I should say, from the beginning, that I never flew into Sarajevo on a military cargo plane, listening anxiously for the sound of artillery fire. I never saw anyone killed in the infamous Sniper Alley that was a death trap during the three–and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo by Serb forces. I never had a gun pointed in my face, I never feared for my life, never interviewed a man who would die the next day, a woman who had been gang-raped, a parent who had just buried a child, or a family that had fled the blood-soaked soil of a village burned to the ground in the name of “ethnic cleansing.”
No, for me, the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Hercegovina was something that happened far off, in a place I’d never been. It was something I struggled to understand, or ignored when the news was too depressing, from my home in Boston, where I wrote of other things. I did not come to Bosnia until the fall of 2000, in the midst of changes in my own life. I found myself drawn at last by a newspaper article that said that just as Bosnians were finally feeling secure enough to start returning in large numbers to homes they had fled during the war, the international community was becoming “fatigued” with the Balkans tragedy and was starting to move its aid and attention elsewhere. The result was that few Bosnians would receive help in what seemed to me to be a Herculean task of returning to homes haunted by tragedy and lingering hostilities. I was dismayed by the quick-fix shortsightedness of it all, concerned that the West was turning its back on Bosnia once again, just as it had during a war that was marked by the worst genocide in Europe since the end of World War II.
I felt compelled to go, to do whatever I could as a journalist to be a witness to the country’s ongoing struggle to rebuild a civil society. Although I began my career as a print journalist, working first for The Christian Science Monitor as a staff writer and later as a freelancer for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Fast Company and others, by the year 2000 I was well into a career transition into photography and had been ready for some time to take on a long-term documentary project.
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 a desire to document that 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 four years I spent making the images that would ultimately become this book, I became 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, nor the final image of our spirit.
My experience of Bosnia 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 widows of Srebrenica – the Muslim women who lost some 7,000 to 8,000 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 spent days in a warehouse lined with body bags, filled with the remains of recently-exhumed victims of the Serbs’ 1992 ethnic cleansing campaign – while family members, mostly women, walked the aisles of skeletons, sobbing quietly, looking for loved ones; as one woman picked up skull after skull with her bare hands, searching for signs of a son.
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 siege of Sarajevo.
I have spent afternoons in Sarajevo with the 3K Sarajevo wheelchair basketball team, made up of young men who were wounded by snipers as civilians or while serving on the frontline as soldiers. I have watched them sweat and spin on a dime and flirt with girls when practice is over and I have come away determined that the world’s final image of them be their strength and grace – and not the moment when they lay sprawled on a city sidewalk, another tragic victim of war, another image of despair. I want to tell the story of their aftermath. I want to tell it all.
The end of war does not mean peace. It is simply the end of war, the end of death and destruction. Every story of war includes a chapter that almost always goes untold -- the story of the aftermath, which day by day becomes the prologue of the future.
And finally, a note about the war. This book does not attempt to re-tell that story; there are many, many fine books, which detail the conflict and why it happened. But it is important, I think, to know a few things – to understand that the war in Bosnia, which occurred during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, was fueled by nationalist aggression and propaganda from its neighbors, Serbia and Croatia, whose leaders wanted to split the country in two.
It is important to know that politicians in the West and the United Nations did everything they could to avoid being drawn into this war – repeatedly appeasing aggressors like Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and urging Bosnia’s leaders to allow the country to be carved into pieces. And while, unfortunately, many Bosnian Serbs continue to deny what was done by them, and in their name, it is crucial to know that the biggest victims in this war, by far, were Bosnian Muslims, who were targeted for expulsion, rape, torture and death simply because of their identity.
