Serbia will file charges of genocide against Croatia at the United Nations" International Court of Justice (ICJ), President Boris Tadic said Thursday, according to dpa. Tadic told the national television RTS that Belgrade has prepared a lawsuit for atrocities Croatian forces allegedly committed against the Serbs in the 1991-95 war in the former Yugoslavia. The Serbian legal team completed preparations for the lawsuit in mid-December, officials said. The move is intended to counter Croatia"s own genocide lawsuit, filed more than 10 years ago. The Hague-based ICJ however only in November 2008 decided to take up that case. Zagreb demands compensation, accusing Belgrade of a campaign of ethnic cleansing through an insurgency of ethnic Serbs it allegedly controlled a portion of Croatian territory and killing 20,000 Croats. The war broke out in 1991, after Croatia declared it was splitting from the Yugoslav federation. Supported by Belgrade, the Serbs proclaimed a state of their own on Croatian soil, but were eventually crushed in the summer of 1995. The ICJ had delivered an ambiguous verdict in a similar lawsuit of Bosnia against Serbia in February 2007, clearing Belgrade of accusations that it committed genocide, but saying it had not done enough to stop Bosnian Serbs from carrying it out.
