Top UN Court to Judge on Croatia, Serbia Genocide Claims
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - The UN's highest International Court of Justice on Tuesday hands down its ruling in a long-running genocide case, seen as a landmark decision that could re-open wounds between former foes Croatia and Serbia.
ICJ chief judge Peter Tomka will read the verdict at its headquarters in The Hague's Peace Palace at 10:00 am (0900 GMT) in a case described by Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic as "perhaps one of the most important events for our bilateral relations with Croatia."
Zagreb in 1999 dragged Belgrade before the ICJ on genocide charges relating to Croatia's war of independence that raged in 1991-95 following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.
Serbia was accused of ethnic cleansing as a "form of genocide" at the time, leading to large numbers of Croats being displaced, killed or tortured and their property being destroyed.
Some 20,000 people died in the conflict, one of several to shake the Balkans in the 1990s.
Zagreb also wants judges to order Belgrade to pay compensation for damage "to persons and properties as well as to the Croatian economy and environment... a sum to be determined by the court."
Belgrade responded with a counter-suit in 2010, saying some 200,000 ethnic Serbs were forced to flee when Croatia launched a military operation to retake its territory.
Following Zagreb's counter-offensive, called Operation Storm, the proportion of ethnic Serbs in the area dwindled from 12 percent to four percent, AFP reported.
Belgrade was outraged in 2012 when Operation Storm's Croatian military commander, Ante Gotovina, was acquitted on appeal before the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
So far the ICJ, which rules in disputes between states, has recognised only one genocide case since opening its doors in 1946.
Genocide is the most serious of international crimes but also the hardest to prove.
In 2007 the court ruled that genocide had taken place in 1995, at Srebrenica in neighbouring Bosnia, when almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered and their bodies dumped in mass graves by Bosnian Serb troops that overran a UN-protected enclave.
