Ziyah Gafić: Everyday objects, tragic histories

These are simple objects:

clocks, keys, combs, glasses.

They are the things the victims of genocide in Bosnia

carried with them on their final journey.

We are all familiar with these mundane,

everyday objects.

The fact that some of the victims carried

personal items such as toothpaste and a toothbrush

is a clear sign they had no idea

what was about to happen to them.

Usually, they were told that they were going to be

exchanged for prisoners of war.

These items have been recovered

from numerous mass graves across my homeland,

and as we speak, forensics are exhuming bodies

from newly discovered mass graves,

20 years after the war.

And it is quite possibly the largest ever discovered.

During the four years of conflict

that devastated the Bosnian nation in the early '90s,

approximately 30,000 citizens, mainly civilians,

went missing, presumed killed,

and another 100,000 were killed

during combat operations.

Most of them were killed

either in the early days of the war

or towards the end of the hostilities,

when U.N. safe zones like Srebrenica

fell into the hands of the Serb army.

The international criminal tribunal

delivered a number of sentences

for crimes against humanity and genocide.

Genocide is a systematic and deliberate

destruction of a racial, political, religious

or ethnic group.

As much as genocide is about killing.

It is also about destroying their property,

their cultural heritage,

and ultimately the very notion that they ever existed.

Genocide is not only about the killing;

it is about the denied identity.

There are always traces —

no such thing as a perfect crime.

There are always remnants of the perished ones

that are more durable than their fragile bodies

and our selective and fading memory of them.

These items are recovered

from numerous mass graves,

and the main goal of this collection of the items

is a unique process

of identifying those who disappeared in the killings,

the first act of genocide on European soil

since the Holocaust.

Not a single body should remain undiscovered

or unidentified.

Once recovered,

these items that the victims carried with them

on their way to execution

are carefully cleaned, analyzed,

catalogued and stored.

Thousands of artifacts are packed in white plastic bags

just like the ones you see on CSI.

These objects are used as a forensic tool

in visual identification of the victims,

but they are also used as very valuable forensic evidence

in the ongoing war crimes trials.

Survivors are occasionally called

to try to identify these items physically,

but physical browsing is extremely difficult,

an ineffective and painful process.

Once the forensics and doctors and lawyers

are done with these objects,

they become orphans of the narrative.

Many of them get destroyed, believe it or not,

or they get simply shelved,

out of sight and out of mind.

I decided a few years ago

to photograph every single exhumed item

in order to create a visual archive

that survivors could easily browse.

As a storyteller, I like to give back to the community.

I like to move beyond raising awareness.

And in this case, someone may

recognize these items

or at least their photographs will remain

as a permanent, unbiased and accurate reminder

of what happened.

Photography is about empathy,

and the familiarity of these items guarantee empathy.

In this case, I am merely a tool,

a forensic, if you like,

and the result is a photography that is as close

as possible of being a document.

Once all the missing persons are identified,

only decaying bodies in their graves

and these everyday items will remain.

In all their simplicity,

these items are the last testament

to the identity of the victims,

the last permanent reminder

that these people ever existed.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)