Quote Originally Posted by Brenus View Post
As Louis kindly reminds I am not an anti-Serb.
Having working in the (major) three sides involved in the disintegration of Yugoslavia I had stories from all the sides and it was not nice.
The Serbs were certainly not angels and none of their fighters I met even try to deny the crimes committed on their names by some.
I took most often than I should for my own future in the UN or others International Bodies their defence. Not because I agree with their actions or political view, but because they were under constant attack, lies were told and they never succeeded to get out of the fine trap they were so keen to be engulf in.
Having lost the battle on the media hey finally lost the battle on the field.

However, the crime allegedly committed by Thaci and Co is just the tree that covers the forest. Sure, it is good that finally this criminal is shown for what he is.

But, I would have preferred the outcry of indignation a little bit earlier. E.g. when the Roma, Ashkenalies, “bad” Albanians, Croats, Montenegrins and Serbs, under the view of the K-For and the UN Vice Roy Kouchner were expelled without mercy and losing time.

This would have given some credibility at the claim made by Blair and Co of a new age of democracy.
But better later than never.
Now, will this change something? No.
EU and US are now stuck with what they fabricated. Instead to negotiate ad to go for the hardest solution they favoured the nationalism in all camps. Tudjman, Milosevic, Izetbegovic and all their affiliates and apprentices won at the end.
Now, we have to deal with this.
Not that the Serbian answer to the Albanian problem neither was the most wise and appropriate but nor was the Croatian answer towards the Serbian problem. The Croats got away with it, the Serbs didn’t.
Tempest (Oluja) operation that saw the entire Serbian population from the Croatian territory (except Vukovar) emptied of its population was even not considered as a problem. The fact that the Croats attacked a UN protected Area (same status than Srebrenica), bombed by planes (against Deny Flight Operation) on Refugees and burned 90% of the Serbian houses and killed a little bit old people not fast enough to run didn’t move at all the “democrats” and the “liberals” nor the “humanitarian” western souls.

Sorry, I wanted to be cynical. I can’t.
The disaster of Yugoslavia should be a lesson of the future. The Nationalist won. We could have help in a democratisation process… We could have preserved a Democratic Yugoslavia. More borders, more destruction of lives, what price these countries did pay, and will?



The one defense is, that the West always had to respond after the damage had been done, and that the West's options were subsequently limited to picking the least of several evils.

In Kosovo's case, nobody has ever been under the impression that Kosovo was anything but a mobster run hellhole. Islamo expansionist, Balkan nationalist, mafia controlled, Albano-Kosovan clan system. With the exception of the first, the role of Islamo expasionism, which was underappreciated a decade ago, all have been understood all along.

What else should've been done in 1999? Serbia, Serb paramilitatries, and Kosovar irregulars were all getting at each other's throat. The best one could've done was to disentangle the fighting parties. Keep them apart. At the end of that dreadful decade of violence, there was only political will to end the fighting, to separate the warring factions, not for any perfect solution.

One can wonder of in the long run, it wouldn't have been best to turn a blind eye ('we hadn't known it' ) and let the Serbians provide a final solution to the problem. But that would've been an act of breathless cynicism. It was done by Croatia, which with tacit support from the west ended its part of the Yugoslav wars with a war of etnic cleansing. But unlike Serbia, Croatia, Tudjman, could be reasoned with.