Monthly Review

The breakup of Yugoslavia provided the fodder for what may have been the most misrepresented series of major events over the past twenty years. The journalistic and historical narratives that were imposed upon these wars have systematically distorted their nature, and were deeply prejudicial, downplaying the external factors that drove Yugoslavia's breakup while selectively exaggerating and misrepresenting the internal factors. Perhaps no civil wars--and Yugoslavia suffered multiple civil wars across several theaters, at least two of which remain unresolved--have ever been harvested as cynically by foreign powers to establish legal precedents and new categories of international duties and norms. Nor have any other civil wars been turned into such a proving ground for the related notions of "humanitarian intervention" and the "right [or responsibility] to protect." Yugoslavia's conflicts were not so much mediated by foreign powers as they were inflamed and exploited by them to advance policy goals. The result was a tsunami of lies and misrepresentations in whose wake the world is still reeling.

The short version is that the media version of genocidal Serbs does not hold up on closer inspection. There where atrocities and massacers, but the size of those are often exaggerated and only one sides crimes are reported.

Monthly Review

16,000 Serb civilians killed in Bosnia 1992-95 are effectively disappeared, while the 31,000 Muslim civilians killed in the latter years are elevated to world class status as victims of genocide.

Most important there was no genocidal campaign against croats or muslems in Serbia, where you could expect it to be worst would the Serbs really be genocidal. Actually, I think lots of people of different ethnicity fled to Serbia from the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. Have no link for it right now though.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se