“People don’t know what war is and what kind of evil it is,” says the multiple award-winning photojournalist, Milos Cvetkovic after the opening of the exhibition of his war photos “My Bosnia” in the Belgrade gallery “Endzio HAB”.
At the exhibition, which opened on July 4th, only a fraction of the photos taken by Cvetkovic as a photojournalist for the Belgrade newspaper “Borba” from the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in 1992 were presented.
On that occasion, the book “My Bosnia”, published by the NGO Forum ZFD, was presented. It contains a much larger part of the opus documenting all the brutality and senselessness of the war that ended with the signing of the Dayton Agreement in December 1995.
The expulsion of Bosniaks from Prijedor in the spring of 1992, the exhumation of the remains of Serbian civilians killed at the end of the same year in the village of Ratkovici in the north-east of BiH, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, the evacuation of Croats and Bosniaks through the territory controlled by Serbs near Kotor Varos, the entry of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) into Srebrenica in 1995, after which the genocide was committed – all these events were followed through the lens by Milos Cvetkovic.
“As a photojournalist, I had a challenge. We usually watched a war that was happening somewhere far away – Vietnam, the Middle East, Afghanistan… And then it happened here and of course, I covered it, first of all, because it is happening in my country,” says Cvetkovic.
Milos Cvetkovic’s black-and-white photographs alternate with scenes of civilians imprisoned in camps that were once schools or centers of culture, mass funerals, refugee columns, beardless soldiers, and abandoned houses riddled with bullets.
“The hardest thing for me was the suffering of those people – everywhere death, pain, sadness, suffering… All of it is difficult. War… Which war is good?” Cvetkovic stated.
In many of his photos published in the book “My Bosnia”, members of various military and paramilitary units are present. Some pose, others do not even know that they have been immortalized.
Cvetkovic says that not everyone agreed to stand in front of the lens right away, but that, with a human approach, they “opened up” to him. It is precisely in this human approach that Cvetkovic sees the essence of good photography.
“I think my photographs, no matter how terrible they seem, have some humanity. I think every one of them has that.”, Radio Slobodna Evropa reports.
E.Dz.
