Israel ground war in Egypt?

[Jan Klimkowski]

Israeli air strikes hit media centres in Gaza City

Six injured as strikes target buildings housing media organisations including Sky News, al-Arabiya and al-Quds TV

The ethnic cleansing will not be televised.

In and of itself a war crime.

I was wondering why Bibi & his henchmen were threatening their quisling leader, Abbas. Apparently, if Abbas' move to get Palestine "observer status" at the UN succeeds, Israeli war crimes could be referred to the International Criminal Court.

That said, I still don't know why Bibi is worried. The International Criminal Court just revealed itself as totally bought and paid for by declaring the Croatian ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Krajina, masterminded by American private military contractors, as legitimate:

War crimes convictions of two Croatian generals overturned

Croatia celebrates release of Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac, but Serbian prosecutor calls appeal ruling 'scandalous'
Julian Borger in The Hague

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 November 2012 12.50 GMT



Ante Gotovina, left, and Mladen Markac. Photograph: Bas Czerwinski/AFP/Getty


An appeal court at The Hague war crimes tribunal has overturned the convictions of two Croatian generals for the expulsion of ethnic Serbs in 1995, in a ruling hailed in Croatia as a vindication of its war of independence but denounced in Serbia as evidence of bias.

The court ordered the immediate release of Ante Gotovina, a former military commander, and Mladen Markac, a former head of special police, who had been serving jail sentences of 24 and 18 years respectively.

The verdict revealed deep divisions inside the tribunal. It threw out last year's trial verdict on the two men, but only by a 3-2 majority. The two dissenting justices were scathing. One called it "simply grotesque" and contradictory to "any sense of justice".

The two generals remained impassive as the verdicts were read out but the decision was greeted with cheers and applause in the public seats in the chamber and with celebrations around Croatia, where Gotovina is seen as a national hero and an embodiment of the country's fight for independence. Thousands of people took to the streets and children were sent home from schools. After collecting their prison possessions, the two generals were driven in Croatian government cars to Rotterdam airport for the flight back to Zagreb.

Croatia's president, Ivo Josipovic, said: "The verdict confirms everything that we believe in Croatia: that Generals Gotovina and Markac are innocent."

Gotovina's defence lawyer, Greg Kehoe, said the appeal verdict demonstrated that Croatia's Operation Storm in 1995 to regain control over the last Serb-run enclaves on its territory had been entirely legitimate under international law.

"This judgment vindicates that operation as a proper and just attempt to bring back that land into Croatia. More importantly, it vindicates what kind of soldier General Gotovina was," Kehoe said.

The appeal verdict caused outrage in Serbia, where President Tomislav Nikolic condemned the verdict as "political" adding it "will open old wounds."

Early reports suggested Serb officials may boycott an event planned by the Hague tribunal next week in Belgrade.

By mostly majority verdicts the judges said the original trial had erred significantly in ruling that Croatian artillery had illegally shelled four Serb-held towns Knin, Benkovac, Gracac and Obrovac. In particular, it found that the criteria used that any shell that landed more than 200 metres away from a military target must have been fired indiscriminately was arbitrary and "devoid of any specific reasoning".

More controversially, the majority verdict said that there had been no "joint criminal enterprise", or conspiracy, to force out the Serbs from the Krajina region. An estimated 20,000 fled their homes and 600 were killed, many in summary executions.

In one of the two dissenting verdicts, Fausto Pocar, argued there was much more evidence presented at last year's trial to suggest that one of the aims of Operation Storm was to force the Serbs out, including transcripts of a meeting on the island of Brijuni just before it was launched, presided over by the then Croatian leader, Franjo Tudjman.

Pocar wrote that the majority view on the Brijuni meeting was "simply grotesque."

The defence lawyer, Kehoe said. "There were crimes, very heinous crimes that need to prosecuted." But he said that by vindicating the conduct of Operation Storm, the tribunal had "put itself on the right side of the rule of law".

The tribunal, set up by the UN in 1993, has been repeatedly criticised for the slow pace of its proceedings. The fact that Gotovina spent almost seven years in prison in The Hague between his arrest by Spanish police in Tenerife and Friday's ruling islikely to bring fresh scrutiny.

Croatia's 'war crime' is no longer a crime after UN tribunal verdict

Successful appeal in The Hague exonerates 1990s regime of Franco Tudjman and has huge significance for international law

Ian Traynor, Europe editor

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 November 2012 16.42 GMT

Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac hugging their lawyers after being acquitted at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Photograph: Ho/AFP/Getty Images


In almost 20 years of amassing evidence on the rights and wrongs of the Balkan wars, the UN tribunal in The Hague has delivered several verdicts shaping modern international law and informing the identities of the countries that emerged from Yugoslavia.

That the Serbs perpetrated an act of genocide at Srebrenica in July 1995 is the biggest. That rape is a war crime and was an instrument of Serbian terror against civilians is another landmark. And the successful appeal of two former Croatian military and police officers will go down as a third.

Until Friday Operation Storm the military offensive in August 1995 that ended four years of war with the Serbs and gave Croatia victory and independence had been termed a war crime. The foundation myth of Croatian statehood was sullied.

Generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac were last year sentenced to 24 and 18 years.

Gotovina, the commanding officer of the 10-week military operation, had been on the run for years with the connivance of the Zagreb authorities until they handed over his mobile phone number to international prosecutors, enabling him to be traced to a hotel restaurant in Tenerife. The fugitive held up Croatia's efforts to join the EU for years. Ultimately he was sacrificed in the national interest.

At stake in his trial was much more than the fate of one man. The guilty verdict incriminated the entire 1990s regime of President Franjo Tudjman and destroyed Croatia's founding myth: the liberation war. The key players Tudjman, his defence minister, Gojko Susak, and the army chief, Janko Bobetko had died in the meantime and could not face justice. The Gotovina case became a proxy trial of the Tudjman regime.

The guilty verdict found the same regime deliberately plotted a systematic campaign of terror and violence aimed at ridding Croatia of its large Serbian minority, triggering the flight from Croatia of around 150,000 Serbs.

The Serbian insurgency, plotted from Belgrade, had left Croatia crippled and partitioned for four years, the medieval wonders of Dubrovnik battered, the pretty Danube town of Vukovar levelled by relentless Serbian shells. Croats were incredulous at the Gotovina guilty verdict.

Friday's ruling changes all that radically. Resting on an argument as to whether Croatian shelling of four Serb-held towns in the Dalmatian hinterland was lawful or not whether civilians were deliberately targeted or not the appeal judges found against the previous prosecution and verdict, a debacle both for the judges in the earlier trial who accepted the arguments and for the prosecution service in The Hague.

Because the appeal judges found that the shelling was not unlawful, they also concluded there was no planned deportation of the Serbian minority and no "joint criminal enterprise" or political conspiracy by a leadership cold-bloodedly planning an ethnic pogrom.

The previous trial heard plenty of evidence to support the planned pogrom, including transcripts of meetings of the Croatian political leadership on the Adriatic island of Brioni plotting the operations, which were strongly supported by the Americans, with retired Pentagon generals and advisers ensconced in the Croatian defence ministry at the time.

The Tudjman regime had been incriminated. Now it is exonerated. The result is joy in Zagreb and rancour in Belgrade. There was also bitterness from the dissenting two judges in the panel of five.

The arguments will rage, but there is unlikely to be another verdict reversing Friday's, allowing Croatia to argue that they beat the Serbs fair and square.