Some participants in the event accused the media of stirring alert and general mobilisation and some also warned that it was disputable whether the ICTY, set up by the United Nations in The Hague, could at all apply the institute 'joint criminal enterprise'.
On 15 April the ICTY trial chamber sentenced General Ante Gotovina to 24 years in prison and General Mladen Markac to 18 years in prison for their role in a joint criminal enterprise, the aim of which, the tribunal said, was to forcibly and permanently remove the Serb population from occupied areas of Croatia during and after Operation Storm, launched on August 4, 1995. The Hague tribunal acquitted the third Croatian general in this case, Ivan Cermak. Croatia's forces launched Operation Storm to retake central and southern Croatian areas from rebel Serbs who set up the statelet "Republic of Serb Krajina" in those area in 1991.
University professor Zarko Puhovski, who was a member of the Croatian Helsinki Committee in 1995, said the Croatian nation did not show readiness to come to terms with the past.
Puhovski said he did not believe that the term "joint criminal enterprise" could be overruled in order not to be mentioned in the final judgement but he believed that sentences against the two generals "will be radically reduced".
He also said that the trial chamber's judgement contained many questionable things but that it was not true that the judgement said that the Croatian state was based on the crime or that Operation Storm itself was a joint criminal enterprise or that it recognised the Republic of Serb Krajina as a state.
The head of the "Documenta - Centre for Dealing with the Past" NGO, Vesna Terselic said that the shock caused by the rendering of the verdict was partly connected to a drive of spreading a feeling months before the ICTY's judgement that the tribunal would acquit the generals.
Terselic said that media mainly focused on the defence teams leaving little room for victims.
She said that after Croatia's forces liberated the said areas in August 1995, more than 600 civilians were killed and 150,000 Serbs fled Croatia.
Markac's defence lawyer Goran Mikulicic said that in the opinion of the defence teams and prominent international legal experts it is disputable whether that tribunal could at all apply the institute of joint criminal enterprise.
He said that there were still enough material for the defence teams to contest the verdict.
Human rights activist Zoran Pusic said that "nobody denies that Operation Storm was a liberating operation" and added that what deserved condemnation was "the use of this military operation for implementing an idea of ethnic cleansing".
Gotovina's role was in a military part of the operation and to see to it to militarily defeat the enemy, Pusic said adding that the cases of Gotovina and Markac should be separated from a "joint criminal enterprise" case.