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For many, the return has been traumatic and difficult. Some have returned to find their homes looted or destroyed. Others have had to face the realisation that relatives who have been missing are dead, murdered in the brutal ‘ethnic cleansing’ of 1992. Exhumations of mass graves by the Bosnian government have taken place alongside the refugees’ return to their homes. Amid the joyful reunions, there has also been grief, as the grim task of attempting to identify missing relatives from the mass graves takes place.
In the village of Biljani, north-west Bosnia, over a 100 men were shot outside the schoolhouse. Some of the refugees lost whole families, across generations. The murders and internment were organised by local Bosnian Serbs. Most painful of all for the refugees was that their Serb neighbours, with whom they had grown up with, did nothing to intervene when the killings began. The task of coming to terms with their return and the losses resulting from the war continues with the support of the resettlement and rebuilding programme of Edinburgh Direct Aid.
A wounded Bosnian soldier finds refuge in a disused army barracks in Croatia. Varazdin, Croatia. 1992
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