I watched a documentary from the BBC about the dissolution of Yugoslavia and my impression from it is that reports of abuse of ethnic Serbs in Kosovo and in other parts of Yugoslavia were a significant contributor to the rise of tensions and may have been exaggerated by the media and by Serb nationalists. Were Serbs the victims of persecution by other ethnic groups in areas that they were the minority? If yes, was this persecution exaggerated to serve a Serbian nationalist agenda?
Well, one can hardly talk about persecution of Serbs as whole in other SFRY republics. The Serbs were occasionally persecuted on Kosovo and Metohija, as the central government occasionally tried to buy local Albanians by imposing what could've sometimes be described as persecution of the Serbs.
What inspired Serbian nationalism was not persecution, but the threat of persecution. Pictures of Fascist Croatia and Fascist Albania were still vivid in public imagination, and the steps towards building regimes in Croatia and Kosovo-Metohija had parallels with those; as one old man put it, the people who cried the most when Tito died were Croatian Serbs.