>>>Yup, all success. The wars weren't as bad as it was claimed to be, just looked so under the media scrutiny. The end result is that instead of one moderately developed, independent and generally successful country, now there are six or seven mostly unviable ones, or at least nothing to envy them for, completely dependent on any bidders that come along, deeper in debt than ever, living under the IMF dictatorship. And the market is a free-for-all. Anyone's free to try and anyone here's free to try to take a share in the loot.
>>>
...
>>sounds somewhere between bitter and sarcastic. In hindsight, what course of action would you have preferred from UN / NATO ?
>
>None. Including not helping anyone's preparations.

Hm. How do you define that? Total embargo for the region? Embargo for military weapons ? No subsidies ? No trade ? Force refugees back into the area by not allowing them in, but not even train them if you send them back?

In nature it is common that whenever there is a bloody conflict, scavengers will have a field day, from vulture and hyenas down to bacteriological level. Even if political bodies would have refrained from meddeling with own troops, ANY action/measurement/law concerning the area could be seen as "helping somebody". Even n-standards reporting ;-)

>
>>In my hindsight all ethnic groups were spread unevenly across former Yugoslavia (even the main "borders" defining those groups are unclear to me, I do know that there is at least a trend involving "typical" religion, population growth and economic standing, but further than that I draw mostly a blank, not even knowing how close the respective languages are) and were well underway to create a mess while trying to splinter into smaller, self-autonomous and ethnically seperated regions. "mistake" perceived(publicized?) over here was the serbian attempt to either boycott referenda or plan to annect parts they saw as "mostly serbian". Personal guess is a tit-for-tat strategy (if you want to separate, allow the serbs within your region to do the same to your new country if you succeded) would have been hard to argue against.
>
>But it was (and still is) argued against. Actually, double standards were applied from day one.

Double standard is the norm. Serbian side was printed at first to be the bully, either not playing nice with autonomy efforts of other ethnic areas and somewhat threatening to use mostly serbian controlled Yugo army. When later on sometimes mostly serbian populated areas were won by non-serbian troops, the winners were also printed not to bring roses and pudding - but that *might* have been aimed at cementing current fragmentation/status quo. But ***if*** fragmented Yugoslavia was NATO/capitalistic intent, why stop there and not create even smaller entities?

>
>But no matter which side was helped against whom, the result is the same - practically all economies (probably including Slovenia, though I don't know much about how it's there now) are just a pale shadow of what they once were.The natural resources are regularly sold to the dirtiest bidder, capital pumped out... And I think that was the goal of the whole circus.

Still, what dire motives you think was behind UN/NATO effort? I do not believe the area has enough economic worth for a big capitalistic master plan - any numbers to disprove my assumption? I could argue that splinterization would give those splinter states more vote/bargaining power in EU decisions due to those funny rules always shafting big (as in net payers and/or population count) members at EU conference tables and pampering the dwarfs. Also more seats which could be filled by politicos - but killing in own population for those goals in small stadium sizes? Hard to envision.

In my visualization it was cheaper and less altering the status quo here to send troops there to stop wealth redistribution through/accompanied by shootings and rape, which created refugees not really wanted up here. Not really humanitarian/nice, but nothing onerous.