Skewed focus on Serbia.

Alexander Brendan Zecevic writes about the peculiar focus on Serbia in the NATO intervention in the Balkans when Bill Clinton was in full stride, doing his best to help establish an Islamic toehold in Europe:

As a half-Serb living in Edinburgh, I can't help but share their sense of injustice. I have travelled throughout the former Yugoslavia and have seen lines of Serb refugees that stretched for miles. Yet I didn't read about those refugees in the Western newspapers or see them on the TV.

I have read about the crimes of Serbs, of the criminals being captured and tried. Yet the crimes against them seem not to matter, at least not to the international media, Nato or the UN.

I'm not denying the horrors perpetrated by Milosevic, Karadzic or Mladic. But in Bosnia, in Croatia, in Kosovo, as in any conflict in history, there is always more than one side. There were parallel, almost mirror-image upsurges of fervent patriotism among Croats and Bosnians, and they had opportunistic leaders in Franjo Tudjman and Izetbegovic.

Like Milosevic, they took advantage of this reawakening of national identities that had been suppressed during communism. All three exploited it and were greatly rewarded. Most importantly, they were all guilty of war crimes. Yet while Tudjman's Croatia and Izetbegovic's Bosnia were welcomed into the international fold, Serbia and Milosevic stood outside as pariahs.

Despite the fact that around a quarter of the 100,000 people ethnically cleansed in Bosnia were Serbs, Serbia alone was punished by a UN embargo, and those pursued by The Hague's war crime tribunal were predominantly Serb.

"Two sides to Serbia's story." By Alexander Brendan Zecevic, Scotsman.com, 3/18/06.