan Čermak, assistant defense minister from 1991 to 1993. The three were accused of "aiding and abetting the murders of 324 Krajina Serb civilians and prisoners of war by shooting, burning and/or stabbing" them and "forcibly displacing almost 90,000 Serb civilians". Gotovina was charged with five counts of crimes against humanity (persecutions, deportation, inhumane acts, murder) and four counts of violations of the laws or customs of war (plunder, wanton destruction, murder, cruel treatment). He denied all charges.
For four years, 2001–2005, Gotovina remained at large despite intense pressure from the United States and the European Union for his surrender. Foreign countries sought to hunt down Gotovina, and an Interpol warrant was issued for his arrest. The United States announced a $5 million (€4.2 million) reward for his capture. The British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was reported in Croatian media in 2004 to have been allowed to import sophisticated monitoring equipment to track down Gotovina. This caused resentment among elements of Croatia's security establishment; as a result, MI6 officers based in Croatia under cover were exposed in the Croatian media, allegedly at the behest of Gotovina's sympathisers in Croatia's counter-intelligence service, the POA (Protuobavještajna agencija). Prior to that, a number of Croatian security officials were sacked, including POA head Franjo Turek, who was replaced by Joško Podbevšek and shortly afterwards by Tomislav Karamarko. The wiretapping operation went ahead after Turek's retirement in March 2004, under his successor at the POA, but failed to locate Gotovina before a deadline set by the Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader in June 2004. According to a leaked memo from MI6 to the POA, the UK government had called for Turek's arrest, unless he started to cooperate on Gotovina.