Serbia Begins Final Presentation in ICJ Genocide Case

The Bosnian authorities say Serbia and Montenegro, as the successor state to Yugoslavia, was responsible for an effort to wipe out parts of the non-Serb population in Bosnia during the war there in the Nineties. And judges at the ICJ have ruled in the past that they could hear the case.



But the Belgrade team continue to point to a more recent ICJ ruling that prevented Serbia from launching a separate suit against NATO states in connection with the air strikes that ended the conflict in Kosovo in 1999. Serbian lawyers say the legal arguments offered for that decision lead directly to the conclusion that Serbia is not eligible to be sued in the current case, either.



The Serbian representatives also attacked various elements in Sarajevo's case which were intended to show that a complex web of connections existed between Belgrade and the Bosnian Serb government and army during the war in Bosnia.



British lawyer Ian Brownlie attacked a report presented by Bosnia showing that Yugoslavia and the Serb entities in Bosnia and Croatia shared a single monetary and economic system. Brownlie said economic cooperation was in fact limited to loans provided by Belgrade to cover budget deficits.



He also noted that salaries paid by Belgrade to officers in the Bosnian Serb army continued long after the 1995 Dayton peace accords. This, he said, showed that the money was not specifically intended as remuneration for fighting in the Bosnian war.



Another Serbian representative, Vladimir Cvetkovic, concentrated on knocking down Bosnian arguments about the relationship between the Belgrade authorities and the paramilitaries who travelled from Serbia to fight in Bosnia. Using a number of the arguments employed by the late Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in his war crimes trial at the Hague tribunal, he denied claims of a link between such units and the Serbian security services.



The Serbian team also argued that the Bosnians had failed to show that Belgrade intended to destroy parts of the non-Serb population in Bosnia during the conflict there, something which they say is a precondition for a finding in Sarajevo's favour.