Tuesday, September 20, 2005

You may have seen this story:

One of the most wanted war criminals is being shielded by the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican hierarchy, the United Nations' chief prosecutor for former Yugoslavia said yesterday.
 
Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the UN international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said she believed that Gen[eral] Ante Gotovina was being sheltered in a Franciscan monastery in his native Croatia.

The Vatican could probably pinpoint exactly which of Croatia's 80 monasteries was sheltering him "in a few days", Mrs del Ponte told The Daily Telegraph at her offices in The Hague.

Instead, she had been "extremely disappointed" to encounter a wall of silence from the Vatican....

A former French foreign legion officer, he is accused of overseeing and permitting the killing of at least 150 Serb civilians and the forced deportation of between 150,000 and 200,000 others after Operation Storm, a 1995 offensive to reimpose Croatian control over the Krajina region....


Two years ago, the United States offered a reward for Gotovina's capture. But here's an interesting detail about him:

...He finished his service in the [French Foreign] Legion in 1979, obtaining French citizenship.

Later he was employed by a private security company and trained paramilitaries in Argentina and Guatemala....


In the 1980s? Really? He worked for our authoritarian Latin American pals?

Yup, that's what it says at this pro-Gotovina site:

...in 1982 he went as an instructor to Guatemala, Col[o]mbia and Paraguay. He spent most of the 1980s in Latin America....

There you go. A generation ago, this apparent war criminal was working for our thug pals in Latin America.

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