Janko Bobetko
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Janko Bobetko | |
|---|---|
| 10 January 1919 – 29 April 2003 | |
 General Janko Bobetko |
|
| Place of birth | Crnca, Croatia |
| Place of death | Zagreb, Croatia |
| Allegiance | Croatian Army |
| Rank | General |
| Commands | Chief of General Staff HV Commander of Southern Front HV Chief of Staff of 5th Army District YPA Political Commissar of 32nd Division Political Commissar of Brigade |
| Battles/wars | World War II Croatian War of Independence Operation Tiger Operation Maslenica Operation Jackal (June dawns) Operation Medak Pocket Operation Flash Operation Storm |
Janko Bobetko (1919 - 2003) was a Croatian army general and the chief of the General Staff of the Croatian army between 1992 and 1995.
Bobetko's career spanned more than 5 decades of military service -- although intermittently. After gymnasium in Sisak, he studied at Veterinarian faculty in Zagreb. At 11. July 1941. when he was 22 years old, Ustaše killed his family, and he joined First Sisak partisan company in the forest Brezovica near Sisak. Bobetko fought in partisan resistance movement from 1941. to 1945. He was heavily wounded at Dravograd in Slovenia, but survived and became Yugoslav People's Army officer. In the post-war period he attended and graduated from YPA Military academy and rose to the rank of Lieutenant-general. But, in the events known as the "Croatian Spring", Bobetko, who sided with the reformist Croatian Communist leaders, was demoted and expelled from YPA after Tito's crackdown on Croatian leadership.
In 1993, during the Medak pocket military operation against the Krajina Serbs strongholds that terrorized town of Gospić, the Croatian soldiers allegedly committed crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia subsequently indicted Bobetko as the supreme commanding officer.
Bobetko refused to accept the indictment and refused to surrender to the court, indignantly claiming that such an indictment questions the legitimacy of the whole military operation. The crisis stretched out as popular opinion agreed with Bobetko, and the Croatian Government wouldn't assert an unambiguous position over his extradition. At that time Bobetko was already gravely ill, and he died in 2003 before being extradited.
In 2002, the United Kingdom had halted its ratification process for the Treaty of Stabilization and Accession of Croatia to the European Union because of the Croatian government's handling of the Bobetko case. This problem was later rectified, in 2004.
