Miroslav Volf suggests this:
he says the answer is not to eliminate identity. "We must develop a notion and a practice of identity which is situated somewhere between a formless hybridity and a rigid purity." Both sides in the war pursued rigid purity; Serbia continued to do so in its ethnic cleansing attempts.
"Maybe some help could be found in the Hebrew Scriptures," Volf says, "in which the injunction to remember that one was a slave in Egypt is coupled with the command not to treat the alien the way one was treated by the Egyptians."
It's from a summary article on the violence in former Yugoslavia.