ABSTRACT
Introduction Historically, to put it mildly, Europe has not been a peaceful continent. The Nazi holocaust was simply the most murderous and horrifying example of a wellestablished European tradition of the persecution of ethnic minorities. Both the First and Second World Wars started as European conflicts between peoples with a long history of attacking each other in different combinations and numbers. More recently, the Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia have demonstrated graphically how easily old hatreds and distrusts can still spill over into the worst excesses of barbarism.1
