ABSTRACT
Refugees from former Yugoslavia have fled from a crisis whose history is still being written and the outcome of which is far from settled. The causes of the war, following the collapse of the Yugoslav federation and calls for independence by the republics of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, are still open to fierce debate. The conflict has been described as a 'civil war' ensuing from the breakdown of order after the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and attributed to ethnic strife where 'Nationalism has come to fill the political and ideological void left by the erosion of communism'.' While the countries of western Europe were quick to celebrate the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling former Soviet Empire in the eastern bloc, the status quo was shattered, giving way to a 'new world order' full of hope and promise but also of fear and instability. The crisis has led to the emergence of new nation-states in a war demonstrating that 'ethnic cleansing' and methods of brutality witnessed during the Second World War were capable of re-emerging.2 Within the conflict almost two million people were displaced out of a total of some 20 million inhabitants, hundreds of thousands within Yugoslavia and many more forced to cross the country's former borders. Some fled under their own initiative, while others left with the assistance of the UNHCR which attempted to coordinate international 'burden sharing' in Europe's new and massive refugee crisis.
