"Genocide as tool of ethnic cleansing"

"Genocide as tool of ethnic cleansing"

THE HAGUE -- Legal team chief Saša Obradović on Thursday presented the evidence before the ICJ in Serbia's genocide counter-lawsuit against Croatia.

Earlier in the week, the Serbian team responded to the evidence from Croatia's lawsuit, presented earlier this month as public hearings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague began.

Addressing the court, Obradović said that Serbs from the Knin region of Croatia, Kninska Krajina, were destroyed as an ethnic group in Operation Storm in the summer of 1995, and that the genocidal intent of the then Croatian president Franjo Tuđman was realized in the operation.

Obradović noted that, in the Brioni meeting, Tuđman discussed with his commanders the plan and the execution of the plan for "a forcible disappearance "of the Serb community from Kninska Krajina (the Serb-majority area at the time).

At Brioni, Tuđman and his subordinates assumed genocide, if necessary, as a tool of the ethnic cleansing, he said.

That is also proved by the statement that Tuđman gave in Knin on August 26, 1995 that "(t)here can be no return to the past, to the times when they, the Serbs, were spreading cancer in the heart of Croatia, cancer which was destroying the Croatian national being and which did not allow the Croatian people to be the master in its own house", Obradović said.

Underlining that the crime of genocide is not based only on the motive for revenge, but also on a certain disparaging public attitude towards other racial, national, ethnic or religious groups of people, Obradović cited statements by Croatian officials and public figures that incited to hatred against the Serbs. "As...