DB, you seem to have understood my point pretty well. But in case you didn't, I would say simply that there is a way of looking at the Balkans that does not start out from the premise that Milosevic caused all the trouble and that the Serbs, en masse, are always the bad guys.

Your own points have some validity, but again they are somewhat one-dimensional. For instance it was certainly Bosnian Serbs who besieged Sarajevo. But not without reason. They were resisting, by any means available to them, the prospect of a BiH secession from Yugoslavia which would have left them stranded as a Serb orthodox minority in a fundamentalist Islamic state. Milosevic was not a Bosnian Serb and any extent to which he was responsible for the siege has never been established.

The first atrocities against civilians began at Gospic in the Lika Valley, before any of the Serb actions you mention (Vukovar etc). Croatian paramilitaries - led by a prominent member of Tudjman's party, and flaunting ustashe regalia - seized the JNA base there and then set about murdering Serbs. These "Croatian knights" were then given the task of exterminating Serbs in the Pakrac Valley. You may not be aware of this, because it passed unreported at the time. It was brought to light nine years later by the Association of Independent Media, and corroborated by Croatian officers who took part in the campaign. But by then no-one was interested.

To understand how those atrocities played with Serbs, it might help if you keep in mind that it was in that same town of Gospic in 1941 that an ustashe minister announced his regime's programme of genocide: "We shall kill one part of the Serb population, expel another, and the rest will be converted to catholicism. All that will be left of them will be an evil memory." Which would be so much hot air, except that the programme was duly implemented. (Let’s keep in mind, incidentally, that the Serbs fought with the Allies throughout WW2 while the ustashe ran a puppet state for the Nazis.)

For sure Milosevic had blood on his hands, as did thousands of war leaders down the years who were never indicted as criminals. But I’m not aware of any evidence for your suggestion that "it was surely Milosevic who worked hardest to precipitate the bloodiest chaos." And your phrase "I would find it very surprising to find that Milosevic was not implicated" is really no better than saying "let him remain guilty until proved innocent."