A Croatian general charged with war crimes has been arrested in Spain, the UN's chief war crimes prosecutor says.

Ante Gotovina - the third most-wanted suspect from the Balkan wars - was held in the Canary Islands on Wednesday.

Gen Gotovina, 50, is accused over the death of about 150 Serb civilians during a Croatian offensive in 1995.

He has been jailed by a Spanish judge and could be extradited to The Hague as early as Friday. His lawyer said his client would probably plead not guilty.

He was picked up at a luxury hotel in Tenerife in Spain's Canary Islands apparently without struggle. Just about every European leader has praised Gotovina's arrest.

The EU and the United States have especially been pressing Croatia to turn him over or find him as part of the "carrot" inducement to future talks about joining the EU. But many Croats see him as a national hero.

Yesterday night as the news broke in Zagreb, there were protests and clashes with police. Click on the link to see some video coverage of the unrest.

The crowd also tried to storm the presidential palace because the government refused to give a statement concerning the arrest. Via the official state-run media, the government later issued this statement:

Anyone who is charged must face the charges, appear before a court and answer the charges. Presumption of innocence, meaning that everyone is innocent until proven otherwise, applies to any case, including this one, the statement said.

The full truth is in the interests of all people in Croatia. The Homeland War was a defensive, just and legitimate war of liberation. Croatia was the victim of aggression and had the right to self-defence and to liberate its territories that had been occupied. Croatia will follow further developments in this case with the greatest attention and will continue fully cooperating with the Hague tribunal in all cases against citizens of Croatia, using amici curiae as a legal instrument, the statement said.

The statement went on to say that Gotovina's arrest proved the veracity of Croatia's statements that the fugitive general was not within reach of Croatian authorities and that he was hiding outside the country. It confirmed the credibility of the Republic of Croatia and all government institutions, and its full cooperation with the Hague tribunal. It also proved right all those who trusted us and supported us at times when Croatia's efforts to cooperate with the tribunal were doubted. It has turned out now that such doubts were unwarranted.

No one can be above or beyond the law. The rule of law is one of the fundamental principles on which Croatia is based, including both domestic laws and the country's international obligations. In any way it includes the Constitutional Law on Cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, which the Sabor adopted in April 1996, the statement concluded.

But why exactly is he indicted and what are the alleged war crimes he committed? The Croatian state-run media ran a brief bio and explanation:

Gotovina is indicted for crimes against humanity during and after Operation Storm. The charges say he failed to prevent the murder of Serbs, or to punish the perpetrators. He is also held responsible for plunder and systematic destruction of Serb property.

That's putting it mildly. For more detail, I recommend Wikipedia's somewhat controversial description of Operation Storm (along with Operation Lightning):

At 0500 on August 4, around 150,000 Croatian Army troops attacked at about 30 separate points along a 300 km front. The Croatian 4th and 7th Guards Brigades broke through the lines of the already demoralized Serb forces and rapidly advanced deep into Krajina Serb territory. Knin was subjected to an intensive artillery bombardment, but much of the Krajina Serb leadership had already left for Serbia and Bosnia.

On the same day, aircraft from the United States Air Force bombed two Croatian Serb surface-to-air missile radar sites near Knin and Udbina. The attack was described by NATO as being a self-defence action undertaken after the radars had locked onto the USAF aircraft, which were patrolling Croatian and Bosnian airspace as part of Operation Deny Flight to enforce no-fly zones.

Back in July of this year, I wrote a very extensive (and very controversial) article about Srebrenica, in which Operations Storm and Lightning were included for context. In short, the southeastern region of today's Croatia was inhabited by a great number of Serbs in the area known as Krajina.

During the war, the Serbs pushed out a large number of ethnic Croats and established their own government and army, although it was not internationally recognized. Operation Storms and Lightning then ethnically cleansed the area and today the area has less than a 5% Serb population. Many Croats accurately recognize that without Gotovina's military operations, modern-day Croatia could not exist in its present form.

Regrettably, the war involved many atrocities, concentration camps and shelling of civilian areas by all sides involved. While the events in and near Srebenica are widely "known" in the west, what occurred in Krajina is not. And Gotovina and his commanders carried out one of the most efficient ethnic cleansing operations of modern times. Most Serbs in the area fled and survived, but the area was efficiently and ruthlessly depopulated of an entire people.

What makes Operation Storm so much different than the events of Srebrenica (besides the numbers of deaths involved) is that the U.S. actively participated in the organization, support and training for Operations Storm and Lightning.

Besides the air defense assistance as quoted above, many of Croatia's soldiers were trained and assisted by the American private contractor Military Professionals Resources, Inc., staffed by many retired American military soldiers. This was, in essence, fighting by contractor (mercenary) proxy, which later gained such prominence in the current Iraq war.

As with this entire war, there is a lot of partisanship in the reporting of what occurred. You can read Amnesty International's take on the events:

In May and August 1995, the Croatian Army and police forces recaptured Western Slavonia and the Krajina region. During and after these military offensives, some 200,000 Croatian Serbs, including the entire Croatian Serb Army, fled to the neighbouring Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina under Bosnian Serb control. In the aftermath of the operations members of the Croatian Army and police murdered, tortured, and forcibly expelled Croatian Serb civilians who had remained in the area as well as members of the withdrawing Croatian Serb armed forces. Steps taken by the Croatian authorities to investigate such crimes, to bring to justice those responsible, and to award reparations to the victims and their families have been largely insufficient.

As Amnesty states above, the Croatian government has often hindered Gotovina's arrest. There were reports last year about how the Croatian government outed British intelligence agents who were in the country trying to find him. More on that here.

So there you go... and now Gotovina is on his way to The Hague to at last face these charges.

Peace