The Complicated Wars in the former Yugoslavia

I was not very politically aware as the wars in Yugoslavia were happening.

Later, when I started learning that NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 with little justification, I had a hard time putting the pieces together.

One of the key things that was repeated in western media over and over was the Srebrenica Massacre.

Every time I said that NATO bombed Serbia without justification, friends would say "But what about the Srebrenica Massacre?  Sure, Serbs claimed that they were retaliating (against civilian casualties inflicted on Serbs by Bosniak soldiers under the command of Naser Orik).  But those claims were rejected as bad faith."

So I'd dutifully look up the Srebrenica Massacre, and AFAIK it actually happened.  So there's the justification, I thought many times.

But the problem is that the Srebrenica Massacre (and I'm not arguing about that in particular here) reputedly happened in 1995, and Belgrade was bombed in 1999.  

Well, better late than never, some might (and IIRC did) say.

But I was confused by the two different phases of the war in the former Yugoslavia.

The Srebrenica Massacre related to a struggle between Serbs and Bosniak Muslims.  Key people held responsible for the Srebrenica Massacre were Radovan Karadzic, a Serbian militant, and Ratko Mladic.  That part of the war was "settled" (if you could call it that) in 1995 with the Dayton Accords.  

The bombing of Belgrade in 1999 was over a similar but different conflict, between Serbia and Kosovo.

The NATO bombing was spurred by the "Racak Massacre" of 45 Kosovo Albanians.  This story is a bit murkier, because not only were far fewer 'civilians' involved, Racak was a center of KLA militant separatist activity, and Serbia maintained that all of those killed were KLA fighters, who had previously been involved in an ethnic cleansing of Serbs.

Furthermore, the NATO bombing could be seen as highly disproportionate to this particular claimed massacre.  It was said to have killed 1,500, which western sources allege to have included 1,000 serbian fighters and around 500 civilians.  (IIRC Serbian sources claim they were all civilians.)

But it seems the only massacre anyone I know ever remembers is the Srebrenica massacre.

This came back to mind when reading about the fact that after dying in a NATO prison, Milosevic was posthumously exonerated from crimes related to the wars in Yugoslavia, not just once but twice.

I stumbled upon that fact (which I had never heard before) while reading this article about how US backed jihadis in Yugoslavian war by Kit Klarenberg.