The United States on Friday said it supported the decision by the UN court in The Hague that cleared two Croatian general of war crimes and freed them to return home.
The dramatic acquittal of Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was met with tears of joy in Croatia and outrage in bitter foe Serbia.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said: “We note the judgment of the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. We fully support ICTY, and we accept its ruling.”
She also stressed that Washington had not submitted any briefs on behalf of either the prosecution or the defense in the case.
“When we created ICTY, as an international community and as a trans-Atlantic community, we all supported it,” she told journalists.
“It was so that these accusations could be adjudicated in a manner that was open and that was transparent. So it’s therefore incumbent on all of us to support the process and support the outcomes.”
Serbia is furious at the ruling and has said it would scale back its cooperation with The Hague in protest.
Gotovina and Markac had been jailed last year for 24 and 18 years respectively for the murder of Croatian Serbs during their country’s struggle for independence and the bloody, ethnically driven breakup of Yugoslavia.
But the court rejected the premise on which the initial convictions were based, namely that artillery that hit Serb-inhabited towns and was more than 200 metres (yards) from a military target constituted an attack on civilians.
US supports acquittal of Croatian generals
