"Comic Review: Safe Area Gorazde (Sacco)": 05/12/2002

05/12/2002 Entry: "Comic Review: Safe Area Gorazde (Sacco)"

Joe Sacco spent a few months in Gorazde after the worst of the war had finished, and got to know some of the people there. This book is a collection of vignettes about what he saw there and the stories that the survivors told of what had happened during the war. Like any book about war and ethnic cleansing and violence, it is easy to feel sympathy for the people telling the stories about the friends and family members that were lost. It is also easy to feel that sense of superiority that "this could never happen here," especially in the USA, where we like to think we've put that kind of thing well behind us. But reading each story, and hearing each person talk about how a few years earlier these people were friends and neighbors and now they were not only on opposite sides of the conflict but actually taking up arms directly against each other, it made me wonder. How far away is anyone from this kind of thing? It took me a while to find the rhythm of the book, with all of the different narrators, the changes in the timeframe being portrayed, and my lack of knowledge about the conflict. But after a few stories he explains a lot more of the background of what is going on and you get a little bit of the sense that he might have felt first going to the town and hearing all these different stories. The stories themselves are absolutely horrifying, and getting a glimpse into how the events affected these people later provides a much deeper impact. No one seems to be completely right, although the book obviously does favor the Muslim residents of Gorazde and the surrounding area who are telling the stories. Of course, I don't think their stories really got told in other places - and while there are probably sympathetic stories to be told from the other side as well, it seems like there was a distinct lack of people willing to stand up to those that wanted to use violence to deal with problems. And not just violence, but slaughter of hundreds and thousands of people and destruction of whole villages and rape and mutilation and all of those kinds of horrible things you think only happened in history books. No, it was happening while we were listening to soundbites about Sarajevo and weren't quite sure how to keep all the strange-sounding names straight. The book does a fantastic job of showing the influence US foreign policy can have on individuals in these places, but also the bizarre alienness of how those policy decisions can seem. How can elections seem important when you are seeing your hometown be slowly destroyed? The book also takes to task just about everyone involved in the situation - obviously the murderous soldiers, but also the foreign journalists that aren't interested in the real story, the UN personnel who had the authority to make the use of force decisions (what is a peacekeeping force supposed to be doing if they are trying to keep their neutrality in an armed conflict?), the peacekeeping soldiers that didn't seem willing or able to do anything, the Muslims who lived in Sarajevo and looked down on the farmers that lived in Gorazde - all to some degree responsible for the tragedies that we hear about. How many times do we need to learn this lesson to be able to stop it from happening over and over? In the end, the book should have some hope, since we do see the people that survived trying to re-establish their lives like they had been before the war, but it is impossible to believe they won't have to keep dealing with the effects of what has happened for the rest of their lives. Hopefully this book will help people reading it learn something of those lessons, too.