Counsel for Serbia Wayne Jordash noted that the genocide was planned in the Brioni meeting between the then Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and military commanders on July 31, 1995.
During the meeting, Tudjman set as the objective of Operation Storm, which followed on August 4-5, 1995, that the Serbs disappear from the Krajina region.
"As the evidence shows, President Tudjman, the leader of Croatia and its ruling party, the HDZ, as well as the Supreme Commander of the Croatian forces at the time, saw genocide as a solution to the problem presented by the Krajina Serbs," Jordash said.
Serbia provided the Brioni meeting transcript, which Tudjman himself recorded, as the key evidence of the Croatian authorities' genocidal intent.
Quoting a paragraph from Tudjman's book "Wastelands of Historical Reality", Jordash noted that Tudjman regarded genocide "as a pragmatic solution to inter-ethnic conflict or political disputes".
He noted that the Brioni leaders targeted the Krajina Serbs for extinction, adding that this was the plan that- if successful- would destroy the group or a substantial part of it.
During the operation, the widespread and systematic killing, physical and mental harm and the deliberate infliction on the Krajina Serbs of conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction on its own give rise to such an inference, he said.
After 200, 000 Serbs were forced to flee due to the indiscriminate shelling of towns in Operation Storm, the operation continued with the attacks on those that remained - mostly the elderly, the disabled and the sick, he said.
"Anything Serbian was burnt or destroyed in a crescendo of violence that was as motiveless, as it was destructive. It speaks eloquently, yet terribly, about the intent at the heart of Operation Storm," Jordash underlined, and further illustrated with quotations from reports by international humanitarian organizations.
He concluded that there is no dilemma that all these acts represented a comprehensive operation with the intent to destroy the Krajina Serbs.
"The Croatian leadership knew that the combination of the crimes would inevitably result in the physical disappearance of the Serbians from Croatia and clearly intended through these acts to physically destroy this group," Serbia's counsel said.
Jordash also presented the evidence that Croatia failed to punish the perpetrators, given that up to this day no one has been convicted for the crimes against the Serbs during and after Operation Storm.
William Schabas, a member of the Serbian legal team, pointed to the 2011 census of Croatia which shows that ethnic Serbs living in Croatia accounted for just 32 percent of the total number of ethnic Serbs who had lived in the country twenty years earlier, which illustrates the scale the scale of the transformation that has taken place within that country's borders. A large proportion of this is a consequence of Operation Storm, he noted.
Schabas said that had he lived longer, Croatian president Tudjman would have appeared before the international court on charges of genocide.
Referring to the acquittal that the Appeals Chamber delivered to Croatian general Ante Gotovina, the commander in Operation Storm, Schabas noted that the court had not challenged the findings about the widespread crimes against the Serbs from the first-instance ruling that had sentenced Gotovina to 27 years in prison.
Schabas said that one of the two judges that had voiced a dissenting opinion concerning the acquittal of Gotovina said that the judgment had nothing to do with justice.
"The Brioni meeting transcript provides conclusive evidence of the existence of a policy on the part of the Croatian leadership to eradicate the Serbs living in Krajina - military personnel and civilian population alike," Schabas said.
"The communication at Brioni reveals the intent to bring about the disappearance of the Serb population not simply through their removal, but likewise through their physical destruction," he added.
Schabas compared the Brioni meeting with Wannsee Conference of February 1942, the meeting during which senior Nazis plotted the destruction of the Jews in Europe using the notorious euphemism of the "final solution".
Responding to Croatia's claim that a legitimate military operation to expel the Serb military forces, and not civilians, was planned at Brioni, Serbia's representative said that there is no dilemma that Operation Storm was planned by a meeting of criminals, at Brioni, at which criminal acts were planned.
At the close of the first round of argument of Serbia, Agent of Serbia Sasa Obradovic said that it had not been Serbia's choice to come before the ICJ to litigate these issues, but that Croatia had insisted on that.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Serbia's counter claim is much stronger than the claim submitted by Croatia, he noted.
"The scale of the violence in Operation Storm, the number of the victims in a short period of time and under limited opportunities on the side of the perpetrators, as well as the consequences upon the life of the attacked group cannot be compared when any of the massive crimes described by the Applicant's claim which covered the time period of five years," Obradovic said.
"Nothing remotely similar can be said of the victim group that is the object of Croatia's claim," he said, noting that the number of Serbs in Croatia has shrunk enormously since 1991.
The dispute will be continued on March 18, when Croatia will present its observations on Serbia's counter-claims. The second round of the hearings will take place from March 20- April 1.
According to expert assessments, the final judgment, which cannot be appealed, should be delivered by the end of 2014 or in early 2015 and it will be binding for both countries.
http://www.tanjug.rs/news/121433/serbs-disappearance-from-krajina---goal-of-operation-storm.htm
14/3/14
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