1. Ante Gotovina was born on 12 October 1955 and is a Croatian retired lieutenant general and former French senior corporal who served in the Croatian War for Independence.
38 Facts About Ante Gotovina
1. 2.
Ante Gotovina is noted for his primary role in the 1995 Operation Storm.
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On 15 April 2011, Gotovina was found guilty on 8 of the 9 counts of the indictment and sentenced to 24 years of imprisonment.
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On 16 November 2012, Ante Gotovina's convictions were overturned by an appeals panel at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and he was released from custody.
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Ante Gotovina was born in Tkon on the island of Pasman.
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Ante Gotovina's mother was released while his father spent time in prison.
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Ante Gotovina kept his escape attempt from his family and continued to attend school for electrical engineering in Zadar.
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At the age of sixteen, Ante Gotovina left home to become a sailor.
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Ante Gotovina 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, and was at this time responsible for the security of far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.
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Ante Gotovina met his first wife Ximena Dalel in Colombia, and they had a daughter.
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Ante Gotovina was freed the next year, "in circumstances showing that he was benefiting from very particular protections".
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Ante Gotovina's lawyers submitted a brief to the International War Crimes Tribunal alleging that Ante Gotovina was framed by an alleged criminal police group loyal to Francois Mitterrand.
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Ante Gotovina returned to Croatia in 1991 at the dawn of Croatian War of Independence and enlisted in the Croatian National Guard, the first organized military body of what would become the Croatian Army.
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Ante Gotovina fought in western Slavonia: in Novska and Nova Gradiska, attached to the 1st Guards Brigade.
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Ante Gotovina soon caught the attention of his superiors, and when the Croatian Army was established as such in 1992, Gotovina was promoted to colonel.
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Ante Gotovina led the conquest of Glamoc and Bosansko Grahovo, which enabled him to close from the east the encirclement of Knin, the capital of the self-declared Republic of Serbian Krajina.
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Ante Gotovina was then immediately put in charge of the combined forces of the Croatian Army and the Croatian Defense Council in Bosnia 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.
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Ante Gotovina was indicted together with Markac, a former commander of the special police of Croatia's interior ministry, and Ivan Cermak, assistant defense minister from 1991 to 1993.
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Ante Gotovina was charged with five counts of crimes against humanity and four counts of violations of the laws or customs of war.
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Ante Gotovina went to the Vatican to ask for help in locating him, but told The Daily Telegraph that the Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, had refused to help, telling her that the Vatican was not a state and thus had "no international obligations".
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Ante Gotovina's comments infuriated the Church in Croatia as well as the Vatican, whose spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said the archbishop asked Del Ponte what evidence she had for her claims but which she reportedly did not provide.
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On 7 December 2005, Ante Gotovina was captured by Spanish police and special forces in the resort of Playa de las Americas on Tenerife in the Canary Islands.
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Ante Gotovina was reported to have been traveling on two fake Croatian passports using the names, Goran Drozdek and Stjepan Senicic.
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Ante Gotovina's passport contained border stamps of several countries, including Argentina, Chile, Russia, China, Czech Republic and Tahiti.
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Ante Gotovina was immediately flown to Madrid, where he was imprisoned in advance of a court hearing to extradite him to the ICTY prison at The Hague.
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On 10 December 2005, Ante Gotovina was flown to The Hague, where he appeared before the ICTY on 12 December.
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Unofficial polls by television programs showed strong support, with most callers saying that they would prefer Ante Gotovina remain at large even if it meant not joining the European Union.
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Polls taken by the PULS Agency after Ante Gotovina's arrest showed that almost two-thirds of the Croatian public found the accusations baseless.
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Ante Gotovina's lawyers were Luka Misetic, an American attorney of Croatian descent, Greg Kehoe, an American lawyer who advised the prosecution in the Iraqi Special Tribunal case against Saddam Hussein, and Payam Akhavan, former Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor's Office of the ICTY.
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Ante Gotovina's attorney stated that he signed because of his Catholic faith, which stresses forgiveness.
31.
On 15 April 2011, Ante Gotovina was found guilty on 8 of the 9 counts of the indictment and sentenced to 24 years of imprisonment.
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Ante Gotovina was convicted of "committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, deportation, persecution and inhuman acts" and Presiding Judge Alphons Orie cited several witness testimonies in the decision.
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In June 2011, Ante Gotovina was ranked the second most creditable person for the creation of an independent Croatian state in a poll conducted by Vecernji list.
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On 16 November 2012, Ante Gotovina was found not guilty by three votes against two by the Appeals Panel of the ICTY, presided over by Theodor Meron.
35.
On 19 November 2012, the Belgrade-based tabloid Kurir ran an interview with Ante Gotovina, who urged Serbs displaced after Operation Storm to return to Croatia.
36.
On 23 November 2012, Ante Gotovina became an honorary citizen of Split and the next day he became an honorary citizen of Zadar.
37.
On 7 January 2014, it was announced that Ante Gotovina had filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Treasury to lift economic sanctions imposed against him, which had been in place for more than a decade, listing Ante Gotovina as a Specially Designated National in 2003, subject to economic sanctions.
38.
In 2019, The General, a biographical film about Ante Gotovina's life based on Nenad Ivankovic's book Warrior-Adventurer and General was released.