Gorazde

an old postcard of Gorazde

In Safe Area Gorazde, Joe Sacco uses comics to portray the events that took place in Bosnia from 1992 through 1995. He succesfully expresses the feelings and situations of the Bosnian Muslims living in one of the UN safe areas, Gorazde.

The united Yugoslavia that Tito had been credited to creating was more of a suppressor of harsher ethnic relations. After Tito's death, Milosevic took power, and arued for Serbian nationalism, causing Croatia and Slovenia to split from Yugoslavia. Both of these regions had small Serb minorities. However, Bosnia was more mixed, with roughly 52 % Muslim, and 44 % Serb. In 1990, (Bosnia's first free election), three nationalist parties, (Serb, Croat, and Muslim) were created. The Muslim party (Izetbegovic) argued for Bosnian sovereignty, and it was recognized as autonomous in 1992. However, this caused the Serb faction to leave the Bosnian assembly, create their own Serb state, and establish themselves as autonomous in many parts of Bosnia.

Thus, many Serbs saw it as their duty to cleanse Bosnia of it's Muslim population in order to survive. Throughout 1992, the Serb government took over the majority of Bosnia, causing the UN in 1993 to create safe areas that they were responsible to protect including Sarajevo, Zepa, Srebrenica, and Gorazde. This idea of "safe area" is largely hypocritical, as the presence of the UN peacekeepers in Gorazde did little to ameliorate the situation. They were quite useless. "Safe Area" Gorazde was still targetted by Serb forces. Within Gorazde, most of the Serb citizens had fled to Serb controlled areas, leaving just the Muslims within the city. Everyone was affected. The town was destroyed and people, men, women, the eldery and the young, were massacred during Serb offenses.

Life before the war had been peaceful. In Gorazde, as in most of Bosnia, Muslims lived next to Serbs. They were friends, and their ehtnic backround did not matter. How is it that two groups can feel peaceful towards eachother, but when a provincial and nationalistic leader comes to power, (Milosevic,) superficial differences between groups that hadn't mattered at all before become the most important factor in distinguishing who is killed and who kills. People hear what the leader has to say, and their feelings can become exxagerated and exploited.

Another chiling aspect of this four year genocide that is portrayed in this book is the ignorance of the rest of the Western world's population. The UN's inability to make any difference in the situation is incredibly dissapointing, considering that they should be the people to help those that need help in these situations. Unfortunately, the UN's influence is always muted when they are forced to be neutral in these conflicts. They can't be seen favoring one side over another. Unfortunately, in this case, although it is clear to us now who was the good guy and who was the bad guy, during the conflict it was not as easy for the rest of the world to tell. The Serbs argued that it was the Muslims who were trying to create a radical Islamist nation (!) and who were killing Serbs... Unfortunately, preconceived notions and stereotypes about Muslims may allow a Westerner to believe this interpretation of the war than what really happened.

In one part of the story, one of the "silly girls" asks Joe if people know about Gorazde in America, and he has to lie to her that they do. The fact is that people in America did not know what Gorazde was, and what was exactly happening there. And if they did, it wasn't likely that they were actively doing much about it. Unfortunately, this has not changed, and I fear it will never change, regarding ethnic conflict. During the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the ehtnic strife in Rwanda, the genocide in Darfur, and the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, the rest of the world has failed to help those when they most need it, during the conflict. Rather, afterwords, they realize that what had happened had destroyed the lives of so many innocent victims, and the world says "Never Again". But, it happens again, and again, and again. :(