IMHO the reluctancy to act and the Serb friendly Dayton agreement suports my claim. But again this is my personal view.
The reluctance to act was not because anyone liked the Serbs! It was because NATO was not configured for this kind of small conflict, and the EU (it was the EC then) wanted to try diplomacy... and then try it again... and then again.
It's true that some countries took a harder line against the Serbs than others. But nobody in Europe (except Greece and Cyprus)
liked them. Keep in mind that "they're villains" is a separate question from "should we bomb them".
As for Dayton, that was a peace of exhaustion. There's no question that, given another six months, the Bosniaks could have pushed the Serbs back and regained a lot of territory. But by that time everyone had been fighting for four years, around 100,000 people were dead, another ~100,000 mutilated, over a million people were refugees, and the country's economy was completely destroyed. Everyone was willing to accept peace rather than continue fighting. But, again, this doesn't mean that anyone was favoring the Serbs.
The Serbs had a very negative image from late 1991 onwards, thanks to Dubrovnik and Vukovar. (How many Germans and Scandinavians had spent a weekend in Dubrovnik? Millions, probably. It was like shelling Disney World.) And after that, it just got worse and worse.
And yes, US did a excellent job of getting the Croats to par and beyond the Serbs. But I have not seen claims of other than US involvment?
It depends on what you call "involvement". For example, the Austrians sold the Croats a lot of, shall we say, dual-use equipment... stuff that was officially for civilian use, but that converted very easily to military use. And a lot of this stuff was sold cheap, with the sale funded by cheap loans from Raiffeisen Bank, which had close links to to Austria's ruling coalition. We're not talking small amounts of money, either... hundreds of millions of dollars, enough to build much of the logistical train for Operation Storm. Meanwhile there was a lot of back-and-forth travel of Austrian "military observers", at least one of whom later retired to work for... Raiffeisen Bank.
It was done very smoothly, with few fingerprints, so that even today there's no firm proof. But it's worth noting that all consecutive Croat governments have had very warm relations with Austria, and Raiffeisen today is by far the biggest foreign bank there.
Interesting analogy.
But what can you do if the dog is already growling at you?
Eh. The Krajina Serbs were a bunch of hayseeds. Mostly rural, mostly backwards. Slobo was trying to stir them up, and with some success -- they all had bleeding memories of 1941-44, when the Pavelic regime had tried to exterminate them (with some success... there used to be a lot more Serbs around there). But they shouldn't have been a serious threat; IMO it's possible they could have been placated (local autonomy, guarantees about things like the Orthodox Church and the Cyrillic alphabet, their own police), and even if not, it should have been possible to neutralize them. Tudjman just fumbled it from beginning to end.
(Croat nationalists get very excited about Operation Storm. They get less excited when you ask them how a bunch of lightly armed farmers, led by a dentist, were able to claw off a quarter of Croatia and then hold on to it for four years.)
But do you seriousley think that JNA would have allowed Croatia to come to par military quietly?
Well, they did OTL, didn't they? Of course it took four years, but still.
A better question is "what would Slobo have done if Tudjman had nipped the Krajina rebellion in the bud?" I suspect the answer is, not much. OTL Slobo treated the Krajina Serbs as useful idiots from day one.
An interresting POD would perhaps include Tudjamn to adhere to Martin Spegelj's suggestion of making the "Assult of the Barracks" during the initial Slovenian war.
Sounds like a good WI. Post it!
Now that is a technicality. I must admit that I do not exactley cannot point to were all JNA units were stationed at the outbreak of hostillities. But the amount of JNA units in Croatia on a general basis makes your point about Kraina void.
Yes and no. There were a lot of JNA units all around Croatia, sure. But all the heavy stuff was in Slavonia -- Vukovar, and the subsequent advance on Osijek, sucked up most of JNA's air, heavy artillery, and armor. (Most of it ended up sitting around doing nothing, but it was doing nothing in Slavonia, not Krajina.)
Krajina had no JNA unit larger than a light infantry brigade. More to the point, the JNA units in Krajina were ethnically mixed, and by summer 1991 all the Croat, Slovene, and Kosovar Albanian soldiers had left. And unlike the JNA units in Serbia and Slavonia, the Krajina units were cut off from resupply. So JNA ended up taking no part in the fighting -- the few JNA soldiers just sat in their barracks while Serb irregulars fought the Croats outside.
That's not to say that JNA had no effect. A lot of equipment and supplies drifted from JNA to the Krajina Serbs. Also, some JNA soldiers and officers moonlighted as advisors to the Serb militia. The most famous of these, of course, was Ratko Mladic -- before he was famous in Bosnia, he got started training Krajina Serb troops, and later leading them in battle. (This while he was still employed full time as a major in JNA...)
So JNA was there and had some influence. But it did no actual fighting in Krajina -- the Krajina Serbs did all that themselves.
Again, even with some help from local JNA units, the Krajina Serbs were just a bunch of hillbillies with guns. A competent military should have been able to roll them up in a couple of days... hell, in 1995 a competent military DID roll them up in a couple of days. But in 1991-2 they came close to knocking Tudjman over, and then in 1994 they cam even closer to winning autonomy and de facto independence. Which is pretty ridiculous when you think about it.
Doug M.
