ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the underlying principles leading to an analysis of coping with the Balkan war, and the health and helping interventions for Serbian Australians. It explores how a sense of bonding, belonging and purpose in Serbian national and cultural activity was a means for participants to interpret and manage distressing events in the Balkans and Australia. Serbian authorities in the former Yugoslavia made it both clear and public that their main interest was to safeguard Serbian minorities in Croatia and the integrity of borders that could only be negotiated through peaceful ethnic division. As the conflict in former Yugoslavia progressed along ethnic divisions there were people throughout Australia who had re-aligned themselves with their Serbian heritage. Having lost one's sense of self, both through war and through the process of re-defining oneself as Serbian, there was a new affinity with all things Serbian.
