Over at Teekay’s

The Frankfurter Allgemeine is running a front page editorial this morning (not online, AFAICT) saying a clearer picture of the implications of Gotovina’s arrest was yet to emerge, and then makes this astonishing claim:

Seit Jahren beteuern Präsident Mesic und Sanader, daß Gotovina sich nicht in Kroatien aufhalte, sich auch nicht in Reichweite der kroatischen Behörden befinde – das hatte Frau Del Ponte lange Zeit behauptet. Sie hatte unrecht, Mesic und Sanader hatten recht.

For years, President Mesic and [Prime Minister] Sanader have been giving reassurances that Gotovina was neither in Croatia nor within the reach of the Croatian authorities [i.e., in Bosnia], as Ms. Del Ponte had been claiming for a long time. She was wrong, Mesic and Sanader were right.

Now, there’s a reason it’s called editorializing. But it takes guts, or a particular kind of ideological blindness, to first admonish readers to be patient and wait for the facts to come in only to go on to make such sweeping statements.

Having said that, Del Ponte was widely criticized when she gave Croatia a clean bill of health in early October, making it possible for the EU to open membership talks not only with Croatia but with Turkey as well. The Austrians, steadfast allies of this former possession, had vetoed Turkey’s application and linked it to Croatia’s. In retrospect, some of that criticism — that the Hague prosecution was indeed an instrument of politics, as its foes in Croatia and Serbia had argued for years — now appears overblown. Indeed, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports that Del Ponte received the critical bit of information from the Croatian governments already in September.