Good read and many excellent comments. I have many Serb and Croatian friends and though they tolerate each other its hard to get a non biased opinion.
Professor Maher is the king of the anecdote. He’s always able to back up his facts with a story, whether it’s his own personal experience or the experiences of others whom he considers credible sources. The anecdotes make the facts come alive, and he has no reason to lie or to make things up. He’s not a “paid propagandist”. His motives are to discover and share the truth. It’s called integrity.
It’s almost impossible to imagine that Croats and Serbs ever lived together “peacefully” and that they shared common experiences. As to your point about “bias”, I feel that once the essence of an “opinion” is shown to be “fact”, it’s no longer “biased”. There are, believe it or not, Serbs and Croats who are able to look at the history of their people honestly and to provide a truthful description of their history. There are Croats who have testified to the crimes their own bretheren have committed who actually lived to tell about it. And with Serbs, you have to always keep in mind where they are coming from “politically” and “ideologically” when they are giving you their analysis of things. For example, a pro-Tito Serb will often paint a whole different picture than a chetnik Serb will.
Serbs, for a long time, believed that the “truth” would prevail as events unfolded in the Balkans at the beginning of the 1990s. One day it will.