The Widows of Srebrenica
Exhumation & Identification
Refugee Returns
Hardline Areas
The Youth of Sarajevo
And More of Bosnia
Bosnia 2004

So I went to Bosnia to cover the aftermath of war – to try to capture the images that are the all too often forgotten companions of the vivid pictures of war itself. I came with the conviction that war is only half the story. I believed, and still believe, that what happens in the aftermath of war is as newsworthy, if not more so, than the destruction and horror of war. I went to Bosnia with the desire to document the incredibly difficult period when humans move out of war’s desperate struggle to survive, and begin another equally mighty struggle – that of learning to live again. In the two years I’ve been working on this project, I’ve become convinced that we need post-conflict images to remind us of our humanity – to testify that war is not the final word on who we are as human beings, or the final image of our spirit.

My experience of Bosnia, then, has been marked not by war, but by the echoes of war, by the scars it has left behind. My work and travels have been charged with the struggle of rebirth, not the horror of destruction. I have spent long hours with many widows of Srebrenica – the Muslim women who lost some eight thousand men and boys in a 1995 massacre by Serb forces. I have been with them as they returned to visit homes they fled in terror, I have been with them when they have laughed, cried and prayed for their dead.

I spent a rainy afternoon with a man as he exhumed a shallow grave containing his father, killed eight years earlier by Serb neighbors. I have stood on the

 
freshly laid concrete floors of homes being rebuilt by returning refugees, determined to reclaim their land and their lives. I was in the crush of a group of young people, crowded in the square outside the National Theatre in Sarajevo, cheering wildly as they greeted Danis Tanovic, fresh from his Oscar victory for his film about the war, “No Man’s Land” – a victory he celebrated in his homeland on April 5, 2002, just one day short of the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the 1,325 day seige of Sarajevo. I have spent days in a warehouse lined with body bags, filled with the remains of recently exhumed victims of the Serb’s 1992 ethnic cleansing campaign – while family members, mostly women, walked the aisles of skeletons, sobbing quietly, looking for loved ones; while one woman picked up skull after skull with her bare hands, searching for signs of a son. I have spent afternoons with the 3K Sarajevo wheelchair basketball team, made up of young men   [continued]