It seems I possibly made you some enemies in this thread, and for that I apologize. My reasoning as to why I feel it wasn't ethnic cleansing is due to the simple fact that to this day, Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians, and even Albanians still live in Serbia in relative peace. The Yugoslav war, in my opinion, seemed to be more based on territorial disputes, and not so much ethnical. And my reasoning that Serbs didn't initiate the war is due to the fact that they were the only ones that wanted the country to stay together...but I'm still trying to learn more.
Oh no, don't worry about it. They've been after me for some time. If not this thread, it would be another.
My reasoning as to why I feel it wasn't ethnic cleansing is due to the simple fact that to this day, Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians, and even Albanians still live in Serbia in relative peace. The Yugoslav war, in my opinion, seemed to be more based on territorial disputes, and not so much ethnical.
Well, I think there were national/ethnic claims to different territories, and that's how the war was organized. This does not mean that Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Albanians (and Slovenes and Montenegrans!) can't live in peace. Certainly they do. But it's also important not to dismiss the fact that armies and atrocities in the Yugoslav war were organized along ethnic and religious lines.
And my reasoning that Serbs didn't initiate the war is due to the fact that they were the only ones that wanted the country to stay together...but I'm still trying to learn more.
I don't know enough about the subject to answer this, but I do know that the non-Serb nationalities in Yugoslavia felt that the state was becoming increasingly Serb-dominated. Unfortunately, their desire for greater representation was picked up by warmongers who said that Bosnians should live in Bosnia, Croats in Croatia, Serbs in Serbia, etc. even though those people were all neighbors in, say, Sarajevo. And inflammatory rhetoric like, "the Muslim is the natural enemy of the Christian and they were all Nazis," "the Serb wants only to dominate the other Slavs," Albanians want to deliver Kosovo to Albania," etc. scared some people who were ethnic minorities in their region. (Any possibility of being joined to Albania ca. 1990 would have been particularly terrifying.) And on this fear grew a terrible civil war that we're still trying to recover from.
And because the war was instigated by several actors who organized their armies and support on ethnic/religious lines, there was ethnic cleansing. I'm not suggesting that "The Serb" was trying to kill all Bosnians (or, for the 28 year-olds: I'm not suggesting that Teh Serb wanted to kill Teh Bosnian) but there were armies and paramilitary groups and rogue commanders who were genuine racists and saw the war as a racial/ethnic conflict over territory. These are the people who ordered that Serbs be driven from their villages, that Bosnians be shot, that Croat women be raped, etc. As another poster said earlier, I understand very well that this was going on on all sides in the war. But that must not be an excuse for ignoring its horror.