Hartmann: There was no genocide in Croatia

BELGRADE - No genocide was committed during the war in Croatia, and even Serbia and Croatia are aware of this, Florence Hartmann, a former spokesperson for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, has said, adding that the two countries' mutual genocide lawsuits will be dropped by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

There is no doubt about the outcome of the trial before the ICJ on Croatia's and Serbia's mutual lawsuits, Hartmann told the Belgrade daily Danas.

She said that the European Union had encouraged both Croatia and Serbia behind closed doors to drop the lawsuits, adding that the situation during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, cited by both lawsuits, was completely different and that the Bosniaks, one of the constitutive nations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, were victims of genocide.

Crimes against humanity were committed in Croatia, but there was no genocide, Hartmann said, adding that, despite years of talks, the lawsuits had not been withdrawn because historical issues regarding the war remain unresolved.

With the exception of a segment of its civil society, as a country and society, Serbia has been unwilling to initiate a serious process of facing the past to explicitly distance itself from the grimmest chapters written during the time of Milosevic's regime, Hartmann said.

The purpose of the process, whose outcome is already known, is to have the court describe the roles of the two countries in the grave crimes committed in Croatia in the 1990s and possibly give a legal qualification of the armed conflict itself in explanation of a decision to drop the mutual genocide lawsuits, Hartmann said.

Consciously or not, the objective is...