UNITED NATIONS: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) of the United Nations ruled on Tuesday that neither Serbia nor Croatia had committed acts of genocide in the events following collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The ICJ rulings cannot be challenged in any court, a UN spokesman said at a press briefing in New York. Both Serbia and Croatia have accepted the ruling, he said.

The court, which deliberated on the allegations of genocide by Serbia and Croatia against each other, ruled that neither party had been able to prove that the other had committed an act of genocide.

The crimes in question were allegedly committed during the Croatian independence war, which followed the breakup of the Yugoslavian republic, and left about 20,000 people dead between 1991 and 1995.

“In the absence of proof of the necessary intent, the court finds that Croatia has failed to substantiate its allegation that genocide or other breaches of the Convention were committed,” the court said in a statement, adding “the Court considers that the existence of an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the national or ethnical group of the Serbs in Croatia has not been proved in this case”.

The ICJ ruled that Serbia intended to create a Serbian state by driving the Croatian population away from a region instead of destroying it, while noting that the acts of Croatian troops were not on a scale sufficient to establish an intention of genocide.

The Croatian government had accused Serbia of committing genocide in the town of Vukovar in 1991.

The Vukovar incident, and a subsequent 87-day siege by the Yugoslavian army, is said to have left over 2,000 dead and tens of thousands of people displaced.

The court also ruled that Serbia cannot be found guilty of acts committed before April 27, 1992, according to a telecast of the court’s deliberations.

Serbia had filed a counter-claim against the forced expulsion of 200,000 Serbs from Croatia, in an incident where the Croatian military bombarded a majority Serb area, in an exercise called Operation Storm.

The proportion of ethnic Serbs in the area had reportedly dwindled to 4 per cent from 12 per cent before the attack.

Published in Dawn, February 4th, 2015

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