Decades after the Bosnian War, refugees still live out the aftermath of their displacement in former Yugoslavia.
Children in Karaula refugee settlement. Bosnia and Herzegovina. January 2020.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
This story was made with support of The Aftermath Project, as the winner of its grant for 2023.
The Aftermath Project is a non-profit organization committed to telling the other half of the story of conflict — the story of what it takes for individuals to learn to live again, to rebuild destroyed lives and homes, to restore civil societies, to address the lingering wounds of war while struggling to create new avenues for peace.
At the onset of the Bosnian War in 1992, Hazira Đafić fled Srebrenica with her brother Merfin and her one year-old son. Soon after reaching safe-haven, she and her family were moved into a temporary refugee settlement built by the international community called Ježevac, near Tuzla in eastern Serbia.
For over three decades, Hazira has been living in utmost precarious conditions – often without running water, basic sanitary needs, and means of survival. She shares this fate with people across the region of former Yugoslavia, individuals and communities who remain displaced and live in temporary refugee settlements, for whom the war and its consequences have hardly ended.
“I was born five years after the war, and yet I am born into displacement. I am born a refugee,” says Salčin Isaković. “Of course, many have lost their relatives during the war, but here in [the] Višča settlement where I live, it feels like we relive those losses every day.”
Višča, Karaula, Belvedere, Mihatovići, Ježevac, Sokolac, Barake, Mrdići, and various other still-active refugee settlements are a sphere where the remnants of conflict are omnipresent. In these camps, war has reproduced precarity and made it visible in the form of everyday life.
But these refugee settlements are also a source of a counter-narrative—of the many lost, unspoken, or unheard histories of the displaced communities. Refugee settlements in the region often become spaces where the culture, heritage, and destiny of those who were subjected to annihilation are preserved.
This photography project is a collaboration with permanently displaced people whose only sense of home is in memory, and whose acts of storytelling are ultimate acts of resistance.
10 years after the Dayton agreement that officially ended the conflict, Hazira’s brother Merfin stepped on a landmine near a refugee camp and died.
Hazira later framed his obituary photograph in a broken frame and tapped over it with the only tape she had: an orange safety tape with German printed on top of it. The warning, among others, reads: Nicht Fallen (do not fall).
“When I sleep, sometimes I visit my home village.”
Hazira on her doorstep in the Ježevac refugee settlement, Bosnia and Herzegovina. February 2023.
“This was Ševko’s first birthday. Two years later we were in the concentration camp in Vlasenica.”
We now confront a second Trump presidency.
There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.
Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.
Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.
The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
I urge you to stand with The Nation and donate today.
Onwards,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
Nezira and her son Ševko’s only photograph from before the war.
“When she fled, Nena first lived in Kiseljak, and then came to Mihatovići in 1998. She had four sons, but only one of them survived. She has suffered a lot. It was too much for her, all this sadness.”
The account of Nena and her arrival to Mihatovići refugee settlement by her neighbour Nezira Musić. Bosnia and Herzegovina. January 2020.
This story was made with support of The Aftermath Project, as the winner of its grant for 2023. The Aftermath Project is a non-profit organization committed to telling the other half of the story of conflict — the story of what it takes for individuals to learn to live again, to rebuild destroyed lives and homes, to restore civil societies, to address the lingering wounds of war while struggling to create new avenues for peace.
Jošt FrankoJošt Franko is a visual artist and photographer whose work and research focuses on issues such as displacement, migrations, workers' rights, and individuals and communities on fringes of society.