SREBRENICA-POTOCARI,

Image- report on the Srebrenica mass-burials in Potocari on the 11th of July

During the war on the Balkans that broke out in 1992, the Dutch peace-keeping force (Dutchbat) had been sent to the “safe area” Srebrenica under the flag of the UN in order to protect the local population.

However, on the 11th of July 1995 general Mladic and his Bosnian-Serbian army could invade the enclave without any resistance from Dutchbat. They handed over the population to the Serbs which meant the murder of 8,000 to 10,000 people.

Every year on the 11th of July, day of the fall of Srebrenica, hundreds of victims, exhumed from the mass-graves and identified, are buried in the Potocari-graveyard.

To me, as a citizen of a country which didn’t do anything to prevent this genocide, this is something that drives me crazy. Profound shame. I am guilty of this tragedy too.

Dutchbat was in Srebrenica in my name as well!

The only thing I can actually do is just be there on the 11th of July, together with the thousands of relatives who bury their father… husband… son…And giving testimony in words and pictures.

How ashamed I am to be present there and focus my lens on the intimacy of this grief?!

Face to face with the cruelty in this enclave full of desperate, isolated, lonely grief, surrounded by the mountains where the tragedy took place…

This story must be known: their story, concerning all of us, the story of the largest genocide in Europe after the Second World War and its aftermath.

“It happened under the flags of the Netherlands and the United Nations.

We have been betrayed!”

SREBRENICA-POTOCARI (2009)is a serie of 40 panels with photomontages, size 75 x 60 cm each.Exhibits among others: Amsterdam Resistance-museum, former Camp Westerbork, the NIOD, Amsterdam (Institute for War-Holocaust-and Genocide-studies), the Noyes Museum of Modern Art, New Jersey,USA, PRODEMOS, The Hague.