The defence team for Croatian General Ante Gotovina on Wednesday filed with the ICTY a renewed application for an order instructing Serbia to produce documents which show that the reason for the mass departure of local Serbs during the August 1995 Operation Storm were not artillery attacks by Croatian forces, as established by the trial chamber, but a decision on departure made by wartime Croatian Serb rebel leaders.
Since Serbia has been refusing to produce those documents for more than three months, it is clear that it does not intend to voluntarily cooperate with General Gotovina's defence team, reads the renewed application, filed with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
The defence team requests that the UN court should set a 30 September deadline for Serbia to produce the requested minutes of meetings of the Supreme Defence Council in Belgrade in 1995.
This July the ICTY appeals chamber dismissed the first application of this kind forwarded by Gotovina's lawyers, explaining that it holds that Belgrade should be given more time to voluntarily meet the requests from the defence team of the Croatian general.
Gotovina's lawyers submitted two letters to the Ambassador of Serbia to The Netherlands, on 30 May and 16 June 2011, respectively, requesting the documents which are the subject of the application, however, no response came from the Serbian authorities which was why on 21 June, the defence team filed the first application asking the appeals chamber to order the authorities in Belgrade to provide the defence team with the requested transcripts.
In the renewed application, the defence team said Serbia had not responded in any way to any of the requests for the production of the documents.
On 15 April the ICTY trial chamber sentenced General Gotovina to 24 years and General Mladen Markac to 18 years for their participation in a joint criminal enterprise the aim of which was to forcibly and permanently remove the Serb population from Croatian areas previously held by Serb rebels.
On 1 August both defence teams filed their appeal briefs.
It is evident from some minutes of the meetings of the Supreme Defence Council in Belgrade that the decision on the exodus of the Serb population made by the local leadership was the cause of the mass departure of local Serbs in early August 1995 rather than artillery attacks by Croatian forces on civilians, as established by the ICTY trial chamber at the trial of Gotovina and Markac and General Ivan Cermak. Cermak was acquitted.
Those transcripts were introduced as evidence at the trial of General Momcilo Perisic, wartime Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army, whom the Hague-based tribunal on Tuesday sentenced to 27 years in prison for war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. However, those documents were made public after the presentation of evidence at the trial of the three Croatian generals, which is why Gotovina's defence insists on their introduction in the appellate proceedings.
