Their reasons included to avoid paying war reparations for having fought the Allies, and to unite with their ethnic brethren in Macedonia.
Among most Pashtuns, sympathy remains high for the Taliban, if not as models of Islamic behavior, then at least as ethnic brethren.
"If that happens, other Central Asians might try to cross the border to help their ethnic brothers."
Sterca-Şuluţiu was the surname of two ethnic Romanian Transylvanian brothers:
Some refugees are living in caves; others are heading south, to where their ethnic brethren still dominate.
Their ethnic brethren, as well as Bosnian Croats, desire independence from Bosnia by a comparable percentage.
To Western ears, all this talk of protecting ethnic brothers is unsettling at best.
The Kosovar Albanians are not the only people who want to assemble all their ethnic brethren into a single state to be carved out of existing ones.
In the eyes of the nationalists, and probably of most Russians, the Bosnian Serbs are ethnic and religious brethren.
A breakup of federal Yugoslavia would automatically heighten aspirations of these 6 million ethnic brothers to join hands across the mountain-ringed borders.
