Croatia killings were not genocide, Belgrade argues

Serbians say UN court has no jurisdiction to consider claims

President Rosalyn Higgens (6th right) and judges of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, initiate the hearings on Zagreb’s genocide complaint, yesterday.

By Arthur Max - The Associated Press

THE HAGUE – Serbia said yesterday the brutalities of its war with Croatia fell short of genocide and argued the United Nations’ highest court has no jurisdiction to consider Croatia’s claims for compensation for humanity’s worst crime.

A year after it was cleared of responsibility for genocide in Bosnia, Serbia appeared again at the International Court of Justice to fight Croatia’s charges that it was liable for genocidal crimes during the 1991-95 war.

Croatia accuses Serbia of breaching the 1948 Genocide Convention by controlling army soldiers, paramilitary units and intelligence forces who murdered or illegally detained Croats and torched homes to ethnically cleanse large areas of Croatia.

The 17-judge tribunal, also known as the World Court, began a week of hearings over Serbia’s objections to the court’s jurisdiction. Croatia was to outline its case today. A ruling on jurisdiction was expected to take several months.

The decision likely will depend on the court’s interpretation of Belgrade’s ambiguous legal status in 1999, when Croatia filed the suit. The court adjudicates disputes between UN member states, but Serbia was not accepted as a new UN member until 2000, after the ouster of President Slobodan Milosevic. Belgrade also says it is not responsible for the government’s behavior during the Milosevic years.

“Serbia was not a member of the United Nations before 2000,” said its chief representative, Tibor Varady.

He also argued Serbia was not party to the Genocide Convention when Croatia filed its case.

Varady acknowledged Serbs committed “serious crimes” against Croats, but they “did not reach, much less pass, the threshold of genocide.” Crimes were committed by both sides, he noted.

“What happened cannot be reduced to a one-dimensional picture,” he said. “The misdeeds of one side were matched by the misdeeds of the other.” Varady said it was time to move on. “The days of yore have gone,” he said. “We have reached normalcy. It may still be delicate, it may still be frail, but it is normal,” and the two nations share a vision of their future as part of the European Union.

In a landmark judgment in February 2007, the court cited rulings by the separate UN Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia establishing that Serb soldiers and paramilitary forces had committed genocide against Muslims in Bosnia.

But the judgment said the Serbian state had lacked effective control over the troops who slaughtered Muslim civilians and conducted campaigns of ethnic cleansing, and Belgrade was not responsible for their actions.

Yesterday, Varady argued that the Yugoslav war crimes court had never indicted anyone for genocide in Croatia.

“There was no genocide,” he said.

Croatia says tens of thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced during the four-year conflict, which Croatia’s legal filing said was “a form of genocide.” Serbia says Croatia conducted its own campaign of ethnic cleansing against Serbs in the closing year of the war.

Zagreb’s application to the court said Serbia “has an obligation to pay” for the damage caused to Croatia and its people, but asked the court to determine an amount.

The world court has issued contradictory rulings in previous cases regarding its jurisdiction over Yugoslavia in the years after its republics broke away to become independent states.