I agree that the west have unfairly demonised the Serbs, although it must always be noted that they did much in the 1990s worthy of condemnation. I have always thought of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia as being about secession and counter-secession. When they escalated to war, the wars were brutal, but civil wars usually are.
However, the West’s analysis was always hampered by its limited historical horizons. In fact, it scarcely exaggerates to say that much of the West carries around two historical precedents:
a) Munich – if you see a bad guy, not hitting him is appeasement.
b) Holocaust – brutal conduct combined with ethnic hatred is likely to end in extermination camps.
With these as precedents, the West has an awful tendency of trying to fit what it sees into one or both of these categories. It was impossible to say that both Bosnian Serbia and Bosnian-Muslims were fight wars of secession, with the Serbs committing the most number of war crimes. It had to be a Hitleresque figure fighting for the Third Reich style “Greater Serbia” out to exterminate Muslims.
The West could not see that, had the former Yugoslavia been divided up in the style of Wilson’s 14 points, then Serbia would have received an awful lot of Croatia and Bosnian territory. What Serbia specifically asked for was the right of Serbian areas for self-determination, which is hardly of itself repugnant. Of course, if your only precedent is Hitler, it all sounds scarily familiar. but if your knowledge goes beyong GCSE Grade C, then it is a not unreasonable demand. (Instead, we insisted that the earlier pre-secession borders were sacred (mis)applying the great 1986 ICJ authority of Burkina Faso v Mali – which concerned rewriting international borders that had long appeared on world maps as such.)
So, in Kosovo, we were well primed to believe the worst – well, I wasn’t!! When 33 Albanians die after a battle in Racak, it must be a death squad. (I dare say most in the west would have called it an Einsatzgruppen if their knowledge stretched that far, but doubtless they made the connection.) Yet, to those who know better, post-battle massacres are depressingly familiar parts of all conflicts. Perhaps had we looked to Mai Lai or to the Belgian massacres of 1914 we could have better understood the nature of the war crimes in the former-Yugoslavia.
Heaven knows, our leaders (even those who bombed Serbia) are for more understanding of the dynamic of anti-insurgency when our own troops walk away with a 70-0 scoreline in Iraq and Afganistan.
