[thriftwy]

I thought what drove Serbs to war was the Bosniak's desire to create a Muslim state and treat everybody else (Serbs, Croats) as second class citizens; and the Kosovar Albanians desire to create Albanian ethnostate and treat everybody else as second class citizens, which they did.

You are placing blame on Serbian militias' greed and power hunger, which sounds as an underwhelming explanation to me.

[OfSanguineFire]

The modern wave of Albanian-Serb hostility goes back to the early 1980s, a time when the breakup of Yugoslavia was not yet on the horizon and so there was no fear of an oppressive Albanian ethnostate. Rather, the Serb rhetoric was driven by a claim that Albanians were squatters on historic Serb land.

An independent Kosovo would have become a state chiefly for the Albanian ethnicity simply due to demographics, but it need not have become completely hostile to Serbs and Bosniaks, if the Serbs had acted more wisely. The Republic of Albania itself contains a number of Greek, South Slavic-speaking, and Aromanian villages. And had the Serbs acted more wisely, Kosovo undoubtedly would have been partitioned at Mitrovica.

[thriftwy]

The latest claim sounds disingenous. I'm too painfully aware that no partitions of USSR were redone with regards of actual ethnic occupancy (especially when talking about Russians, that's Serbs in case of Yugoslavia).

So all the new states are extremely imperialistic and will not give up on any of "their" lands even if they did not have ethnic dominance there. So no, Kosovar Albanians will still demand Mitrovica.

However, it is actually outrageous that Serbs were made to give out their actual UN recognized lands, and they had full motivation to try and keep those, like Azeri did. And in fact it's not off the table yet. Let's suppose something bad happens to NATO, Serbs can try to Karabakh-2023 Kosovo.