ICTY has the same conclusion as you, except it is totally opposite :) It can't be only "everyone did horrible things", and to talk the same about the aggressor and the victims. Yes, all sides did SOME horrible things, but one side started all of it, did the majority of the horrible things, and has 99% of the ones prosecuted by ICTY. What the hell was JNA doing in Bosnia when Bosnia was an independent country? Gradjanski rat, ali u qrcu. Bratstvo i jedinstvo umrlo s Titom.
This whole category of thinking in terms of sides is the problem in the first place. Thinking in these categories only strengthens the nationalist prosecution complex that drives the hatred in the first place.
Which subethnicity started it or whatever doesn't fucking matter., this whole line of thinking only leads to more hatred, more destruction, more dysfunction.
As a Croat, my enemy is not my fellow Yugoslav, my enemy is the nationalist thugs on all sides that destroyed my country so they could rule over their hateful little fiefdoms.
Bratstvo i jedinstvo is coming back, under a blue flag with yellow stars. Montenegro is joining the EU next, with Schengen etc bratstvo i jedinstvo between crna gora and hrvatska will be restored.
I think the problem is every tribe/nation/area has a percent of psychopaths (the estimates are 1 in 25), and if they run unchecked they end up doing evil things. This can then echo as the other side seeks retribution, etc. It takes significant effort to stomp out the fire.
The tricky thing about that is it depends "what period of time" you choose to look at. When the Serbs had the upper hand in the 90s, yes - a lot of the aggression was due to their actions... But if you choose to look 50 years before that, it was the Croat ustazi allied with Nazis slaughtering Serbs wholesale, to the point where even the Nazis themselves were appalled... A little while before that, it was the Bosniaks/Muslims impaling everyone else with the backing of the Ottomans.
It's more accurate to say "whoever had the upper hand at a given time" was using their temporary advantage to terrorize the others over the last couple centuries.
Given this, it's easy to understand why Serbs wouldn't want their friends and families living in states administered by people who were massacring them with the backing of Nazis and/or Ottomans within a generation.
It doesn't justify the atrocities of the Milosevic era, and it's still technically correct that "yes, the Serbs were the lone bad guys" but only if you choose to look at a certain decade and pretend history doesn't exist before that: which is very much how the American news media at the time "sold it" to justify U.S. involvement in the region.
