It's no secret, for instance, that the Greeks, and this includes the Greek popular sentiment as well, sided with the Serbs. Greek irregulars were reported to have participated in Bosnia massacres, and flip over to Greek attitudes on "FYROM" (what a laugh that name) and Kosovo, and you'll see it would have been very hard for the EU to have a united front in this story, regardless of the facts (which, it turns out, were as dispensible in Western capitals as in those of the balkans), even if the core of the EU were as one.

Add to this the deep divisiveness of Germany's unilateral decision to prematurely recognize Croatia and Slovenia's independance - at loggerheads with France, the UK and George HW Bush's US- and thereby guarantee a bloodbath. When Germany recognized Tudjman's Croatia, and this beyond the historical precedence dating from WW2, it guaranteed that every Yugoslav Republic, in violent fashion, would also become independent.

Why necessarily violent? Look at the ethnic map (the sort of map, I might add, the Germans innovated themselves) of the area, and read the press accounts of the ethnic fervor at the time in the region. Hell, even little ol' me saw it first hand, witnessing more than one fight at the kiosk between folks buying Croatian-language papers and those buying Serb-language papers.

Kohl has a lot of blood in his hands. But this might not worry him much given all the money he tucked away as well.

"Understandably" then, the EU was hardly in a position to lead on this. Which is just the way one might well imagine a US government to like things. Keeps Europe weak, and accentuates their inability to build an independent and coherent foreign policy backed by a credible and independant military force (which only France today, really, has).

And if shepherded correctly, the resulting mess can be assured to be a gift that keeps on giving instability and rancor to Europeans for generations to follow.

Which is exactly what Kosovo is now.

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill

Yugoslavia's collapse became inevitable by the start of 1991, with the federal institutions completely deadlocked between pro- and anti-Milošević forces. The indictment against Milošević alleges that in a televised address on 16 March 1991 Milošević declared that Yugoslavia was finished and that Serbia would no longer be bound by decisions of the Federal Presidency.[7] This allegation was shown to be false when a transcript of the speech was exhibited at the Milošević trial on 25 January 2006.[8]

In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia seceded from the federation, followed by the republics of Macedonia (September 1991) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (March 1992). The Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) sought unsuccessfully to prevent Slovenia's secession by the use of force; however, Slovenia's Ten-Day War ended in a disastrous defeat for the federal forces.

Demands for a greater autonomy for nations had been proposed since 1989, and Milošević had been an early opponent of such moves. Part of the reason why demands for Slovene independence were growing was the continuing authoritarian rule in Serbia. Milošević tried to organise a "Meeting of Truth" in the Slovene capital, Ljubljana, to discuss the Kosovo situation, but this proposal was rejected by Kučan. Milošević later moved towards a more pragmatic policy. He had little opposition to Slovenia leaving the country. Kučan recalled, "Milošević had said to me that we should reach some agreement on Slovenia's desire to leave Yugoslavia. He said that he would not stop us, and that the others didn't understand what the whole thing was about anyway. But he said that he cannot let Croatia go, because Croatia was bound to Serbia by blood."[9]

At this point, Milošević supported the claims of Serb populations in other states to stay in Yugoslavia, based on the ostensible premise that the large Serbian populations in Croatia (580,000) and Bosnia (1.36 million) should have the right to stay in Yugoslavia as they desired, arguing that the Yugoslav Constitution gave the right of self-determination to nations (Serbs, Croats, etc as a whole), not republics (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, etc). His agreement with Slovenia was based on the self-determination of peoples; as Slovenia was ethnically homogeneous, he had little opposition to the country leaving.

Croatia's Serbs began campaigning for greater autonomy within Croatia from as early as 1990 after the election of the Croatian nationalist Franjo Tudjman, with Milošević's full support. From the day of Croatia's independence on June 25, 1991 until early 1992 when Croatian independence was recognised by the high profile world states, Croatia was facing resistance from the Yugoslav National Army (JNA). Following their withdrawal from Croatia in 1992 came the emergence of Serb dissidents from within Croatia's borders who engaged in a war against the Croatian government with support from Milošević. The first leader of Serbs in Croatia, Milan Babić, has stated that Milošević was responsible for this and his successor Goran Hadžić publicly bragged about how he was "the extended hand of Slobodan Milošević".

War crimes prosecutors subsequently characterised the creation of the separatist Republic of Serbian Krajina as a "joint criminal enterprise" whose goal was "the forcible removal of the majority of the Croat and other non-Serb population from the approximately one-third of the territory of the Republic of Croatia that he planned to become part of a new Serb-dominated state."[7] At the trial of Milan Babić, the ICTY found that the Serbian government was directly involved in the Croatian Serb rebellion, providing supplies, weapons, money and leadership.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slobodan_Milo%C5%A1evi%C4%87

for you not adopting the Serbian nationalist standpoint is to be uninformed and malicious.

It is true that war crimes have been committed by all parts. But it is also true that the biggest ones in THIS war have been committed by the Serbs and that the Serbs, because in control of the Army and for pure ideological reasons started the war.

They are paying for that today. Exactly as the Germans did after WWII. At least they accepted their defeat.

But fact remain that it was Milosevic's nationalism that created most of the havoc in the region. After Tito's death the unsolved problems were not solved by negotiation, and the GREATEST responsability falls on the Serbian nationalists, based on nationalistic fantasies from the historian Karadic that everybody that spoke serbocroatisk was an ethnic Serb. Milosevic wanted even to include parts of Hungary and Bulgaria in the Greater Serbia and join it in a union with Greece...

Had someone else been in charge maybe the old Yugoslavia had split into independent nations without major conflicts. But history often doesn't work the easy way.

I think I am consistent. I see a big difference between a geographical unit with a vast majority (88%) of one very different ethnical group with a completely different language (Kosovo) - and enclaves (12% of the population) of people within another community speaking the same language but using a different alphabet. I never said that the Kosovars had "the right to take to arms", I said that their historical situation was different from the Krajina Serbs.

In a way the Milosevic claims reminds of the Zionist claims on Palestine. But using some verses about a more or less unverified "treason" in a poem written 100 years after a major defeat (as only source) to define the craddle of a nation, is even more preposterous than the Zionist claim.  

Greater Serbia map proposed by the leader of Serbian Radical Party, Vojislav Šešelj, in late 1980s

The modern elaboration of Serbs' grievances and allegation of inequality in Yugoslavia was to be developed in the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, a paper not officially publicized at the time of its appearance, 1986, but which was the single most important document to set into motion the pan-Serbian movement of the late 1980s which led to Slobodan Miloševic's rise to power and subsequent Yugoslav wars. The authors of the Memorandum included the most influential Serbian intellectuals- among them: Pavle Ivic, Antonije Isakovic, Dušan Kanazir, Mihailo Markovic, Miloš Macura, Dejan Medakovic, Miroslav Pantic, Nikola Pantic, Ljubiša Rakic, Radovan Samardzic, Miomir Vukobratovic, Vasilije Krestic, Ivan Maksimovic, Kosta Mihailovic, Stojan Čelic and Nikola Čobelic. Christopher Bennett (Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse) characterized the memorandum as "an elaborate, if crude, conspiracy theory."

The memorandum alleged systematic discrimination against Serbs and Serbia culminating with the allegation that the Serbs of Kosovo were being subjected to genocide. According to Bennett, despite most of these claims being obviously absurd, the memorandum was merely one of several similar polemics published at the time.

The "Memorandum"'s central theses are:

• Yugoslavia is a Croatian-Slovene hegemony
  
• Serbs are, in Yugoslavia, oppressed as a nation. This oppression is especially brutal in Serbian province Kosovo and in Croatia, where their status is "the worst ever as far as recorded history goes"
  
• Serbia is economically exploited, being subjected to the political-economical mechanisms that drain much of her wealth and redistribute it to Slovenia, Croatia and Kosovo
  
• borders between Yugoslav republics are arbitrary, drawn by dominant Croatian and Slovene communists (motivated, supposedly, by anti-Serbian animus) and their Serbian political lapdogs

All of the "Memorandum"'s verifiable claims have been refuted (for instance, the portions on the economy part by Croatian economist and academician Jakov Sirotković; the ideological-cultural portions by Croatian historian and polymath Miroslav Brandt), but to no avail, since the main arguments of the "Memorandum" were not intended to convince, but to inflame. This is especially visible since the authors have issued the "official" version after the collapse in wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1995. They claimed that the course of events "had corroborated" their contentions and did not question a single assumption they had made.

The Memorandum's defenders claims go as follows: far from calling for a breakup of Yugoslavia on Greater Serbian lines claimed to be in favor of Yugoslavia. It's support for Yugoslavia was however conditional on fundamental changes to end what the Memorandum argued was the discrimination against Serbia which they alleged was inbuilt into Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav constitution as it existed. The chief of these changes was abolition of the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina two provinces which were almost equal to other republics yet were nominally part of the republic of Serbia. According to Norman Cigar (Genocide in Bosnia p24), because the changes were unlikely to be accepted passively, the implementation of the Memorandum's program would only be possible by force.

With the rise to power of Slobodan Milošević the Memorandum's discourse became mainstream in Serbia. According to Bennett, Miloševic used a rigid control of the media to organize a propaganda campaign in which the thesis that Serbs were the victims and the need for reajust Yugoslavia to redress the alleged bias against Serbia. This then was then followed by Miloševic's anti-bureaucratic revolution in which the Regional governments of Vojvodina and Kosovo along with the Republican government of Montenegro, were overthrown which gave Milošević the dominating position of 4 votes out of 8 in Yugoslavia's collective presidency.

Miloševic had achieved such a dominant position for Serbia because, according to Bennett the old communist authorities had failed to stand up to him. This changed first when the Slovenian communist leadership felt it had to respond to the concerns of the civil society opposition. Then in 1990 free elections brought opposition parties to power in Croatia and Slovenia.

By this point several opposition parties in Serbia were openly calling for a Greater Serbia, rejecting the then existing boundaries of the Republics as the artificial creation of Tito's partisans. These included both Vuk Draškovic's SNO (Cigar p35) and Šešelj's Serbian Radical Party. Slobodan Miloševic and his Socialist Party of Serbia now however posed as defenders of Yugoslavia claiming that the recent changes had rectified most of the anti-Serb bias that the Memorandum had alleged. However, they together with the groups calling for a Greater Serbia insisted on the demand for "all Serbs in one state". For Miloševic Yugoslavia could be that one state but the threat was that should Yugoslavia break up then Serbia under Miloševic would carve out a greater Serbia. (James Gow: Triumph of the Lack of Will p. 19).

The Yugoslav civil wars were initiated by the breakdown in federal institutions, in an attempt by the Socialist Republic of Serbia under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic to change the hitherto power structures and centralise power in hands of Serbia. The act was consistent with the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which saw the Serbs' status in Yugoslavia as inferior and argued for a reorganisation of the Yugoslav state (including borders). Realising that their autonomy could no longer be facilitated through the Yugoslav state, the moves by Serbia initiated the secession of the two northernmost republics of the former Yugoslavia - Slovenia and Croatia.

The first of these conflicts, known as the Ten-Day War or the War in Slovenia, was initiated by the secession of Slovenia from the federation on 25 June 1991. The federal government ordered the federal Yugoslav People's Army to secure border crossings in Slovenia. Slovenian police and Territorial Defense blockaded barracks and roads, leading to standoffs and limited skirmishes around the republic. After several dozen deaths, the war was stopped through negotiation at Brioni on 9 July 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia agreed to a three-month moratorium on secession. The Federal army completely withdrew from Slovenia by 26 October 1991.

The second in this series of conflicts, the Croatian War of Independence, occurred when rebel Serbs started to take control over some parts of Croatia. Yugoslav People's Army pretended[citation needed] to mediate between rebel Serbs and Croatian government forces, before completely taking the Serbian side. Croatia had to form its military from scratch[citation needed] and was further hindered by the arms embargo which didn't hurt the Serbs who had almost the entire equipment of Yugoslav People's Army on their disposal. Many Croatian towns were attacked and civilian targets were more common[citation needed] than military ones. The destruction of Vukovar and the killings of captured soldiers and inhabitants by Serbian forces are the heaviest[citation needed] atrocities of this war. The shelling of Dubrovnik by Montenegroan forces (part of the Serbian army) is among better-known atrocities. In January 1992, the Vance peace plan proclaimed UN controlled (UNPA) zones for Serbs and brought an end to major military operations, though sporadic artillery attacks on Croatian cities and occasional intrusions of Croatian forces into UNPA zones continued until 1995.

In 1992, the conflict engulfed Bosnia. It was a three-way conflict between local Muslims, Serbs, and Croats, primarily differing in their traditional religion: Islam, Christian Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, respectively. It was by far the bloodiest and most widely covered of the Yugoslav wars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_wars

those little reminders above are mainstream history. Surely can different points and episodes be discuted. But presenting things the way you do is nothing but historical revisionism. And calling me a racist won't change that.

That's a cultural tradition, followed to different extent by different individuals. If we consider the actions and motives of political leaders, it is of little use. I don't think for example that the sex trafficking conducted by some ex-KLA-commanders has much to do with traditions of solidarity.

Regarding the land-buying, which BTW sounds more like a Serbian nationalist theory of the reasons for Yugoslav-era and Milo-era loss than the results of sociological research, that's not necessarily because of solidarity. Given that Albanians outnumbered all others by 1:5 around the eighties, the smaller richest segment of a poorer ethnic must have outnumbered the larger richest segment of the minority, and many of the latter probably wanted to move to Belgrade anyway and thus not pursue land purchase.

harshly punish those who are not loyal to their mutual policy and task

All Albanians, Albanian Albanians, Kosovo Albanians, KLA member Albanians, Albanians of some wing or clique within the KLA? I'd say what you say applies primarily to the second-last, and then to the last. I think the Socialist circles and the Sigurimi mafia, the power base of President Berisha and the KLA can be considered separate (sometimes rival, sometimes cooperating) power bases.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

That being said, it doesn't absolve the EU of the ability to easily predict the reaction of Serbs in that region.

And some people, like Cyrus Vance and David Owen, did predict it.

You mix all this in a cauldron: Croatian nationhood for the first time since the Middle Ages, new discriminatory laws against minorities, memories of WW2 and the death camps, no Western attempt to have that history exposed and commemorated, a Yugo military dominated by Serbs, ethnic militias on the ground already sharpening knives.

What do you get?

So while I agree the Serbs made a huge mistake, if you re-run all these events in a simulation again and again, I'd bet the Serbs would make that mistake 99 out of 100 times.

(For the record, I later withdrew that as something I remembered about Western Krajina, not the entire RSK.)

As for Serb refugees - I'm not sure about the relevance to this question

If borders are created by population transfer/ethnic cleansing from patchwork areas on both sides, the populations moving across the border are relevant to the 'balancedness' (not fairness, because in my view there is no fairness in ethnic selection and re-settlement) of the border. In the Croatia/RSK case, it's an ambiguous situation, e.g. the area of the RSK contained less homes than could have housing all refugees from rest-Croatia, but refugees from rest-Croatia actually choosing the RSK were less than non-Serbs ethnic-cleansed by the regime.

We don't know how Croatia would have developed if the folks in Knin and elsewhere hadn't started seeking to break away by force as Croatian independence emerged.

I'd say the situation was a lot worse than under Mečiar on both sides even before the SAOs switched from autonomy demand to independence demand: there were paramilitaries strolling around, and self-declared authorities. (I was still in Germany when TV news showed the villagers who dug up WWII-time weapons and patrolled their villages, and while some Westerners might have seen just some Balkans people fiery as usual, I felt something is very not okay.) Then came restrictive citizenship laws from the Croatian nationalist side and a Serb-only referendum from the SAOs side.

I'm thus not sure about your objection to my statement that the Croatian Serbs sought the maximum amount of territory that included a clear Serb majority

There is a difference between sought and got, I read you to argue for the latter.

FWIW In the abstract I feel that the best solution to this kind of situation is a strong non-territorial autonomy along Austro-Marxist grounds rather than territorial partition.

Thanks for making that clear.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}