The SDA said in a statement on Tuesday that it was indisputable that the area of Krajina was occupied by Serb rebels and that "Operation Storm was a legal and legitimate military operation which lead to the defeat of the paramilitary Serb forces both in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina."

This way, Operation Storm contributed to efforts to put an end to the war in the region, this parliamentary party said in a statement dismissing allegations from the ICTY's non-final ruling about a joint criminal enterprise set up during Operation Storm when in August 1995 Croatia's forces retook central and southern Croatian areas which had been under the control of Serb rebels since 1991.

The party refutes attempts to brand the Croatian Homeland Defence War as a criminal enterprise, stressing that it was a just and defensive war.

The party also calls on the ICTY appeals chamber to take into consideration historical, political and military circumstances which lead to the Croatian Homeland Defence War and mitigating circumstances for the generals in order to pass a fair ruling for them.

According to the SDA, it is unbelievable that the Hague tribunal has neglected the fact that the so-called Serb Krajina in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina were set up during the wars in the 1990s in an attempt to see to it that the idea of a Greater Serbia come true, and this attempt "resulted in thousands of refugees, dead, wounded, humiliated and raped people from Vukovar, Skabrnja, Struga to Srebrenica, Sarajevo, and Bihac".

"Only a just verdict, and this (non-final) was not such -- will be in function of the development of interpersonal, interstate and good-neighbourly relations in the future," reads the statement signed by the party leader, Semso Tankovic.

On 15 April, the Hague-based UN tribunal sentenced Gotovina to 24 years and Markac to 18 years in prison for war crimes committed during and in the wake of Operation Storm in August 1995.