Croat officials assumed genocide as tool of ethnic cleansing

THE HAGUE - Agent of Serbia Sasa Obradovic presented the evidence before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Thursday that Serbs from 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 Tudjman was realized in the operation.

Presenting Serbia's counter-claim, Obradovic noted that, in the Brioni meeting, Tudjman 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, Tudjman and his subordinates assumed genocide, if necessary, as a tool of the ethnic cleansing, he said.

That is also proved by the statement that Tudjman 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", Obradovic 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, Obradovic cited statements by Croatian officials and public figures that incited to hatred against the Serbs. "As history taught us, a group which is intended to be destroyed is usually treated as a group of people of smaller human values than a group to which perpetrators belong," he said, voicing his conviction that "Serbs in Croatia in 1995 had such a treatment".

Obradovic cited Sime Djodan, special envoy of the Croatian president, who said at...