>>> 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?

Rewind... 2-3 decades before. Things like "do not host, fund or train any terrorist organizations - them being anticommunist doesn't make them less terrorist". Or "put your money where your mouth is and apply that free trade across the board, including communist countries - if communism is so bad, let them fail on their own". Then, in the last months before the beginning, "do not sell weapons to anyone", "do not fund anyone", "do not promise political support to any group".

Once there are refugees - it's too late for me to have any ideas what to do. The situation was created beforehand.

>>>. 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?

I guess these are small enough to rule on remote. Having more of smaller ones makes it organizationally expensive - more handlers, more analysts, more diplomats, more spies.

>Still, what dire motives you think was behind UN/NATO effort?

Remove a strong independent player from the field and replace it with a bunch of small colonies. Easier to rule. And while there's not much oil (there is some - I actually pass a few oil rigs while driving around), there's fertile land, there's lots of mineral stuff (lead, coal, gold, even uranium, and, news flash, Rio Tinto is interested in lithium found here). And the strategic value of the imperial (as in Roman) road from middle Europe to Asia Minor.