Croatia and Serbia both absolved of genocide by top UN court

The cases were part of a long legal fallout from the break-up of Yugoslavia into seven states in wars that lasted eight years and left more 130,000 people dead.

Presiding judge Peter Tomka, fourth from right, opens the World Court session in The Hague, Netherlands on February 3, 2015. Peter Dejong/AP Photo

THE HAGUE // The UN’s highest court ruled on Tuesday that neither Croatia nor Serbia had committed genocide against each other’s populations during the wars that accompanied the violent break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Judge Peter Tomka, president of the International Court of Justice, said the forces of both countries had committed crimes during the conflict, but that the intent to commit genocide – by “destroying a population in whole or in part” – had not been proven against either country.

Finding that neither side had violated the 1948 Genocide Convention, Judge Tomka called on the former enemies to continue their cooperation in compensating victims with a view to “consolidating peace and stability in the region”.

Following the rulings, Serbian president Tomislav Nikolic voiced hope for lasting peace in the volatile Balkans region.

“I hope that in the future Serbia and Croatia will have the strength to jointly resolve all that is hampering the possibility of establishing a period of lasting peace and prosperity in our region,” Mr Nikolic said.

The cases were part of a long legal fallout from the break-up of Yugoslavia into seven states in wars that lasted eight years and left more than 130,000 dead in Europe’s worst conflict since World War Two.

Croatia filed its case against Belgrade in 1999 and Serbia its counter-case against Zagreb only in 2010.

“Croatia has not established that the only reasonable inference was the intent to destroy in whole or in part the (Croatian) group,” Judge Tomka said of Serbia’s campaign to destroy towns and expel civilians in Slavonia and Dalmatia.

Also rejecting Belgrade’s counterclaim, the judge said Croatia had not committed genocide when it sought to drive ethnic Serbs from the province of Krajina.

“What is generally called ethnic cleansing does not constitute genocide,” he said. “Acts of ethnic cleansing may be part of a genocidal plan, but only if there is an intention to physically destroy the target group.”

The panel of judges rejected Croatia’s claim by fifteen votes to two, while Serbia’s counterclaim was rejected unanimously. This implied that even Serbia’s delegated judge had ruled against the claim.

The United Nations tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which also sits in The Hague, has long since ruled that genocide was committed in Bosnia, where more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed when the UN “safe haven” of Srebrenica fell to Bosnian Serb forces in 1995.

In an earlier ruling from 2007 – in a case brought by Bosnia – the ICJ found that Serbia was not responsible for genocide, but that it had breached the genocide convention by failing to prevent the massacre in Srebrenica.

* Reuters with additional reporting by Agence France-Presse