Belgrade - It was only Tuesday that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) decided to hear Croatia's genocide case against Serbia and already on Wednesday the thin scabs covering old Balkan war wounds had been scratched off.

"Serbia raped" was one among the fiery headlines from Serbia's yellow press bringing back memories of the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Although reports on the ICJ decision from the mainstream Serbian press remained cool and professional, speeches in parliament and even diplomatic gestures only served to raise tensions.

In its complaint to the ICJ, Croatia claims that Serbia committed genocide by spurring on and supporting Serb insurgents in an ethnic cleansing campaign on a third of Croatia's territory in 1991-95.

Incensed, Serbs are now dusting off their own files and may seek to prove at the ICJ that Croatia drove 200,000 of their compatriots out in brutal, war-ending offensives in
1995.

"Croatian officials ... say the truth needs to be established. So we will give them a chance to respond ... in a lawsuit over the ethnic cleansing of Serbs," Belgrade's Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said.

In any case, the trial provides "a new challenge to relations of Serbia and Croatia," said Belgrade's former ambassador to Zagreb, Milan Simurdic.

The ping-pong game of accusations and counter-moves is being played across the former Yugoslavia, a region that appeared to be a solid country over seven decades before finally falling apart in bloodshed.

So far the court cases have been far from productive - in 2007 the ICJ ruled in Bosnia's claim against Serbia, ambiguously clearing Belgrade of blame in the genocide of Muslims, but chiding it for not doing enough to stop Bosnian Serbs from committing massacres.

That verdict, described by many as political, did nothing to ease tensions between Serbs, Muslims and Croats which have kept Bosnia in stalemate in the 13 years since the war ended.

Similar are Serbia's relations with Kosovo, where the Albanian majority declared independence in February, a case that also landed on the ICJ's agenda, this time at Serbia's initiative.

The ICJ earlier turned down a Serbian lawsuit against NATO, in which Serbia accused the military alliance of unlawfully bombing it over Kosovo in 1999. That cemented the conviction - shared by many Serbs and encouraged by many of their leaders - of an international anti-Serb conspiracy.

The bitterness Serbs have accumulated through the humiliations of lost wars, lost political ties and lost territory stands in precarious balance with the desire to open up and become a part of Europe.

That showed in a May parliamentary election, when President Boris Tadic's pro-European camp barely escaped defeat from nationalists who wanted to steer Serbia off its Western course.

In any case, much of the diplomacy of the former Yugoslavia resembles "a small-time court more than politics," former Serbian premier Zoran Zivkovic, who inherited the government of slain reformist Zoran Djindjic in 2003, told radio B92.

The upcoming trial at the ICJ and the likely counter-suit "are a defeat of politics both in Croatia and Serbia - trials cannot replace politics," said Zivkovic. (dpa)