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"This is not meant as a flame to you, but I am sorry to say you offer excuses rather than explanations."

I don't take this as a flame at all. This is debate after all and it's only natural that some people are going to have differences of opinions based on how they judge the facts. It is the process of debate and discussion (the real kind, not the media sound bytes style) that we can examine our facts and discover who is actually correct.

"I am not a Yugoslav nor do I think Milosevic belongs anywhere but behind bars (Serbian ones)."

I myself dislike the way Milosevic's trial is being conducted at the Hague for a number of reasons (it's a show trial, his defense in court forms the basis for the later defense of his regime, questions over what can be accomplished in the Hague versus what can be accomplished in Serbia, ect.), but I don't feel much pity for Milosevic given the fact that the man was a threat to Eastern European security while he was in power. In a way, I almost long for the old days when the rebels killed the evil king after driving him from power. So much simpler back then.

"Saying that, the Serbs I feel were justified in both seeking to keep Yugoslavia whole"

Under a strict Serb hegemony, presumably. Yugoslavia was never a "real" nation (rather like Iraq) but rather product of post-World War 1 desires to dismember Austria-Hungary. The only reason it stayed together so long was that it was under a communist regime that frightened all of the major ethnic and religious groups so much that they for the most part refrained from fighting each other. After the fall of the Soviet Bloc, the ethnic and religious tensions that had been so rudely interrupted by several generations of communist rule simply came to the fore and the nation imploded.

I wouldn't shed any tears today if we took Afghanistan and gave the Pashtun areas to Pakistan, the Shi'ite (Hazara) areas to Iran, the Tajik areas to Tajikistan, and the Uzbek areas to Uzbekistan. If a state like Yugoslavia is so hard to maintain, one has to ask if it's really worth the time of keeping it all together.

"once that failed then to trying to join their Serbian enclaves to Serbia when it came to some parts of Croatia and Bosnia."

In other words they were looking out for their own at the expense of others. This is an all-too-common human trait (one that is no more apparent than that the unwillingness of the African leadership to condemn Robert Mugabe) and one that the Serbs under Milosevic seem to have utilized. The Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia were their brothers, it was only natural to want to protect them. Of course, this "protection" looked an awful lot like invasion to the rest of the Balkans and they responded accordingly.

"At least those areas should have been made autonomous zones with Croatia and Bosnia as a way to ease the fear that animated the Serbs."

As you yourself state later:

"...Inter-power rivalries also nixed all those early deals between Bosina/Yugoslavia/Croatia."

I concur entirely. But then again the Balkans have never been Europe's most stable of regions.

Now, as for chemainus's statement:

"You know damned little authoritative history. The history you are spouting is properly called 'deterministic history' or picking pieces to support your incorrect premises."

I tend to dispute this. I'm not defending the KLA or saying that the al-Qaeda infiltration in the Bosnian paramilitaries never occurred (as Clinton and Co told the American people in 1999) or anything of the sort. I dispute, however, the notion that the Bosnian War began as any type of a Dagestan-style jihad or this absurd assumption that the Croatian government was in active cahoots with al-Qaeda. If you want to dispute these facts or question my interpretation of history, feel free to do so. Out of curiousity, what exactly is "authoritative history?"