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Operation Medak Pocket (Croatian: Medački džep) was a military operation undertaken by the Croatian army between September 9 — September 17, 1993 in which the small area around the village of Medak in the south-central Lika region of Croatia, then under the control of the rebel Republic of Serbian Krajina, was retaken by Croatian forces.
The pocket - or salient, to use the military term - was surrounded from three sides by the Croatian army forces prior to the operation. The offensive began on the morning of September 9 with heavy shelling, after which the 9th Guards Brigade, the 118th Home Guard Regiment, and the Special Police Units of the Ministry of the Interior entered the pocket, with an estimated combined force of over 2,500 soldiers.
The Croatian forces advanced to take three villages before being halted by Serbian reinforcements, and beginning peace talks. A peace agreement was signed on September 15 and the Croatian government agreed to a withdrawal, but the deployment of the U.N. peacekeeping forces (from France and Canada) caused a series of skirmishes between them and the Croatian forces in the field, as the forces on the ground appeared not to have been informed of this decision. The Croatian Army suffered 27 fatalities compared to only four injured Canadian soldiers and eventually withdrew, ending all hostilities by September 17.
After the Croatian withdrawal, the Canadians subsequently found that (in the words of an official Canadian study on the incident) "each and every building in the Medak Pocket had been levelled to the ground", in a total of eleven little villages. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia later established that an estimated 164 homes and 148 barns and outbuildings were pillaged and subsequently destroyed during the cease-fire before the withdrawal.
In addition to that, the United Nations observers determined that 29 Serb civilians had been killed in addition to 59 other casualties. The ICTY cites at least 38 civilian casualties: 21 executed and 17 injured, and two executed Serbian POWs.
The Medak Pocket affair was widely publicised, caused an international outcry and badly dented Croatia's international reputation.
The highest commander in charge of the sector was General Janko Bobetko. He was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001 but died before the case could be heard. The wider area was under the jurisdiction of the Gospić Military District, commanded at the time by Brigadier Rahim Ademi. He was also indicted by the ICTY and was transferred there in 2001, but has not yet come to trial.
The operation itself was carried out under the command of General Mirko Norac. Norac and two lower ranked officers, Tihomir Orešković and Stjepan Grandić were indicted for war crimes by the Croatian authorities. Tried at the District Court in Rijeka in March 2003, Norac was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Orešković received 15 years and Grandić 10 years.
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