Prosecutor v. Ante Gotovina & Ivan Markač

An armed conflict developed between the Croatian government and a Serbian group that was trying to separate the Krajina area from Croatia to form a Serbian republic. During this conflict, Ante Gotovina (defendant) was a leader in the Croatian military, and Mladen Markač (defendant) led Croatia’s special police force. Gotovina and Markač worked together during a Croatian operation to retake Krajina. According to witnesses at a meeting, one of the operation’s goals was to remove all Serbians from Krajina, including civilians. During the operation, Croatian forces repeatedly bombed four towns. Many bombs landed more than 200 meters from a legitimate military target, and at least 13 bombs landed more than 400 meters away. In addition, multiple Croatian bombs appeared to be targeted at an apartment building where the Serbian group’s president, Milan Martić, was supposedly located. Numerous civilians were also in the building and surrounding area. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) charged Gotovina and Markač with war crimes, claiming that the operation had been an indiscriminate, ethnically motivated attack on the Serbian civilian population and that the apartment-building attacks had risked disproportionate civilian harm. At trial, three witnesses each provided somewhat different testimony about the margin of error for the Croatian bombs. The ICTY’s trial chamber evaluated this testimony and determined that the bombs had a 200-meter error margin. The trial chamber then used this number to find that any bombs landing more than 200 meters from a military target had not been aimed at a military target but rather fired indiscriminately at civilians. Taking these findings together with evidence of the operation’s ethnic-cleansing goals, the Croatian military’s artillery reports, and the operation’s acceptance of disproportionate civilian casualties in the efforts to bomb Martić, the trial chamber convicted both Gotovina and Markač of war crimes. The men appealed to the ICTY’s appeals chamber.