Homepage for UWB Portal News

Thousands of personal items, pieces of clothing and footwear, documents, watches, hygiene items, and various small belongings, contains the collections of the Memorial Center in Potočari, Bosnia and Herzegovina. A recent study by archaeologists from the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen has focused on a detailed analysis of these material remains of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. Many of the personal items had previously been recovered by forensic anthropologists from mass graves, and they are still being found in the surrounding forests, through which thousands of people attempted to flee death.

“In many cases, it is possible to link these objects to specific individuals and thus provide tangible testimony to one of the most horrific mass crimes in recent European history. The research also focuses on everyday life in besieged Srebrenica between 1992 and 1995. These artefacts show how people survived under conditions that most people in today’s Europe can hardly imagine,” said Pavel Vařeka from the Faculty of Arts at the University of West Bohemia, who leads the research.

Czech archaeologists are now documenting these personal items, which are only about 30 years old, using modern methods, including 3D recording. The goal is not only their analysis and preservation, but also their accessibility to the public in the future. Archaeologists and Memorial Center staff are currently working together on a virtual museum that will allow people around the world to explore these collections. Surviving relatives and friends will also be able to use these items to help identify victims who have not yet been identified.

The Srebrenica genocide was the culmination of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, formerly part of Yugoslavia. Over the course of several days, units of the Bosnian Serb Army murdered more than eight thousand Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks). “It was a war crime. During the investigations conducted so far by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and the International Commission on Missing Persons, investigators have exhumed nearly seven thousand victims from mass graves. Nevertheless, many cases remain unresolved, and the total number of murdered and missing persons, exceeding eight thousand, is not final,” said Azir Osmanović, a survivor of the massacre and curator of the Srebrenica Memorial.

The research into the remains in Srebrenica is part of the long-term project Zdivočelá země (The Wild Land), which examines, based on material evidence, how people faced wars, violence, and mass repression in the 20th century. Previously, archaeologists from Pilsen uncovered, for example, a U.S. Army military hospital from 1945 in Borský Park in Pilsen, as well as remains of the forced Soviet collectivization of nomads in Kyrgyzstan and Gulag camps in Kazakhstan.