Accompanies by two survivors of the 1995 death march, a group of employees of the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Centre are gathering items which the victims of the Srebrenica Genocide left on the field as they were trying to escape the massacre nearly 25 years ago.
The goal is to preserve those items left in the forests around Srebrenica for future generations, according to the director of the Memorial Center, Emir Suljagic.
“Everything is being photographed, recorded, catalogued, including the exact coordinates where all of it was found,” Suljagic said.
The Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Center appealed to survivors and relatives of those who were killed in the genocide to provide the institution with any items which belonged to the victims.
“The Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Center is at a crucial crossroads: while the truly heroic struggle to find those who remain missing is ongoing, this institution – which is first and foremost our property and which would not exist if it wasn’t for the immeasurable courage and sacrifice of the victims’ families – must move on to the ‘next phase of remembering’,” a statement by the Memorial Centre said.
The Memorial Center is collecting, among other things, clothes, canned food, watches, cigarette cases, personal documents, toys, school books and items which may have been found in mass graves.
The collection may also include diaries, notes or letters which were sent from the Srebrenica enclave by through the Red Cross or newspaper articles, photographs and video recordings portraying life in the eastern Bosnian area during the war in the early 1990s.
How unsettled our recent history actually is: this morning a group from @SrebrenicaMC accompanied by two survivors of the deathmarch from July 1995 are collecting artefacts still remaining along the track, 25 years after the fact. pic.twitter.com/Mr23UrRmBz
— Emir Suljagić (@suljagicemir1) November 26, 2019
