Janko Bobetko
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| Janko Bobetko | |
|---|---|
| 10 January 1919 – 29 April 2003 | |
 General Janko Bobetko |
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| Place of birth | Crnca, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes |
| Place of death | Zagreb, Croatia |
| Allegiance | Croatian Army |
| Rank | General |
| Commands held | 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 Deblockade of Dubrovnik (Op. Tigar) Operation Maslenica Operation Jackal (June dawns) Operation Medak Pocket Operation Flash |
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Janko Bobetko (1919 - 2003) was a Croatian army general and the Croatian army's Chief of the General Staff between 1992 and 1995.
[edit] Biography
Bobetko's career spanned more than five decades of intermittent military service. After gymnasium in Sisak, he studied at Veterinarian faculty in Zagreb. On July 11, 1941 Ustaše killed his father and three brothers[citation needed], and he joined first antifascist unit in occupied Europe - First Sisak Partisan Brigade 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 to become a 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 1970s events known as the Croatian Spring, Bobetko, who sided with the reformist Croatian Communist leaders, was demoted and expelled from YPA after Josip Broz Tito's crackdown on Croatian leadership.
After Croatian parliamentary elections in 1990, Bobetko refused to accept position of defence minister. His involvement in Croatian War of Independence began in Banovina and continued on Southern Front, where he took command on April 10, 1992.
In 1993, during the Operation Medak pocket against the Krajina Serb 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, aged 84, before any final decision was reached regarding his extradition.
In 1996 Bobetko wrote a book titled "Sve moje bitke" ("All my battles"), containing many military maps and commands, on which he said: "My face is clean, and that permits me to leave a written mark on anything I did in more than fifty years of my military and political life."
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.
