02. 05. 2004

“Lest we forget”

BELGRADE, May 2, 2004 – An exhibition of war photographs by Milos Cvetkovic opened in Belgrade’s Cinema REX on Friday as part of the Documents of Reconciliation project. The opening featured a public forum in which Cvetkovic, a staffer for daily Borba, discussed his experience as a wartime photojournalist and told the story behind the photographs, describing them as documents which had made him and his colleagues troubled and troubling witnesses. “I was the first to take Arkan’s photograph, but that photo means nothing to me. You can’t photograph Arkan or any unit by just approaching them, everyone knows how you have to do it. At first, when I went to Vukovar, they asked me: “Who are you working for?’ “I answered ‘Borba’. “If you’re from Borba you’re even worse than the Croats, the Albanians and the Muslims,” they replied. “Then you stay with them for a while and have a chat, pretending that you don’t want to take pictures. It goes on for two or three hours until they relax a bit and start to drink, then they give you drinks and you have to follow their lead, you have to endure it all. “Eventually I can’t avoid taking pictures: take my photograph, take his, and that’s the way it goes,” said Cvetokvic. Cvetkovic has also worked for Reuters and GAMA and his work has been published in leading dailies and magazines around the world. Also addressing the crowd at the opening was Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic: “The government I was part of missed out on the opportunity of explaining what happened in Srebrenica and Vukovar and so I thank Milos Cvetkovic for not letting us forget what I myself would like to forget,” said Svilanovic.