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In 1992 I decided to go and do something
positive in the Yugoslavian conflict. At the time my art skills seemed the
only thing i could offer. After speaking with the
Croatian embassy in London it was agreed that I could do voluntary work in a
refugee camp. When I arrived I should go
to the centre for refugees and displaced persons where I
would be told of a refugee camp where I could work. When i turned up It
seemed that the
Croatians did not require my services! but was gladly accepted by the more
desperate Bosnian Croats. As a trained artist working as an art technician at an Oxford
college my skills could be used to take art activities with
the children in the refugee camps. Many things happened on
the way to Djakova refugee camp. I was
told that I would have to get a train connection at the
Croatian town of Slavonski Brod on the Bosnian border to get
to Djakova. What I did not know, and had not been mentioned, was the fact that the town, and its Bosnian twin
Bosanski Brod over the river
Sava were being pounded day and night by Serbian artillery tanks and
rockets. I ended up staying there two weeks before I
went off to work in the refugee camp. Most of my time in Bosanski Brod was
spent with a Bosnian-Croatian army unit of the HVO located at the front line
town of Sijekovac in Bosnian territory. The unit consisted of HOS and HVO
fighters, an American photojournalist, his friend a French Foreign
Legionnaire and three British soldiers.
After two dark and lonely weeks at the
Bosnian - Croatian refugee camp I found that being the only
European at the camp with no one to confide in or communicate with in my own
language was extremely
demoralising. So I decided to go back to Sijekovac. Day after day of stories
of unspeakable horror and grief made my anger boil and so I went back to the unit put away my cameras and
art materials and took up the gun. Like so many others who
saw the reality of Bosnia I got sucked into the viscosity of the conflict.
War is obscene and dirty, talk is a good solution if someone
is listening but sometimes the men of death cannot hear the words. Fear and adrenalin are like an infectious disease that seem to block rational thought.
It seemed that Former Yugoslavia was operating on a diet of fear and adrenalin!
It felt just as
barbaric to do nothing as it did to do something but, something had to be
done. Until you
have faced the men of death you cannot preach at my door. They were still talking while 7,000 to 10,000 Bosnian men were
marched away from a Bosnian town called Srebrenica and
butchered into mass graves. The UN (who were physically
present in Srebrenica) stood by and watched, while the suits at the UN talked !!!
The photographs on the following pages are of people who
fought the war, for many different reasons, some came home
and some did not and others left parts of themselves on the
battlefields, both mentally and physically
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