>>>Of course, one wonders what would have happened if these guys, for once, couldn't find anyone willing to fall for the bait, would they come and dirty their own hands?
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>You're saying outside forces were responsible for the rise in Serbian nationalism and other events leading up to the worst atrocities since WWII? My understanding was that NATO's failure was to be ineffectual as homegrown terrorists conducted their atrocities. The devil made me do it and then didn't step in to stop me, seems an unlikely argument.
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>I suppose you could argue that the West worked towards the dissolution of Communism in the rest of Europe and the USSR that set the scene, but other ex-Soviet nations managed to avoid the Yugoslav personal and economic self-mutilation. Compare to Hungary or Poland. Even the Russo-Georgian and more recent Ukraine events lack the duration or extent of atrocities.

I think that the Balkan is special due to the mixture of more ethnic groups. If you build a scale of violence during autonomy/separatoin, Czechoslovakian split probably would be on the lower end and Yugoslavia on the high. But in Czechoslovakia you only had 2 groups and already clearly defined spheres of interest, whereas in Yugoslavia those were missing. Add to that some shenanigans by Tito introduced to keep the situation fluid created a vacuum/misrepresentation in government many groups tried to fill later.