Question: When is genocide not genocide?

Answer: It really depends on who you ask.

Yesterday the International Court of Justice (IJC) gave its own answer to the question when it rejected claims of genocide by Serbia and Croatia against each other during the Croatian war of secession from Yugoslavia.

For its part the Croatian government alleged that Serbia committed genocide in the town of Vukovar and elsewhere in 1991. Serbia on the other hand had filed a counterclaim over the expulsion of more than 200,000 Serbs from Croatia during the Croatian military's Operation Storm against the majority ethnic-Serb Krajina area.

Summing up the IJC's decision its President, Peter Tomka, said the forces of both countries had committed crimes during the conflict, but that the intent to commit genocide - by "destroying a population in whole or in part" - had not been proven against either country.

That key phrase "in whole or in part," will resonate uncomfortably with many Serbs and Croats who survived the atrocities committed in Krajina and Vukovar.

As one of only a few journalists who made it into besieged Vukovar at the height of the fighting, I find it impossible to think of what I witnessed as being anything other than genocide within the UN's own strict original 1946 definition of the term.

Back then the international body defined genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group: "Killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group or deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

All three of these violent, punitive, and ethnically motivated acts took place against Croats in Vukovar, of that, personally, I am in no doubt. I'm sure much the same could be said of Croat actions against Serbs in Krajina.

At Vukovar's hospital, hundreds, almost all Croatian patients, ranging age from 16-77 years-of-age were massacred at the hands of Serb militias, some loyal to the infamous warlord Zeljko Raznatovic "Arkan". In the same district, Ovcara, a Serbian transit camp for Croatian prisoners housed thousands of men who were subsequently transported to the Sremska Mitrovica prison camp where throughout the war, torture, abuse and rape were systematic.

Earlier last year I returned to that other ravaged part of former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, as part of a Scottish delegation invited by the charity 'Remembering Srebrenica.'

Srebrenica of course was where in 1995, 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred and buried in mass graves, the greatest atrocity on European soil since the Second World War.

Today, the charity aims to highlight these grim events in an effort to warn against the pernicious impact of discrimination, promotion of hatred and extremism.

Back in 2004 the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled that the Srebrenica massacre constituted genocide.

Yesterday, the IJC came to a different verdict, concluding that "acts of ethnic cleansing may be part of a genocidal plan, but only if there is an intention to physically destroy the target group."

Many survivors of Vukovar and Krajina will doubtless feel discomfort and disappointment at such a conclusion. I know I do.