"Two Croatian commanders of the 1990s war against the Serbs have received lengthy jail terms for war crimes in a landmark verdict that incriminated the entire Zagreb political leadership of the time for waging a campaign of terror, bombing and murder aimed at ridding the country of its large Serbian minority," the British Guardian reports.
Ian Traynor, who used to be the Guardian correspondent in the former Yugoslavia, writes that the judgement "represents the most damning verdict on Croatia's conduct of the 1991-95 war in 17 years of investigations by the international war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia."
"The judges went further than finding two former generals guilty, ruling that the regime of the late President Franjo Tudjman planned a campaign of systematic violence to empty south-western Croatia of its Serbian minority in order to resettle the region with ethnic Croats."
"The result represents a disaster for Croatia and a triumphant vindication for Serbia. The Croats have been told that the decisive victory of the war, sealing their independent statehood, was a war crime," Traynor writes adding that "the current government in Zagreb was stunned by the sweeping verdict".
The article reads that Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor said that it was unacceptable for her cabinet that the tribunal had found that the Croatian state leadership acted in a joint criminal enterprise. President Ivo Josipovic was quoted as saying that verdict is "shocking".
"While focused on Gotovina and two fellow accused, the trial has been the main opportunity for probing the strategy and conduct of the wartime leadership of Croatia. The key political leaders such as Tudjman, the defence minister Gojko Susak and the army chief Janko Bobetko all died before having to face the courts. The Gotovina case has served as a proxy trial," The Guardian writes.
Operation Storm was carried out "at lightning speed, highly successfully with strong American backing."
"It represented the denouement to the four-year war. A fortnight earlier at Srebrenica in Bosnia, the Serbs had committed the worst massacre of the Yugoslav wars, murdering almost 8,000 Muslim males," Traynor writes.
The New York Times (NYT) reports that the rulings made by the ICTY's three-member trial chamber on Friday "were in effect an indirect verdict on the late president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, who died in 1999 as prosecutors at The Hague were planning to have him indicted."
NYT quotes General Gotovina's lawyer Greg W. Kehoe as saying that he was absolutely shocked. The verdict is "contrary to the facts and wrong in law," the lawyer said.
The finding that Croatian forces indiscriminately shelled civilians "flies in the face of reality, and no witness testified to that," Mr. Kehoe said. He told NYT that "when Knin, Krajina’s main town, was shelled, for example, only one person was killed, and the other deaths in the area were the result of private revenge after the campaign."
Mr. Kehoe whom the newspaper describes as "a veteran American lawyer who was the top American adviser at the Iraqi Special Tribunal in Baghdad" was quoted as saying that Operation Storm was carried out "according to accepted military principles, in accordance with NATO doctrine."
The U.S. newspaper recalls that a few weeks before Croatia launched that operation to retake its areas from rebel Serbs, "Bosnian Serbs had outraged the world by overrunning the United Nations safe haven in Srebrenica and massacring thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys."
The British Independent newspaper depicts in the article headlined "Croatian national hero jailed for war crimes against Serbs" the atmosphere of dismay and outrage among Croatians who were watching live footage of the sentencing in the Zagreb main square. The Independent quoted war veteran Branko Borkovic, as saying that the tribunal's decision was "a sentence against the Croatian state". He accused the court of bending to political pressures. "Gotovina and Markac are the individuals, we (the veterans) are all being sentenced together with them," he said.
The Age, a leading Australian daily newspaper, reports that "the trial of the generals, who many Croats regard as heroes, comes at a sensitive time for Croatia".
"The former Yugoslav republic is trying to pull out of a recession, faces general elections this year and is in the final stage of concluding entry negotiations with the European Union," the Australian paper says.
The French Le Monde quotes the summary of the tribunal trial chamber's judgement adding that the Croatian government deems the court's allegations to be unacceptable.
The French newspaper reports that the trial started on 11 March 2008 and that the tribunal found Generals Gotovina and Markac guilty of the murder of 324 civilians and soldiers and of deportation of 90,000 Serbs from areas which insurgent Serbs held before the Croatian retook them.