"Genocide as tool of ethnic cleansing"

"Genocide as tool of ethnic cleansing"

Addressing the court, Obradović said that Serbs from the Knin region of Croatia, 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 Tuđman was realized in the operation.

Obradović noted that, in the Brioni meeting, Tuđman 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, Tuđman and his subordinates assumed genocide, if necessary, as a tool of the ethnic cleansing, he said.

That is also proved by the statement that Tuđman 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", Obradović 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, Obradović 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".

Obradović cited Sime Đodan, special envoy of the Croatian president, who said at a traditional folk festival that Serbs had pointed heads and probably small brains, and Tuđman himself stated for the national television that he was happy because his wife was neither Serb nor Jew.

In August 1991, Croatian parliamentarian Marjan Jurić, in his public statement in the parliament, compared the Serbs with vermin, while journalist Zvonimir Sekulin offended the Orthodox Serb population by stating that a photo of Patriarch Pavle, the then head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, was "more pornographic than the photos of the biggest whores", the agent of Serbia said.

The statement that best illustrates the hatred toward the Serbs is the one by Kresimir Dolenčić, director of the Zagreb-based Gavela Theater, calling the Serbs "beasts from the East", comparing them with monkeys, stating that their culture is below the primitive level and recommending that the Serbs "should either be held in captivity or destroyed", Obradović noted.

"The last statement that I quoted went beyond mere hate speech. That statement publicly and directly communicated the call to members of the general public at large for destroying the Serbs. That was incitement to commit genocide," Obradović said, noting that none of the mentioned persons has ever been called for responsibility for these discriminatory words under any provision of the Croatian Criminal Code, and that it was not officially denied that these statements were uttered.

Obradović said that Operation Storm was not an isolated crime that the Croatian forces committed against the Serbs, and it is not a mere war incident, as crimes against the Serbs in Croatia were also committed in 1991 and 1992, about which Serbia delivered convincing evidence to the court.

Obradović noted that the Croatian government was fully aware of the crimes, and that the Croatian government at that time did not properly investigate and prosecute those massive crimes; quite to the contrary, those most responsible for the crimes were later promoted to the higher ranks in the state hierarchy.

After the deployment of the United Nations Protection Forces (UNPROFOR), Croatian official armed forces conducted ethnic cleansing of the Serbs in the operations - Maslenica, Medak Pocket and Flash, the agent of Serbia said.

He pointed to the importance of the historical background of the state policy against Serbs in Croatia, and noted that the Serbian legal team delivered to the court numerous pieces of evidence in relation to that.

"Without a due overview of that background, a court of law cannot fully understand how a spiral of crimes between Croats and Serbs developed and kept going on for such a long time in history, in spite of the decades of the seemingly peaceful socialist rule, and how that spiral reached its peak in Operation Storm in 1995," Obradović said.

"If this Court did not know what had occurred in Yugoslavia during World War II, in particular in the Independent State of Croatia, it would not be able to understand those words of the young Croat soldier who, entering Knin on August 5, 1995, met witness Hill, the United Nations Military Police Commander of Sector South, and told him that 'he had been waiting for this since 1945'," he noted.

"Nor how it was possible that over two million books were destroyed as 'unsuitable' in the infamous Croatian 1990s process of librocide because they were written by Serbian authors, or they were printed in (Serbian) Cyrillic alphabet , or simply because they were about Yugoslavia," he added.

Nor can the words of Croatian president Tuđman at Brioni be rightly understood without the knowledge of his ideological background, Obradović said, adding that together with the counter-claim that deals with the crime of genocide from 1991-1995, Serbia also delivered the documentation concerning the crimes that the Ustashe (Croatian Nazis) committed against Serbs during World War II in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH).