Srebrenica

Take away Srebrenica’s recent history and it would feel like any other small, slightly isolated, crumbling, old industrial town. Small town people with small town mentalities. I grew up in places of a similar description in the northeast of England. However Srebrenica’s history sits on it like a dead weight. This coupled with its small, run-down normality deeply disturbed me during my time there. A Bosnian colleague from the festival the week before, told me she saw the war in Bosnia as a coming together of all the worst ingredients at the very worst time. For her Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia had always been a very safe environment to live and grow up in, and she was utterly shocked by its collapse and the subsequent violent fallout. She concluded this was not just a Balkan problem, but something that could happen anywhere should the conditions exist. This really made me think, and strangely seemed quite a positive point to consider for a region whose problems are now often written off due to the perceived unique complexities and depth of its national/ethnic divisions. Arriving at Srebrenica however I found it quite frightening to feel the possibilities of what could happen in any old mundane place should all those ingredients mix. The dualities of normality and extremity amplified this and can be found everywhere in the town; the young people in the Rock Bar or the town’s mall, a bus station (above), small vegetable gardens along an idyllic green valley, surrounded by war damaged and empty homes and buildings, an ever expanding cemetery for those massacred and all that memory.

So excuse me, why on earth would you visit such a place?

New goal posts for Kevljani.

Once the festival was over, the locals took advantage of the cleared land to resurrect their old football pitch. They hadn’t had a pitch since before the war. The relatively new colours of the boy’s team are yellow and blue and so are the new goal posts. This is fair enough but colours can be complex with their own political associations and related history. In this case yellow and blue also happen to be the colours of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Muslim or Bosniak village of Kevljani is in BiH but also falls within the Serbian autonomous region, or as its commonly known; Republika Srpska, that covers 49% of the country. The political elite of this entity generally consider themselves to be Serb, continue to follow a nationalist agenda and have their associated colours of red, white and blue. They have ambitions to ultimately break from the yellow and blue of Bosnia and Herzegovina and join with Serbia proper, working towards forming what is termed a Greater Serbia – a land that contains all Serbs (it was such sentiments that fueled much of Serb aggression during the last conflict). Unfortunately these populations are scattered and mixed, I don’t know what the local Serb village’s thoughts are, but it was clear by cementing yellow and blue into the ground what political allegiances where being projected through this young boy’s football team.

Maybe a little bit confusing and I didn’t want to go on and on with explanations, but please feel free to correct me if there is the need.

From Bosnia

Some of you know, I think, that last week I headed off to Bosnia for couple of weeks. The catalyst for the trip was being invited (and offered a free flight) to run a weeks worth of photography workshops as part of a participatory youth festival in the Prejidor area of northeast Bosnia. The aim of the festival was to get kids from the different communities, aged 5-15, to come together and work together over a week and finally produce an arts festival based on their own ideas and initiatives. The whole thing was held in a Muslim village called Kevljani, but in a Serb owned field making it as neutral as possible. This area had seen some terrible atrocities during the war, with many Muslim villages being completely destroyed and much of the Muslim population being interned at the notorious Serbian camps such as Omarska (a mere 5 km away). This included Kemal one of the main organisers who had grown up in Kevljani and spent 7 months in Omarska.

After some initial shyness the children grasped the challenge and produced some wonderful work leading the way for their parents and the adults around them. Kemal said that as the festival came to an end things had happened between members of the different communities (such as communication) that hadn’t happened since before the war. The kids in our workshops had the responsibility to document the whole thing and we displayed their work on the last day. Photography in action?? Obviously photography was only part of the picture but the photography produced (by the kids) over the week, and the process of making it probably had more of a social impact than any of the work I’ve produced myself in my short photography career. I found it quite a nice reality check.

Here are a couple of their pics: