In its judgment, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sentenced Gotovina to 24 years and Markac to 18 years in prison for war crimes committed during and in the wake of Operation Storm in August 1995.

The national umbrella organisation of Croatian American said in a statement that given the United States’ active assistance for and the encouragement of Operation Storm, the ICTY verdict implicates the United States as well.

"As a result, the NFCA strongly urges the United States to provide its full support to the appeal that General Gotovina’s and Mr. Markac’s attorneys have vowed to file with the ICTY. The United States must defend Operation Storm as a legitimate military operation undertaken in the defense of the sovereignty of both Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina."

"As a result of Operation Storm, the Croatian Army successfully broke the Serbian siege of Bihac, a major city in Bosnia and Herzegovina whose population faced the imminent threat of genocide at the hands of Serbian forces only weeks after the mass killings of approximately 8,000 Bosniak civilians at Srebrenica by the same Serbian forces. The Operation further ended the four-year long occupation of approximately one-third of Croatian territory during which time Serb forces massacred countless Croat civilians and ethnically cleansed the entire area under their control," the NFCA said.

The organisation said the ICTY’s verdict relied on flimsy evidence to find that Gotovina and Markac, along with certain leaders of the Croatian government, engaged in a “joint criminal enterprise”, which, as the NFCA said supposedly had as its objective the permanent removal of the Serb population from the so-called Krajina region – an area that had been under Serbian occupation for four years in spite of UN resolutions that recognized the area as Croatian territory.

The organisation cited Peter Galbraith, the US Ambassador to Croatia at that time, as saying last week that no ethnic cleansing took place during Operation Storm and that the civilian population "left the territory before the arrival of the Croatian armed forces."

While the ICTY has inexplicably found it appropriate to convict some of Croatia’s top leaders for a military operation that lasted a matter of days, it has never indicted any members of the top leadership of the Communist-led Yugoslav People’s Army for their role in the war against Croatia and Slovenia in 1991, the NFCA said. "This particular campaign witnessed the deaths of at least 20,000 people, the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands, and the destruction of numerous Croatian towns and cities, including Vukovar."

The Croat American organisation also said that the sentences imposed on Gotovina and Markac were in marked contrast with the sentences imposed on Biljana Plavisic (11 years of which she served only 7) and Momcilo Krajisnik (20 years), who together with Radovan Karadzic, led the Republika Srpska in its genocidal campaign against non-Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina that resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 people.