Commenting on the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and cooperation of southeastern European countries with the court, Carla del Ponte said that the fact that the EU made those countries' admission conditional on full cooperation with the ICTY was the main leverage of pressure on countries to improve their cooperation.
The decision of the EU on 15 March to postpone the start of membership talks with Croatia was a call for waking the Croatian government up, the ICTY Chief Prosecutor said.
In April Croatia adopted a serious and far-reaching action plan. It has started to implement it and now we need wait for the results several months, she said.
She added that the Office of the ICTY Prosecutor was cooperating closely with Croatian institutions with regard the implementation of the action plan.
The success would be for Croatia to manage in three or four months to locate, arrest and transfer Gotovina or find his whereabouts, as he, perhaps, is not now in Croatia, the chief prosecutor said.
She added that the capture of the remaining 10 fugitive indictees would be crucial for the successful performance of the tribunal and its exit strategy.
Asked why she equated Gotovina with war-time Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, and whether Gotovina's crimes are the same as crimes committed by Karadzic and Mladic, del Ponte answered in the negative, explaining that when she was speaking of them it was true that she said: Karadzic, Mladic, Gotovina as the UN Security Council's Resolution 1503 referred to them as three fugitives who must appear before the Hague tribunal.
Commenting on the draft of the amended indictment against Croatian generals, Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac, the chief prosecutor refuted claims that this was a new indictment. We only added some more details about a joint criminal enterprise in the Cermak and Markac case, she said.
ICTY Deputy Chief Prosecutor, David Tolbert, refuted as ridiculous claims that in that draft, ICTY prosecutors accused the entire Croatian state of the joint criminal enterprise.