The International Court of Justice in the Hague should soon rule in the dispute based on Croatia’s suit and Serbia’s countersuit for genocide. The court’s president, Peter Tomka, announced that the ruling would be issued before the trial chamber’s renewal in February.
The director of the Documentation and Information Centre „Veritas“, Savo Štrbac, tells our radio that he believes the court will take Serbia’s arguments into consideration and rule that Croatia committed genocide in the Storm operation in 1995. He was interviewed for our radio by Suzana Mitić.
The International Court of Justice consists of fifteen judges elected to nine-year terms of office, a third of whom is elected every three years, explains Štrbac. Seventeen judges are to decide on the Croatia versus Serbia case and vice-versa as Croatia and Serbia each provided a judge ad-hoc, neither of them having had a judge of its own nationality in the court.
Nothing official or unofficial has “leaked” from that court, which is commendable, considering the number of judges, despite the fact that I would like to know in advance about the majority opinion. A ruling is made by a simple majority of votes – nine judges will decide. The decision-making and ruling process is complicated and consists of five stages, says Štrbac.
Three rulings are possible: the court ruling that both sides have committed genocide, that only one of the sides has or that neither side has committed genocide, says Štrbac. He rules out the possibility of the court deciding that Serbia has committed genocide against the Croats and that it has not been the case the other way round.
My team and I believe that the court will accept our claims and establish, and also rule, that the Croats committed genocide against the Serbs in the Storm operation in 1995 and that they committed war crimes in all the cases preceding the Storm and that the court will, at the same time, reject Croatia’s claim, stresses Štrbac.
He adds that many theoreticians who commented on this case have expressed an opinion that the court will reject the claims of either state and will rule that there was no genocide on either side. Should the court do that, I expect it to give a reasoning to the decision and explain what happened to the Serbs in the Storm operation and during the entire war from 1991 to 1995 if it was not genocide? When one kills more than seven thousand Serbs and expels more than 400,000, when one destroys their entire private and collective property and when one prevents them from returning even twenty years after the end of the war, what is that if not genocide? If the court decides that genocide has not been committed against the Serbs, but that all the other war crimes have, then I will regard that as a partial success, says Štrbac.
Štrbac has been the only expert witness from the Serbian side in this case and presented to the court facts about victims on the Serbian side during the war, especially in the Storm operation.
Povezani tekstovi
