“Welcome to Hell”

Robert McNeil

Art of Creative Unity Award 2020 | Honorable Mention

This painting symbolizes the many women who struggled to feed, clothe or find a place of safety for their children, and lived in constant fear for their lives. The absence of men in the image shows that many men had already been killed or taken to concentration camps.

On the bullet-pocked wall, images of Ratko Mladić, former Bosnian Serb Army General, and Radovan Karadžić, former President of Republika Srpska, are featured. These are the highest-ranking war criminals to be convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and orchestrated the genocide in Srebrenica. Obscene graffiti is daubed on the wall by a Dutch UN ‘peacekeeping’ soldier describing Muslim women. A Muslim has replied by writing: “UN - United Nothing.”

In this painting, Robert illustrates the despair felt by many innocent women and children who found themselves victims of the campaign of genocide and warfare.