The short answer to your questions, VDR, is power.  The US has it, the Serbs, particularly with a much weakened Russia, don't.  Therefore, the US can get away with a lot the Serbs never could.

There was and is massive European opposition to the Iraq war.  Those few leaders who supported it - Berlusconi, Aznar, Blair have all gone, virtually hounded out of office.  But the Iraq war is America's war. Srebrenica happened on our doorstep.

European leaders, with far more European support, felt that they were responsible for doing something about it.  The fact that they didn't was an affront to the EU pretensions to be a world power governed by more civilised values than you know who...

I don't doubt the anti-Serbian bias in much of the media coverage.  Serbia exposed the EU for the toothless tiger that it is.  But it still doesn't make sense for the EU to favour a relatively very small ethnic Albanian and Islamic population over a significant European state like Serbia unless there are other issues at play.

Yes, massacres like that at Srebrenica happen in war, but they haven't happened in Europe since the Second World War.  The EU's founding ideology is based on a determination not to let that happen again.

Srebrenica therefore challenged the whole raison d'etre of what the EU is about.  If the EU cannot stop a relatively minor regional war on its doorstep, then what use is the EU as guarantor that war will never again be permitted in Europe?

The EU had to deal with Serbia or be laughed into irrelevancy.  Serbia was a threat to the legitimacy and survival of the European Ideal and the elite who's fortunes are tied to it.

You can massacre millions in Rwanda or Kampuchea and nothing is done about it because major elites are not threatened by it.  Massacre a few thousand in the U.S. or Europe and you will bear the full force of Superpower retaliation.


Index of Frank's Diaries