Twenty years on since the beginning of the war in Bosnia its women are still fighting for the truth. In their search for husbands and sons still missing due to genocide, they are both victims as well as citizens while they actively investigate with the International Commission for Missing Persons. Fragile or incredibly strong, the Bosnian women, regardless of ethnic or religious distinction, represent the spirit and the multi-ethnic strength which survived the physical and intellectual rape of their nation.
The exteriors of the houses and apartment blocks display a multitude of open wounds. The holes made by machine-gun fire and the white blotches of concrete, used to fill up the gaping cavities created by the bombs, look like imaginary constellations scattered across the whole of Bosnia. Recollection, notwithstanding the implacable passing of time, is swathed with scars, but it is not the destruction that causes us to remember the horrors of war, neither is it purely the pain for those lost, more than anything it is the daily endeavor to recuperate thousands of hidden identities. Seventeen years after the end of the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, around ten thousand humans, who simply vanished into mid-air, are still missing. The International Commission on Missing Persons along with the Missing Persons Institute in Sarajevo have been working non-stop, ever since 1996, with the intent of identifying the missing persons who disappeared during the armed conflicts, thus contributing to the development of an appropriate commemoration of the victims: by giving them back their names in remembrance of the genocide and allowing their families to mourn their own dead at a decent graveside. From the “protected†enclave in Srebrenica, scene of the largest-ever massacre in Europe since the Second World War, at Cerska, where a populace of peasants was forced to defend itself with only rifles and machetes against Serbian mortars and missiles, down as far as the Drina Valley the carnage carried out by the Serb-Bosnian forces against citizens of Muslim religion, is still very vivid in collective Muslim memories. Following the ethnic-cleansing operations of the Serbs, in the Srpska Republic now live about 1.4 million inhabitants, of whom about one million are Serbian Nationalists. The Bosnian refugees have never gone back to their homes, many for the fear of finding themselves living next-door to the slaughterers of their loved-ones, others for the lack of a true process of peace: in fact, justice has not been carried out in the most part of the atrocities committed during the war in Bosnia. Every year hundreds of human remains are identified and on July 11th, the anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica, all those bodies are given back to their relatives. Starting from the First World War right up until the harrowing war at the end of the 90’s, the Slave population assisted a sort of dance of reality: the opening and closing of an atrocious century concerning the violations of human rights. Without stealing images, mine was more than anything else a co-division of memories and visions, of moments truly experienced and others only imagined. This is life in Bosnia now, in the black and white of frozen emotions, a transition still present between past and future. Where dreams run next to nightmares, hate next to love and, in the inverse rules of history runs a newly found desire to serge ahead, incarnated in the new generations. Where a hug rekindles hope, amid the obscure meanderings and backdrops of the mind.