By Alexandra Hudson

THE HAGUE, March 12 (Reuters) - Former Croatian general Ante Gotovina achieved what no other commander could do and halted the carnage in the former Yugoslavia by thwarting Serb expansionist hopes, his lawyer told his trial on Wednesday.

Gotovina went on trial at the U.N. war crimes tribunal on Tuesday charged with orchestrating a campaign of murder and plunder to drive up to 200,000 Serbs from a rebel enclave in Croatia in 1995.

Prosecutors said Gotovina and his fellow accused -- generals Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac -- were responsible for the killing of hundreds of Serbs and the shelling and torching of towns as Croat forces retook the Krajina region.

"Operation Storm", the Croats' military offensive to reclaim Krajina, was designed to expel Serbs and ensure they had nothing to which they could ever return, they added, leaving behind a wasteland of destroyed Serb villages and homes.

All three have pleaded not guilty.

Gotovina's defence counsel said the operation was a series of campaigns designed to halt advancing Bosnian Serbs and prevent their goal of joining the Croatian Serb enclave with a "Greater Serbia" across former Yugoslavia.

He contrasted footage of the devastation wrought by Serbs on Croatian towns such as Vukovar with what he described as the minimal shelling of Krajina.

He also played a video interview with a Catholic bishop who explained how Gotovina had come to see him to seek guidance on Catholic teachings about ethical conduct in warfare.

RIGHT OR WRONG

"There was one person that brought about the demise of the Bosnian Serb army with Ratko Mladic at its helm ... and brought the carnage in the former Yugoslavia to an end," defence counsel Gregory Kehoe told the court, gesturing to 52-year-old Gotovina.

"This was a man who never lost sight of what he thought was right or wrong in leading his men in battle."

Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander Mladic, the two top war crimes suspects from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, are on the run.

Both are indicted for genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims.

Kehoe said Gotovina's defeat of the Bosnian Serbs brought them to the negotiating table and helped end the war. As an operational commander, he was not responsible for activities going on behind the front line, he added.

Years of international pressure on Croatia to deliver its last war crimes suspect ended in 2005 with Gotovina's seizure in Spain's Canary Isles. His capture triggered large protests in Croatia, where many see Gotovina as a war hero, but also an invitation to Zagreb to start European Union accession talks.

All three are charged with involvement in a criminal enterprise with Croatia's late nationalist president, Franjo Tudjman.

The mountainous Krajina region, which skirts the borders of Bosnia in southern and central Croatia, had been heavily settled by ethnic Serbs for centuries.

After Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, they drove out around 80,000 Croats in a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" that has also led to convictions in the Hague, and proclaimed their own Serb republic.

Now just over a quarter of Krajina's original ethnic Serb population have returned. Most of those who have not blame poverty, a lack of jobs and discrimination. The European Union has called on Zagreb to do more on minority rights. (editing by Elizabeth Piper)

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