CROATIA HANDS OVER MATERIAL AGAINST YUGOSLAVIA TO ICJ

THE HAGUE, March 1 (Hina) - The International Court of Justice on Thursday morning received the material on 2,700 pages in which Croatia gives an explanation of its suit against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) for breaches of the convention on genocide. The contents of the suit are confidential until the start of court discussions, Croatia's Ambassador Ivan Simonovic said during the delivery of the documentation to the ICJ in The Hague. In the procedure this documentation is called memorial. The next step is Belgrade's response. Under the Court's ruling, the FRY should forward its answer or can even lodge a counter-suit, if it decides so, until 16 September 2002. Last year, former authorities in Yugoslavia announced a possibility for such counter-suit. After that, another round of written documents to be lodged with the Court ensues, and then the oral phase of the procedure follows. The procedure before the ICTY takes much time but it leads to the establishment of the truth about victims and about the liability for the genocide in Croatia, including the responsibility of the military and political leadership of Yugoslavia at whose helm was Slobodan Milosevic, Simonovic added. On 2 July 1999 Croatia instigated the procedure before the ICJ against Yugoslavia for its violation of the 1948 convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide. The suit covers the period between 1991 and 1995. Zagreb asks the United Nations' top judicial body to deliver verdict that Yugoslavia committed genocide in Croatia in that period, and to define damages which Belgrade should pay. The memorial in the suit has been prepared for nine months by Simonovic, who is a professor at the a law school in Zagreb, another law professor from Zagreb, Ivo Josipovic, Croatia's Ambassador to the Netherlands, Jaksa Muljacic, and a group of 40 experts. They gathered evidence on genocide committed in eastern Slavonia in one volume, and evidence from western Slavonia, Banovina, Kordun, Lika and Dalmatia in another volume. Zagreb consulted some world-famous legal experts for certain issues, and used material and assistance of the state institutions and non-governmental organisations that collected evidence and data on the war crimes and persecution in previous years. The task of the expert group was to establish and process facts so that they can be used not only by the ICJ but also by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Croatia's judiciary, Croatia's representatives explained. Zagreb has now processed data on many fields such as the detention camps, sexual abuse or speech of hatred. As a result, judiciary in the country has already launched several processes. As the ICJ forwards the memorial to the sued party, Yugoslavia, faced with evidence on war criminals who now live there, should instigate court actions as well. The new expert team that prepared the memorial abandoned a notion of the ethnic "self-cleansing" of Serbs from Croatia in 1995, elaborated and advocated by a former legal representative, U.S. lawyer David Rivkin. His work raised controversy in the Croatian public also due to sky- rocketing fees he received for that suit and due to non-transparent motives of the former Croatian authorities for launching the entire procedure. The memorial elaborated by Simonovic and the new team was done within 700,000 US dollars which the incumbent government allocated last year for that purpose. The ICJ was established after the Second World War for the settlement of legal disputes countries. In March 1993, Bosnia- Herzegovina lodged a case with it against Yugoslavia for genocide as well. This case is under way. (hina) ms