Ante Gotovina

Ante Gotovina (born 12 October 1955) is a Croatian retired lieutenant general and former French senior corporal who served in the Croatian War for Independence.

Around Easter of 1971, Gotovina and his friend Srećko tried to escape by sailing away.

Rough seas caused by a storm forced them back and they soon returned to Pakoštane.

Gotovina kept his escape attempt from his family and continued to attend school for electrical engineering in Zadar.

At the age of sixteen, Gotovina left home to become a sailor.

In 1973, before turning eighteen, he joined the French Foreign Legion under the pseudonym of Andrija Grabovac and became a member of the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e REP) after qualifying at the Training School in Pau before joining the elite Commandos de Recherche et d'Action en Profondeur (CRAP) now renamed as Parachute Commando Group (GCP).

It was there he met Dominique Erulin, brother of the Colonel Philippe Erulin, who became his friend and partner in future missions.

In the next few years, he participated in Foreign Legion operations in Djibouti, the Battle of Kolwezi in Zaire, and missions in the Ivory Coast, becoming Colonel Erulin's driver.

After five years of service, he left the Legion with the rank of caporal-chef; he obtained French citizenship in 1979.

He 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 (SAC), and was at this time responsible for the security of far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

In 1981, together with Dominique Erulin, he helped editor Jean-Pierre Mouchard (a close friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen) organize a commando operation to free his press in La Seyne-sur-Mer, occupied by CGT trade-union strikers.

According to French police records, he became involved in criminal activities, which led to arrest warrants being issued for robbery and extortion; it has been reported that he served at least one two-year prison sentence, though this has been denied by his attorneys.

Towards the end of the decade he moved to South America, where he provided training to a number of right-wing paramilitary organizations, notably in Argentina and Guatemala.

He met his first wife Ximena Dalel in Colombia, and they had a daughter.

Arrested during a trip to France, he was sentenced in 1986 to five years of prison by Paris' Cour d'assises.

He was freed the next year, "in circumstances showing that he was benefiting from very particular protections".

Dominique Erulin disputes the verdict against Gotovina and himself and claims Gotovina's criminal record was manufactured by left-wing factions allied with President François Mitterrand.

Gotovina's lawyers submitted a brief to the International War Crimes Tribunal alleging that Gotovina was framed by an alleged criminal police group loyal to François Mitterrand.

Gotovina returned to Croatia in 1991 at the dawn of Croatian War of Independence and enlisted in the Croatian National Guard (ZNG), the first organized military body of what would become the Croatian Army.

He was an efficient commander and had the advantage – shared by relatively few other Croatian soldiers – of combat experience.

He fought in western Slavonia: in Novska and Nova Gradiška, attached to the 1st Guards Brigade.

He led the conquest of Glamoč and Bosansko Grahovo (Operation Summer '95), which enabled him to close from the east the encirclement of Knin, the capital of the self-declared (1991–95) Republic of Serbian Krajina.

He soon caught the attention of his superiors, and when the Croatian Army was established as such in 1992, Gotovina was promoted to colonel.

As a colonel he was one of the main organizers of Operation Maslenica, which restored Croatia's territorial continuity in Dalmatia.

By 1994 he had risen to the rank of major-general and, as a general-pukovnik and commanding officer of the Split military district he organized key military operations: the defense of Livno and Tomislavgrad from the troops of Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić, and the ten-month war of attrition which broke the Serb defenses in the Plain of Livno, the Dinara Ridge and the Šator mountain.

He is noted for his primary role in the 1995 Operation Storm.

This ensured conditions for the rapid success of Operation Oluja ("Storm") in 4–6 August 1995, during which forces under his command captured Knin.

Gotovina was then immediately put in charge of the combined forces of the Croatian Army (Hrvatska Vojska or HV) and the Croatian Defense Council in Bosnia (Hrvatsko Vijeće Obrane or HVO) 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.

In 1996, he became the chief of the Army Inspectorate.

In September 2000, he was a signatory to the Twelve Generals' Letter in which the government of Ivica Račan was criticised.

Among the other generals, he was forced to retire by president Stjepan Mesić, with an explanation that military officers shouldn't write political letters if not approved by the supreme commander and the president, respectively.

In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted him on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges in connection with that operation and its aftermath.

After spending four years in hiding, he was captured in the Canary Islands in December 2005.

On 15 April 2011, Gotovina was found guilty on 8 of the 9 counts of the indictment and sentenced to 24 years of imprisonment.

On 16 November 2012, Gotovina's convictions were overturned by an appeals panel at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and he was released from custody.

Ante Gotovina was born in Tkon on the island of Pašman.

His father Milan tried to move with his mother to Italy, but was caught by the Yugoslav border police.

His mother was released while his father spent time in prison.

When Gotovina was nearly four, his mother was killed saving him from an explosion at a construction site.

Subsequently, his father went to work in Zagreb, while Gotovina and his siblings went to live with their maternal grandfather Šime in Pakoštane.