To this list we should add the posttraumatic stress disorder with its typical symptoms like flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, depression etc.

Because reconciliation should take place between warring sides let us take a look at some specific features of their war traumas.

Psychological consequences of war depend also on the meaning the victims attach to the tragedies they have survived. This meaning, in turn, influences the choice and efficacy of coping strategies. Wars like other catastrophes too, always happen within the given time and place, so they should be evaluated within the social and cultural context in which they happened and which determine their meaning for the individual.

Let me start with the Republic of Slovenia although the war there, in comparison with wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, could not have caused numerous very bad traumas. Yet, many citizens of this republic were traumatized due to the fact that the Yugoslav army has attacked its very own people. Air-raids, airplanes over Ljubljana, buildings in flame, all these reactivated memories of the Second world war. Not knowing that this war will last only a few days, many people panicked.

With the beginning of the war in Croatia the Republic of Slovenia has accepted a lot of Croat refugees, so people in Slovenija were faced with the tragedy of these people, watching at the same time terrible TV reports from Croatia. Being so near to the war zone and not knowing if the conflict was really over for Slovenia led to the so called secondary traumatization of its citizens. In sum, without denying the existence of war traumatized people in Slovenia, one could state that their number was relatively small, and the pride for defending their country relatively huge.

The war in Croatia has caused massive destruction of whole cities and towns (Vukovar, Zadar, Dubrovnik to mention just a few), a lot of dead, missing and wounded people, and a huge number of displaced persons. For the displaced persons the source of additional suffering was the fact that they were driven away by their neighbors. Thus they have not only lost their homes and property but the world they have lived in was totally and irrevocably destroyed. Due to the destruction of communities and separation of family members (most men went to the front) war victims were left even without social support.

But the war in Croatia has at the same time evoked a very strong patriotism and human solidarity with war victims. In the first few war months the whole country was united in its efforts to offer help to victims and to defend the country. Everybody believed that in a few weeks the whole horror will be over. But very soon it became obvious that this war is not going to be as short as the one in Slovenia. Each day there were more and more displaced persons, and when the war started in Bosnia too, Croatia was flooded with refugees and war victims of all sorts.

The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was in many aspects the copy of the war in Croatia, only on a much greater scale and with much more casualties. And of course there was also the war between Croats and Moslems, which made the whole situation even more complicated. One could say that psychological traumas of people in Bosnia were of the same nature as war traumas in Croatia. But they were more intense because of the longer duration of the war, much more genocidal actions and ethnic cleansing performed in that Republic (Srebrenica, Bjeljina) .

The situation of former Yugoslav republics of Montenegro and Serbia, however, is in many aspects quite different. They have fought in this war as aggressors, so there was no destruction of their proper lands. The civil population of Serbia and Montenegro has not experienced the mortal fear of war, nor were there any civilian casualties. Thus the nature of their psychological consequences differs from those of people in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

During wars wedged in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina they have lost a lot of soldiers, and a lot of them were wounded and disabled. The suffering and pain of their parents, wives and other relatives is of course the same as the pain of people attacked by them in other parts of former Yugoslavia. However, there is a big difference which lies in the meaning of this suffering. Parents, wives and other relatives of killed soldiers and civilians in the attacked parts of former Yugoslavia were able to attach some meaning to their suffering and pain. They did not have any choice in it, they were forced to defend their countries and more or less they were successful in doing it. But the Serbs did not fulfill their goals so the loss of lives seems meaningless, and thus in a way more painful. There is also another side to it. Many Serbian soldiers took part in atrocities: killing people, raping women, destroying whole towns and villages. The experience from other wars shows that the worst and most durable psychological consequences were found in people who tortured or killed others, or have witnessed such actions. In other words, Serbia and Montenegro have a lot of people who were traumatized and changed by their own actions against other human beings.This is not to say that there are no such persons among Croats or Muslims, but their number is much smaller.

The present Federal Republic of Yugoslavia also has a great number of Serbs coming from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. They have all left their homes and so, consider themselves as refugees. There is no doubt that they are traumatized too, and yet again there are some important psychological differences. All non-Serbs were chased away by their neighbors or by the Yugoslav national army. They have left their homes only with small plastic bags leaving everything else behind. At the beginning of war Serbs would leave a village or a town in an organized fashion, taking all their belongings with them, and then they would attack the very same place they have left. So the first wave of Serbs coming to the present Republic of Yugoslavia was not forced to leave their homes. They were displaced to a safer place, believing that after winning the war they would come home again. It is not possible to determine how many Serbs have left their homes because their government made this decision for them, nor how many of them have left out of fear. In a simplified manner it could be said that most Croats and people form Bosnia were traumatized by the "horizontal betrayal" of their neighbors, while the Serbs were traumatized by the "vertical betrayal" of their leaders, who ordered them to leave their homes.

Different causes of psychological traumas do not make these traumas less severe or less painful. But human coping processes are closely connected with these causes, and the present situation of all war victims and survivors is still closely connected with the perceived causes and results of the war.

Present situation of war victims and survivors

Most war survivors in Bosnia and Croatia have found some meaning in their suffering. They believe that their personal tragedy has helped build a new and independent state and was not in vain. Serbs did not reach their goal of Greater Serbia, but they cannot face this fact or denounce their leaders because this would make their sufferings meaningless. And this is for most people psychologically unacceptable. So the Serbs still did not give up their goals nor do they believe that the war is definitely over. They take it as a postponement, a cooling-off period.

The war in Croatia and Bosnia has not ended with a military victory but was stopped with Washington and Dayton agreements. This fact forced the Republic of Croatia to live for many years in a suspense-like state, a state between war and peace, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina they are still trying to build a country out of ethnically cleansed regions.

But there is also the other side of the coin. In Serbia as well as in Croatia and Bosnia typical postwar processes are in full swing. Many people do not want to talk about war or its consequences, they want to go on with their lives, they are becoming rich, and they do not want to know that beside them there are still thousands of war victims. Parents are still searching for their sons, wives for their husbands, each day there are funerals of war victims, and all the time new mass graves are being discovered.

Psychological consequences of war are not a static phenomenon like a burned house, but rather a process. The results of this process depend on the posttraumatic environment in which traumatized persons live, and for the time being they live in a separate environment from the rest of the society, most of them with unfulfilled expectations.

Before, finally going over to reconciliation let me conclude with the statement that it is not possible to describe psychological consequences of war without oversimplification. This oversimplification usually forces us to forget thousands and thousands of people who live in mixed marriages or were born in mixed marriages and who do not see themselves as Serbs, or Croats or any other nationality, but simply as human beings, which is today almost a sin.

In this very, very complicated and still fluid situation there are attempts, suggestions even pressures to rebuild communities and social life in the former war regions. The one crucial question is, of course, how? But that is not the only important and difficult question. The other one is: when? Are some basic conditions for the beginning of such a process fulfilled? Have all displaced persons returned to their homes? Have all missing persons been found or identified. or, even more important: have all war criminals been tried in the court of law? Nothing of all these has happened. Refugees and displaced persons are still waiting for their return, people who have chased them away got abolition and are there, waiting for their victims to come home. All war traumas are still vivid and painful as ever, because the healing process has not even started.

The Catholic church is calling for forgiveness and reconciliation, foreign humanitarians and peacemakers are talking about turning to the future and forgetting, and politicians are speaking about confidence building.

It is understandable that the clergy is calling for forgiveness and reconciliation: it is their duty to do so, they are supposed to talk about love and forgiveness. But how can we expect that all these thousands of badly wounded people can forget what they have lived through in the last 6-7 years?

Foreign humanitarians and peacemakers believe in what they are doing, but they do not understand the complexity of the situation. Let me give you just one small example. Persons displaced from Vukovar have now been given the opportunity to come and look at their destroyed houses. One of them, a raped woman, met the man who raped her on the street of Vukovar and when she complained about it to the police she was told that the man got his abolition, and is now living in Vukovar as everybody else. Is it not normal that she decided then and there that she is not going to live there ever again?

Politicians speak about confidence building. Try to imagine that you were chased away from your home and have been given 5 minutes to take something with you in a small plastic bag. People who caused your predicament were up to that moment your good and trusted neighbors. After that you have spent 6-7 years in various refugee camps, and now you are being told that you have to trust again those very same people who have chased you away. Would you be able to do it? Would it be a sane reaction? Would you expose your children to the same situation again? Confidence building is something which should eventually come at the end of a very long process of mistrust and fear. It will take decades to build it up again, and the same goes for reconciliation. The process of reconciliation and confidence building could take place only in personal, individual contacts between people living in the same village or town, but after such a war the rebuilding of a community cannot start with reconciliation or confidence building.

So, what should we do to rebuild some kind of community life in these regions? But before even attempting to answer this question, we should pose another one: why should we even try to do it? What would be the goal of this process?

What can in the present situation be a realistic and attainable goal? There is only one simple answer: the return of all displaced persons to their homes. If they were ever to come home, they have to accept the existence of those "others", no matter who they are. But in order to be able to do this they do not have to forgive them, nor to love them, they do not have to trust them nor to stop being suspicious. They only have to tolerate them, and expect the same in return. Tolerance is the word we should use, nothing less and nothing more.

The whole issue of confidence building and reconciliation stands and falls with proper timing, and time is by far not ripe for it. Most war victims, on all sides, have only negative feelings of anger and bitterness when they even hear this words. "Confidence building" and "reconciliation" only build up resistance towards repatriation. It is difficult enough to talk about tolerance, because most of them do not understand the proper meaning of the word. To tolerate someone doesn't mean to like him or her; on the contrary, it means that I'm going to suffer this person, to put up with her, but that's it. But even for this, for the most rudimentary form of tolerance we should try to educate our war survivors. They should become tolerant not only towards former enemies but towards their own people who have gone away on time and lived throughout the war in some safe places; towards war profiteers; towards Croats coming from some other parts of the country and speaking some other dialect; towards all those coming from mixed marriages or living in mixed marriages. There is so much work to do just to make them put up with those who are not only of different origin, but who have different attitudes or values, that anything above this is just not realistic.

The main problem seems to be that these people used to be very tolerant before the war, and that not only have they lost this tolerance, but they have become extremely intolerant. For example, veterans do not accept their schoolmates who did not go to war, those who lived in refugee camps do not accept those who have lived in some crowded flats with their relatives, etc. This intolerance is so strong that it aims even at children. So Croats see in Serb children only future "četniks", and Serbs see in Croat children only future "ustaša". It is very difficult to revive some tolerance in people whose tolerance has proven to be so inappropriate. And tolerance is only the first step in confidence building and reconciliation. But still, it is not an impossible task, only a very difficult one.

One of the problems is that there is no common action aiming at tolerance building, but a lot of dispersed actions against it. For example, foreign humanitarians, as well as politicians used to ask war survivors questions like: "Would it be possible to live with Serbs, or Croats again?". This is a completely wrong question, because it implies collective guilt: it implies that all Serbs or all Croats are alike. If we would pose a question: "Is it possible to live with war criminals again?" - we would all say no, but this question would imply all war criminals no matter to which nationality they belong. If we would ask: "Is it possible to live with those of our neighbors who did nothing to chase us away but also nothing to prevent others to do it?" the answer would not be so easy. But if we would ask: "Could we live again with those who helped us while their compatriots were attacking us?" most people would say "yes". This is not just my speculation, but an opinion formed on experience with displaced persons from Vukovar and other Croatian towns and villages. Our refugees have shown us that they do not speak of "Serbs" or "Moslems", rather they speak of them only with their proper names, and they are able to differentiate among them according to their behavior in the war. This objectivity could be a good basis for a new start. However, there are still many unsolved problems: a) nobody has really been brought to justice, 2) in Eastern Slavonia Serbs are still living in Croat houses, and the Croats are still waiting in refugee camps, 3) in former Serb Krajina Croats from Bosnia live in Serb houses, etc. 3) Serbs from Vukovar and other destroyed placed did not show any remorse, and without it there will be not only no reconciliation, but no tolerance either.

All these are, of course problems which we, as professionals, cannot solve, and politicians are only making more and more wrong steps. Let me give you just one more example. After peaceful reintegration of Eastern Slavonia it was agreed that all schools in this region will have the same school program as other schools in Croatia, but with one exception: for the next five years Serb children will not be taught anything about the last 6-7 years of our common history. This agreement was reached under the auspices of the United nations and signed by both sides. I do not know whose idea it was, but as a psychologist I cannot imagine a worst one. In the first place, our population as a whole is not well educated. Most people did not even finish elementary school but only three or four classes of it. This means that news and information, as well as prejudices and stereotypes are spread by word of mouth. So in schools nobody will talk about the war, but at home all children will be exposed to their parents views of it with no corrective whatsoever. Children will hear at home what "they did to us" and no word of what we did to them. This is no way to solve the existing problems, nor to build up tolerance.

I know that I should talk about reconciliation with the accent on cultural input. The problem is that for the majority of people living in former Yugoslavia there was never a "Yugoslav" or common culture. Every nation used to have its own, although it was called "Yugoslav culture". That is probably one of the reasons that so much of our material cultural values were destroyed in this war. They never perceived it as a common value. But this also means that any rebuilding of museums, galeries, churches and the like cannot start on any common or "international" basis. First this destroyed part of our identity has to be rebuild, and the looted contents of our galeries and museums returned and then, and only then can we start thinking of builiding something new.

In former Yugoslavia there used to be a very thin layer of artists and scientist who have tried to build up something called Yugoslav culture, but they never succeeded in this endeavor. Now the new national states do not want to have anything in common, and nobody even dares to suggest it. A good example is the well known and in former Yugoslavia very popular Serb pop singer Đorđe Balašević. A few weeks ago he was appointed by Sadako Ogata a good will ambassador for former Yugoslavia. There is no doubt that Mrs Ogata's intentions were good, and in some other times her choice could have been the right one: he was popular, he did no take part in this war, he even wrote songs against it. But he comes from the "other" side and our displaced persons cannot perceive him as a good will ambassador. And it is their perception that counts, not what we, not directly involved, might think of him.

One could say that culture is not going to pave the path for tolerance and reconciliation. But trade is. People who live close to the borders with Bosnia and Serbia have organized open-air markets where they started to exchange goods even during the war. Such personal contacts could open a way to some kind of living if not together then next to each other. Two years ago we have applied a questionnaire to over 200 psychologists coming from all parts of Croatia in order to find out what they would be willing to do together with their former enemies. Among other things we have found that most of them would be willing to work together, and trade goods. But we have also found, which I believe is more important, that most of them would be willing to take "them" if necessary to the hospital, give them medicine, let them used the phone, even let their children play together. All of these shows that some tolerance already exists, and that tolerance is what we should try to build up. We should start with passive tolerance, with just putting up with "the others", and slowly move towards active tolerance, i.e. active acknowledgment that we all have to be neighbors and that we should accept this fact without resistance and anger.

One way of reaching all those thousands of people living in small villages would be to use something which we still have in common: fiddlers.

In many parts of former Yugoslavia the news is being spread by the village fiddler, or - if there is such a person- by the fiddler well known in the whole region. In other words, although people are watching TV news they do not believe it as long as the fiddler in his rhymes has not told them what and why to believe. The fiddlers function as journalistsor TV "anchors". For example Željko Šimić from Hercegovina even made a tape with his "political messages". He used to write songs for Tito, then for our present president, but now he is disappointed in him too, so the newest one goes approximately like this:

All is different now than you've promised, Vrank
All seems to be sold, including the bank.
At the beginning of war, or during it rather
You loved each Hercegovinian as your own brother.
You cut through the map of Bosnia land
with your very own strong right hand.
You said to Hercegovinians, to your very best
that the whole of Bosnia, starting from the west
to the Konjic town and Neum on the coast
all of these will be ours, just for a toast.
This belongs to Croats' yours were very words,
and now you've made borders; it hurts, Vrank, it hurts.

Sve drukčije odigra se, Vranjo,
sve izgleda ko da je prodano.
Znaš li, Vranjo, na početku rata
Hercegovca ti primi ko brata,
kartu Bosne ti si rukom sjeka,
otprilike ovako si reka:
"Ta čitava Bosna sa zapada,
Hrceg-zemlja do Konjica grada
i grad Neum što na moru drima,
sve će ovo pripast Hrvatima.
Nek' si reka granica je meka,
Hercegovac na njoj dugo čeka.

Source: Interview with Dr.Ivo Daniae in the journal "Globus", april 23, 1998, pp.69-71; based on the book by Ivo Daniae, "Prevarena povijest" ("Cheated History"), Durieux, Zagreb,1998.

The important role of fiddlers arises also from the fact that in this part of the world there is a traditional mistrust toward goverment, and official news coming from Turks, Austro-Hungarians or anybody else. Credible messages only come from the "people", and in some regions fiddlers are its representatives.

Thus, if we could reach them, and make them sing about the new life together, that would help. Only in order to this they would have to change their attitudes and beliefs, and that is not likely to happen soon.

We should also on all sides search for groups of people who could more easily understand each other. Parents who have lost their sons are one such group. They could easily agree that nothing was worth the lives of their sons. They share the same loss and pain and thus could understand each other. Maybe widows are another such group.

What I really want to suggest is that we should start with small steps and slowly move forward, forgetting utopian ideas that we can quickly repair what has been so viciously destroyed. Maybe in time, after 5-6 or more years we should meet again to talk about reconciliation.