Democratic Party vice-president Dragan Sutanovac said it was good that the International Court of Justice had not found Serbia guilty of genocide because otherwise "the whole nation would have been branded" as genocidal.
He said in an interview with Beta news agency that all those who had committed or instigated crimes should be identified and brought before courts "not just before the Hague tribunal, but also before courts in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina."
Ivica Dacic, the leader of the Socialist Party of the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, said he regarded the court judgement as important not only for Serbia and the Serbian people but also for his party, which was in power in Serbia at the time of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He said that the ruling "makes stories about the command responsibility of Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia pointless." It also makes pointless the Hague tribunal and the trials of Slobodan Milosevic and other people indicted by the tribunal on charges of command responsibility, he added.
"It's beyond dispute that individual crimes should be tried, but the Hague tribunal intended to impose guilt on a state and a people for organised genocide and ethnic cleansing of other peoples of the former Yugoslavia," Dacic told Beta, adding that individual war crimes trials should become "a process that would include all former Yugoslav republics."
Dacic would not comment on the part of the ruling saying that Serbia was responsible for failure to prevent genocide at Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia, in 1995. He said that the essence of the court judgement was that Serbia was not guilty of genocide and that it was not complicit in war crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
On the other hand, the Youth Initiative for Human Rights said that Serbia should have been found guilty of genocide and that "the judgement is not in the interests of Serbia or the victims."
"I'm shocked by the ruling. I expected Serbia to be found guilty of genocide or complicity in genocide," Dragan Popovic, a member of the Belgrade-based non-governmental organisation, told Beta.
Meanwhile in the Serbian Assembly, President Boris Tadic called for adoption of a declaration that would unequivocally condemn the crimes committed at Srebrenica.
"That would make possible the opening of a new page in relations between Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Serbia, building new trust between citizens of the two states, and promoting political and economic relations," Tadic said.