UdeMNouvelles Université de Montréal

To better understand the mindset of men who committed genocide in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Samuel Tanner visited Bosnia and Herzegovina to conduct interviews as part of his doctoral research. His efforts paid off, since his thesis was named one of the four best of 2009 at the Université de Montréal.

“There is a lot of literature on genocide,” says Tanner, who begins as an associate professor at the Université de Montréal School of Criminology in 2010. “Most of the research on the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda and East Timor is based on secondary sources such as judicial documents. I wanted to understand and reconstruct, sociologically, the mindset of people directly involved in genocide.”

In 2006, Tanner flew to Sarajevo to meet with local organizations. He also interviewed four Serbian executioners who accepted to speak anonymously. For of the executioners, following a murderous agenda was the result of emerging premeditation, says Tanner: “This means that their involvement in mass violence is not the outcome of long-term planning to destroy a group based on its religious, ethnic, racial or national characteristics, rather as a long decision-making process.”

Tanner found that social, community and political events influenced the executioners. Their journey into violence was associated to a radical change in how they perceived reality. “After all these years, when they reflect on past events, there is an awakening,” he says. “It is very difficult for them to live with the killer inside them.”

According to Tanner, the causes of violence can also be attributed to internal conflicts within factions of Serbian nationalist groups. “When the former Yugoslavia collapsed, many right-wing extremist groups tried to fight Slobodan Milosevic on his own turf in order to gain legitimacy with the Serbian people,” he says. “They played up fears resulting from the collapse of the country.”

“I found that massacres and the use of violence was carried out by certain groups headed by Milosevic and many other armed groups such as the Arkans and Chetniks. Although these groups operated independently, it greatly served the State to have groups who were not officially recognized fighting the same cause. As a result, raping, pillaging and murder weren't penalized.”

On the Web:

• About the Université de Montréal School of Criminology
• French version of the news story

Media contact:
Sylvain-Jacques Desjardins
International press attaché
Université de Montréal
Telephone: 514-343-7593
Email: sylvain-jacques.desjardins@umontreal.ca