Gotovina and Markac showed up in court for the first time since April 15, when they were sentenced pending appeal to 24 and 18 years in prison respectively, for a status conference which is called so the court can acquaint itself with the state of the accused and consider matters of status and procedure.

Asked by Judge Theodor Meron about his health and if he wanted to speak about it behind closed doors, Gotovina declined the offer, saying that everything was fine, and Markac gave a similar answer.

Judge Meron said that at the moment there were two unsolved motions, announcing that decisions on them would be made soon.

The first motion refers to the request by the generals' defence teams that Serbia be subpoenaed to submit transcripts of sessions of the Supreme Defence Council which they believe prove that Croatian Serbs left Croatia on orders from their leadership rather than due to attacks by Croatian forces.

The other motion is a letter by the prosecution objecting that in its appeal the defence revealed some confidential data.

A defence attorney for General Markac said after the status conference that he saw certain progress regarding the delivery of documents requested from Serbia.

The status conference was also attended by a new member of General Gotovina's defence team, attorney Guenael Mettraux of Switzerland.

Mettraux said the defence believed the verdict contained many factual and legal errors and that it used and applied the concept of joint criminal enterprise wrongly.

Gotovina's other attorney, Greg Kehoe, expressed optimism regarding the outcome of the appeals proceedings, saying that the main argument of the appeal was that attacks in the 1995 Croatian army and police operation "Storm" were legitimate attacks on normal military targets on Croatia's occupied areas.

Attorney Luka Misetic said the appeal challenged the argument of indiscriminate shelling. "Our position is that the prosecution isn't disputing either that there are no identified victims of artillery attacks in this case. There is no person killed or wounded by shells or claiming that they left out of fear of shelling. We believe that it is illogical for the court to conclude that 20,000 civilians left out of fear of shelling without being able to identify a single victim in the case," said Misetic.

Asked how General Gotovina felt, Kehoe said that Gotovina was a decent, honest and hard-working patriot who never complained about anything. Misetic added that Gotovina did not have any objections, that he looked well and that his mental condition was still very good.

Misetic said that the defence was likely to submit its reply to the prosecution's brief to the appeal on Friday.

Markac's lawyer Goran Mikulicic said the prosecution's brief to the defence's appeal did not even touch on arguments presented by the defence. "We are satisfied with the prosecution's brief to our appeal. Their brief makes no reference to us, they cite parts of the judgment that are in favour of their arguments," said Mikulicic.