Reports from the Former Yugoslavia of Civil War

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 (Malc

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amic practices only as a matter of respect to their culture and tradition (Malcolm, 1994, p. 222). Ironically, the religious component of Muslim identity has strengthened in the wake of the strong anti-Muslim rhetoric of both Milosevic and the Croatians. Social psychological studies of intergroup and interpersonal conflict have revealed a negative bias regarding the perception of enemies and their actions. The image of an enemy should ideally be constructed by direct perceptions of the enemy's actions or statements. But, more often, the source of information comes in the form of interpreted reports of the enemy's actions or statements. Once a group or an individual is identified as an enemy, any trust, defined here as the assumption that the other will not act with malevolence, is rescinded. In fact, the basic perceptual process becomes a matter of simply assuming the worst about the enemy whenever any ambiguity exists. As a result, the image of the enemy will be heavily biased by this assumption. The influence of this bias creates the following tendencies. People are more likely to pay attention to, interpret and remember any threatening actions of their enemies than when perceiving non-enemies. Accusations against enem

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