...As for the military serving in the Mission -- the ones I knew did sympathise with the plight of the Serbs (even if they first came to Mission thinking the Serbs were the bad guys) and were horrified and frustrated that the media twisted everything so. When they went home to England or Holland or wherever on leave and tried to tell people how things REALLY were, no one would believe them. It was truly frustrating for all of us. We had only each other to talk to, really....Also, one must remember that it wasn't all one-sided in Croatia. *In early 1992, just before UNPROFOR deployed, there were Serb atrocities against Croats. They were fairly isolated, but much-publicised*. And, in such incidents, the Serbs just threw the bodies into mass graves (I'm talking around 4 to 15 here, not hundreds). These were, of course, excavated with great media attention after "Op Storm."
The Croats threw bodies in the river, incinerated them, or disolved them with lime and other chemicals. After "Op Storm" they also buried them in established cemeteries on top of bodies properly buried years before, and even made two "show graveyards" containing over 100 bodies each (one in Knin, one in Dvor) which were technically not a "mass graves" as the bodies were buried so many inches apart and marked with numbers. No horrifying headline-grabbing "mass graves" to be found!
To me, such methodical attention to avoiding bad PR is indicative of high-level coordination and orders from the top, whereas "mass graves" could be the work of out-of-control paramilitaries, or even, in some cases, villagers. Not to mention clean-up after an actual military battle (happens in all wars -- even American soldiers had to make mass graves for Japanese after battles in the Pacific -- are they war criminals?)...
So, we have:
Serb crimes against Croats - fairly isolated
Croat crimes against Serbs - indicative of high-level coordination and orders from the top
This shows that the media was spinning things opposite to what they were. The media portrays Serbs acting against Croats from the highest levels, while Croats got a bit of smaller scale revenge, but the evidence shows its the other way around.