Repeat of History

I firmly believe that images have the power to influence change, however cliche it might sound. an image is strong enough, it will move who have the power to change things, to do so. As an artist and photojournalist I see change as a process that begins at a very basic level--with images and words. I am a legacy of this process having been raised in a generation that learned about the holocaust at a very early age and saw its brutality and senselessness through black and white photographs. I am of a generation taught that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. Looking at images of the holocaust as a child, I can remember how I and fellow students asked each other with such disbelief, How could anyone have let this happen? I saw what was happening in Kosovo as history repeating itself. A war between separatists and Serb forces had been going on in Kosovo for 10 years, with ethnic-Albanian civilians enduring a campaign of apartheid and ethnic cleansing that had gone virtually unnoticed by the international community. In January of 1999, incidents of ethnic cleansing came to a head when 45 Albanian Kosovar civilians were massacred in the village of Racak. Would we be asking ourselves yet again: How could anyone have let this happen? Were we going to let this escape our attention as the holocaust did, and, as most recently, in the case of Rwanda? With this in mind, I went to Albania to try and show the impact of war through the Kosovar refugees' plight, and with the hope that I could make a picture that would in some small way contribute to a positive end. The journey began when I boarded a ferry in the Port of Ban, Italy, along with scores of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) recruits and two other photojournalists, an Italian and Spaniard, with whom I agreed to travel and share expenses. Among the KLA recruits was a young man named Darden Islami, a Canadian national of Albanian-Kosovar descent. According to Darden, he was going to fight the war to liberate the people of Kosovo, among them his father, a journalist holed up in the basement of his home in downtown Pristina. All this, despite having never held a gun in his life. Darden began his self-appointed duty by comforting recruits who, within moments of the boat's departure, collapsed into the aisles, vomiting where they lay. The waters of the Adriatic were rough and made the high-speed ferry list back and forth dangerously. If we can't withstand a little rough water, how can we fight a war?, he asked. will toughen us. Later when things became really bad and it seemed as if the boat might capsize, Darden said, laughing, imagine getting killed before you even get to the war. I felt a pit in my throat. This was my first introduction to war, albeit not combat, but a situation in which people's lives were being directly affected by violence, and I was terrified. Darden, on the other hand, was utterly calm, and the thought of him getting killed, because of lack of training, deeply affected me. It was said that the ill-prepared KLA wouldn't stand a chance against Serb forces. When we docked in Durres, Albanian authorities kept all non-Albanians on board until they could get the KLA recruits off the boat and out of sight. I never saw Darden again. With the help of Caritas, a relief organization, I began documenting the refugees experiences, from the time they entered the country--when they were finger printed and registered--to the time they entered the camps, to their day-to-day lives. …

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