This post is also available in: French

• I first met Florence Hartmann during a conference organised by Mothers for Peace.  After that we had to opportunity to see each other again during various journeys in Bosnia, journeys that led to the making of this documentary.

Her practice of journalism, her experience as a spokesperson of Carla del Ponte (attorney of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda), her commitment, her knowledge in history and geopolitics, all meant that it was a natural choice for me to ask Florence to present this exhibition.

• Twenty years ago, Bosnia-Herzegovina sank into war. The fall of the Berlin Wall, a few years earlier, had not saved a reunified Europe from the return of barbarians to its borders.  Ethnic purification defaced and tarnished this land of confluences, exposed to the evil wind of History and its apprentice sorcerers.  The indifference of the Western leaders, still heady from their recent victory over communism, compounded our collective inability to keep our promise of “never again”, while mass graves filled the entrails of a Bosnia which had been left to its fate for too long.  In 1995, a fragile peace silenced the weapons, but left the country divided, as much in its memory as in its institutions.

In the company of the tireless “Mothers for Peace”, Denis Paillard, a photographer from Lille, an attentive and patient traveller, turned his gaze on this country as it tries to rebuild itself.  His lens knows how to catch with modesty this extraordinary strength that wells up out of the depths of trauma and permits, for those who know how, to learn to face hardship and pain, to keeping going even if the scars are still there and always will be.

The marks of the war are there, on the yawning facades, on the closed faces and the tense but determined and dignified figures.  Munira, Sehida, and Kada found another way to deal with the injustice, not through revenge but by becoming the guardians of the memory of the July 1995 genocide of Srebrenica.  Instead of fading from memory, being able to relate a story, to repeat it, to put a name on each victim, is to overcome the work of the killers who count on the eternal silence of the dead.  Suffering is everywhere but it is this wish to face up, to keep living no matter what, that springs from each photograph.  Despite the incomprehension.  Despite the irreparable damage.  A desire that illuminates the features of these men and women who dare to speak out about the crimes of their own side and fight the hatred. Srebrenica, Prijedor, Kozarac, Bihac, Gorazde, Foca, Sarajevo, so many martyred towns where Denis Paillard takes us, photographer of relics from the past.”

• Florence Hartmann, journalist and writer. She covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia for “Le Monde”, and she was the spokesperson for Carla Del Ponte in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

• Mothers for Peace (MPP).
In 1991, at the height of the Serbo-Croatian Conflict, when it was on the verge of spreading to Bosnia, the mothers and wives of Croatian soldiers rose up against mass massacres and rapes.  They joined together to look for solutions, using dialogue and peaceful means, and called out to the mothers of the world that would be heard in Europe, in Canada and also in France.  In 1994, Nanou Rousseau created the association “Mothers for Peace” in order to help women and children, victims of conflicts.  Their programme would win many awards, including the Figaro Madame magazine readers’ award for Humanitarian Action in 2005 (for their work relating to Afghanistan) and the French National Human Rights Award in 2006.  It is thanks to the help of the MPP that this work has been made possible. www.merespourlapaix.org

• This exhibition was made possible with the support of the Agnès b. Endowment Fund.