>>>>Believe me, I know that this logic works. We were bombed for what Milošević did. And we even did go the extra step to distance ourselves from him and his cronies, but the media just wouldn't listen. The collective responsibility can be a bitch, but the world applies it left and right.
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>>Never understood what they hoped to achieve with that senseless bombing.
>
>Stopping "ethnic cleansing"? I never had the impression the intent was to punish all Serbs; it was to stop Mladic and his henchmen from eradicating other ethnic groups.

That was the first bombing, over Bosnia. In which case pretty much everybody was fighting everybody else - one week's allies were bitter enemies the next week - and the US/NATO sided with the mujahedeen, probably because they lobbied the right way. SenLantos was mentioned a lot. And Sloba's PR was "the worse, the better - truth will win in the end" (he's dead now).

>Maybe I misunderstand what you and/or Dragan meant.

First off, on Kosovo and Metohija the ethnic cleansing was going on for decades, only in the opposite direction from what you were fed to think. Through various channels (infighting in The Party on top of it) the Albanians were allowed to immigrate from Albania in big numbers, both under Mussolini's rule during WWII, and after. Then, the serbian refugees who got the land there from the king (for being repatriate WWI volunteers, mostly from South America) were forced out by fascists, and then the communists forbade their return. Then in the 80s it all broke loose - it was gradually revealed that the muslim Albanians are forcing everybody else out, by buying out the leading families' houses and estates (money came from drug and weapons smuggling, extortion of albanian gastarbeiter across EU and of any Albanian shop owners within the country, and they were traditionally bakeries and cake shops). If buying out didn't work, they'd start burning the crops, raping the females, killing cattle, shooting at the windows... and then offering to buy at still decent price. The victims were not just Serbs and Montenegrins - the same policy applied to anyone who was not a muslim Albanian, including catholic Albanians. My first neighbor here is a muslim Gypsy, exile from Kosovo.

At the same time, the official policy required bilinguality for any official position; not too many Serbs spoke Albanian (and Albanians, likewise, avoid speaking Serbian, but they can prove they know it if need be because the committee where they proved it was stacked with their own; but just try to ask for directions in Serbian, you'd probably end up in the wrong end of town, if you get any response at all). Which, in few years, made the local police, specially higher ranks, predominantly Albanian - and (official policy again) if you tried to report a rape higher up, they'd redirect you to the locals. Furthermore, their mullahs were publicly condemning any family (of their own) which produced less then five children, and praised those with ten or more. They had an university, with full courses in Albanian, where they churned brainwashed engineers and doctors and historians and whatnot (but when they got really sick, they went to serbian doctors). Their teachers used textbooks (from grade school on) printed in Albania, and many kids grew up completely brainwashed, to believe that Tirane was the capital of Yugoslavia, who knew nothing about yugoslav culture or history, but knew only that everything albanian was the best and that the Serbs were oppressing them. And still enjoyed all the social security (full year maternity leave on full pay, free education all the way to PhD, retirements (which are still paid from Belgrade, believe it or not), etc etc) while flatly refusing to pay the tolls levied by the repressive regime (like electricity, gas, water). And they renamed Kosovo and Metohija to Kosova, carefully omitting the other part of the name across the board, because metoh means "the estate of the [orthodox] church". Like somebody said, "it will at some point be difficult for them to explain to their kids why do all the toponyms in their new republic have serbian roots".

Then came the time to counterattack the media uncovering all this. They staged several demonstrations and/or incidents, like uninational gas poisoning in an elementary school - the kids were writhing on the floor, choking... while the other kids in the same room stood bewildered. The media took care to take shots of lying kids only; yugoslav media weren't quoted. In later demonstrations they took good care to look good on the pictures and to provoke the police into looking bad.

At the same time, we had the PC speech in effect - they call themselves Sqiptar, or as we pronounce it, Šiptari, but we weren't allowed to call them that. They were Albanians, even though the word used to mean exclusively citizens of Albania just a few years before that.

Which, all together, explains, how did they go from a 10% minority in the 30s-50s to a 90% majority over there.

The reason we were bombed (actually, more than half of the bombing was over Kosovo and Metohija, which makes even less sense - and the army of FRY lost one truck and had one tank damaged, the rest paraded out unscathed in the end) was that Sloba came into power by promising the Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija that the state will defend them, that the wrongs will be righted and that the police won't beat them anymore when they protest. Which was utter bullshit, he never delivered on any of that (but the remaining 100K Serbs there still seem to believe him... probably the local HQ of his party really do something), but used it as a shoulder over which to climb into fame, and then power. What he did was a remedy almost as bad as the disease - he revoked the autonomy of the province, cleaned out the police (and other such services) and put Serbs in all positions... Of course, it made matters worse, the animosities spun out of control, and the various secret armies of Albanians rightfully felt he's playing into their hands. Their PR played the repression card to the point where they could stage Račak and keep it in the media long enough to get the Rambouillet accord signed (the Račak story as seen by some French officials and reporters was suppressed, successfully). And even that accord was rewritten several times on the spot, until the text was such that the Serbs can't possibly sign it, and the Albanians would, at least reluctantly (the whole time it was the yugoslav delegation cooperating and the Kosovar refusing).

In the end, the list of demands was pretty much equal to "you shall peacefully agree to occupation, NATO troops will have all the rights to go anywhere through your country and will not be criminally liable for whatever they do", to which no sane head of state (and specially not a soft dictator like Sloba) would agree, so we were bombed. I think it hurt them just as much as it did us. We lost about 3000 people, bunch of buildings and bridges, and all the goodwill that was built by SFRY. It may take some 20-30 years to wash the bad print off our image. But NATO has lost credibility (first time they went against the decision of the UNSC), cooperativeness (with US generals bossing everybody else, the else weren't happy, which was the germ of the future coalition of the willing being not much so) and a lot of rating (three day campaign goes for 77 days; a stealth F117A downed; pilot paraded on TV; actual damage to the defending army minimal; whole world saw them being afraid to fly lower than 20000ft, shooting a passenger train crossing the river, dropping cluster bombs on a peasant's market etc etc).

Just watch for signs of any kind of behavior described here, lest your country/area/neighborhood/religion develops them - all of them are just bad.