Reports from the former Yugoslavia of civil war, the siege of cities such as Vukovar and Sarajevo, and such atrocities such as ethnic cleansing - another euphemism for genocide - and camps where women are kept with the sole purpose of being raped by their captors, have been recurrent items in the news media. The media have offered little insight, however, into the intricacy of the conflict. The inherent complexity of the situation has been increased by the poorly defined conception of the three parties involved regarding their motives. The Serbs, the Croatians and the Muslims have each been portrayed as both the aggressors and the victims of the conflict.
The actions of these three parties have been commonly understood, if not accepted, as the manifestation of centuries-old ethnic tensions exacerbated by, and allowed undisciplined expression within, the social, political and economic anarchy that followed the collapse of communism. Such tension is not uncommon in places where different ethnic groups coexist. Rarely, however, does it erupt into the kind of sustained, organized violence seen in the former Yugoslavia. While the ethnic tensions exist and have certainly played a part, they were not a self-sufficient cause for the violence and atrocities that have taken place. A closer look into the psychology of the involved parties and their leaders shows that the hostility was based on economic and political motivations, rather than those of ethnicity or religion (Malcolm, 1994, p. xxi).
Slobodan Milosevic is arguably the most dominant figure in the Yugoslavian conflict. He is an unscrupulous man who is motivated primarily by his political ambition. He assumed the leadership of the Serbian Communist Party in September 1987, after carrying out the political assassination of his one-time mentor, Ivan Stambolic. Devoid of passion, Milosevic has never shown any affection or concern for the populace to whom he owes his posit...