'ER' actor plans film about Croat general indicted for war crimes

The Croatian actor Goran Visnjic, the brooding Luka Kovac in the US series ER, is in line to star in a movie from his homeland about the imprisoned war crimes suspect Ante Gotovina.

Visnjic, whose fictional character in the hospital series lost his children during the Balkan wars, said recently he would like to play Gotovina in a movie being planned by the Croatian director Antun Vrdoljak.

Vrdoljak now says he "definitely" plans to make the movie, even though it still is just a "wish, a plan, an idea". He said: "Gotovina is a metaphor for today's Croatia.

Gotovina, a retired general, is seen by many in Croatia as a hero of its 1991 independence war. But the UN war crimes court charged him in 2001 with allegedly orchestrating murders and expulsions of Serbs from Croatia, when Zagreb retook areas that Serb rebels had seized in 1991.

Gotovina fled the arrest warrant but was finally apprehended in Spain in December 2005, and is awaiting trial before the court in The Hague.

Posters with his photo are still plastered across Croatia; T-shirts, mugs and lighters bearing his image are sold and the Spanish wine he was drinking when arrested quickly sold out when it appeared in Croatian stores in December.

There is already at least one book about him, which was published while he was still a fugitive, describing the former French Legionnaire as an adventurer, patriot and a lover.

Vrdoljak said the movie would be primarily about the 1991 war, with Gotovina as the main character.

The two men met before and when he starts making the movie, he plans to talk a lot with him. In The Hague? "No, I hope, I'm certain even, that we'll talk in Croatia," Vrdoljak said, suggesting that Gotovina could be set free.