>>>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?
>
>You're saying outside forces were responsible for the rise in Serbian nationalism

Not at all. But reducing the whole mess to just serbian nationalism is pretty much enough reason for stopping this conversation. If you believe that was the sole cause, then I can do nothing to countermand the millions of dollars worth of propaganda. I'm just a guy with a keyboard. But my buttons aren't so easily pushed, so let's continue.

>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.

We could go as far as you want with the what-ifs, but it doesn't absolve the domestic operators from their responsibility, which I have never omitted. But my guess is that they'd never get that far and that loud without foreign influence. During the whole year of 1990 and on it was croatian and serbian nationalism feeding each other. At each step they were doing exactly what would irritate the other side the most.

And while all of nationalisms were in SFRY generally suppressed (or redirected into "you have your own part of the federation, what else could you want?"), in practice it was always the croatian which was more tolerated than serbian, as there was the theory that Serbs wanted to rule the whole country and that weak Serbia would mean stronger Yugoslavia. The whole breakup dance was executed at the time when Slovenes and Croats held all the top positions (of chief of presidency, prime minister, chief of army, minister of defence, chief of security). So there was some fertile ground on which Milošević was able to sell his line of "we've had enough of this suppression, we want to be equal to the others" etc etc. However, that was just as much so in the preceding ten years and still the country stayed whole.

Still, throughout that whole year, there was widespread hope that the sanity will prevail. Most of the people just wouldn't believe that anything serious will happen; the general thought was that it's a political circus where the politicians were just looking for a different arrangement of affairs, perhaps going for, in the worst case, a confederation. But then the next year it was discovered that Slovenia is arming their territorial units with automatic guns of its own make, that Croatia was smuggling vast amounts of guns and ammo through Hungary - and the strange thing was that nobody got arrested, we only saw the hidden camera footage, and that was actually the official beginning of the propaganda war. On all sides.

>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.
>
>Certainly it's true that smaller nations can't find the same scaled efficiencies as the big boys, but always there are advantages to be exploited. Think Switzerland or New Zealand that currently dominates the international dairy trade. The difference I see is the dead hand of the IMF. Can't you even get together to argue for release of that grip?

"You" as in "all of you folks down there"? Impossible at the moment. About 98% of the people, I guess, don't even know what IMF does. They still think these guys are the only remaining source of cash, and don't even stop to think about the interest accumulated so far; the interest cropping up in the future is purely imaginary to them. And practically every government I know of has its balls screwed so tight that they never dare publish the whole of IMF's requests, just a few details emerge now and then.

One of the goals of those wars is surely accomplished: we all now have powerless and cheap politicians ruling; they can be bribed or blackmailed so easily. And as long as they are obedient to demands, they will be allowed to rule as they like. Which, first of all, means no independent media. Easy to do when their owners are your cronies.