Safe Area Gorazde : The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995

Safe Area Gorazde is Joe Sacco's 240-page opus about the war in the former Yugoslavia. Sacco spent four months in Bosnia in 1995-1996, immersing himself in the human side of life during wartime, researching stories rarely found in conventional news coverage. The book focuses on the Muslim enclave of Gorazde, which was besieged by Bosnian Serbs during the war. Sacco spent four weeks in Gorazde, entering before the Muslims trapped inside had access to the outside world, electricity or running water.

The hardcover edition of Safe Area Gorazde put Sacco on the map as one of the pre-eminent journalists of his time, and the softcover edition will present his work to a wider audience. The book has been prominently featured in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Time, Utne Reader, Spin, The London Times, The Washington Post, Brill's Content, several NPR programs, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, and other media. The book also led to Sacco being named a recipient of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. Safe Area Gorazde features an introduction by Christopher Hitchens, political columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair.

His own visits are fairly basic, everyone is frightened and devastated by the war and he experiences the guilt of one able to come and go as he pleases. The history of the war is very clearly told, with maps and pertinent statements from UN leaders, Clinton, Milosavich, et al. Sacco clearly highlights how ineffective and downright cowardly the UN approach was, singling out British Lt. General Rose and French Lt. General Janvier for lying and dissembling in order to avoid conflict, and the Clinton administration for being inept and vacillating toward the Serbs. The history is a stark reminder that in the absence of a superpower with a vested interest, one cannot expect loose multinational efforts to deter genocide. Throughout the war, due to a total lack of leadership and moral will from above, UN forces were pushed around, held hostage, and at times fled into the night rather than protect the civilians they were supposed to. Which brings one to the most compelling and disturbing parts of the book. Sacco supplies images to the testimonials of survivors and witnesses to execution, rape, nonstop civilian shelling, snipers, and even poison gas. Most of the voices from Gorazde are those of Muslim inhabitants or refugees "cleansed" from other areas, and while the stories are chilling enough, what also disturbs is the confusion and pain these people feel because in many cases, it was their former Serb neighbors who participated in it.

Sacco's artistic style may not be to everyone's taste, and certainly this is only a slice of the larger war, but he bears witness and hopefully makes the reader more conscious of the failings of leadership in preventing what was supposed to be "never again." American loves to pat itself on the back for kicking [...butt] in the "good war" against the Nazis, but somehow we've managed to avoid any responsibility for allowing genocide to continue, even when it's been clearly within our ability to do so.


The brutality of Bosnia   August 22, 2000
Ron Jensen (RAF Mildenhall, England)
16 out of 18 found this review helpful

I have been to Bosnia many times in the past few years and have met many Bosnians. The stories I've heard from them are similar to the ones Sacco relates here. They make your spine tingle and your hair stand on end. These are decent people more like you and me than different from us. And they have endured unspeakable horror. Sacco's storytelling and his decision to use the medium of comic-style art make the war in Bosnia all too real. I actually had to put the book down more than once and walk away from it. Sacco will reach an audience that has yet to understand what happened in sad and wonderful Bosnia. He deserves our thanks.


Another brilliant work of comics journalism   October 13, 2002
Dave Thomer (Philadelphia, PA USA)
16 out of 18 found this review helpful

While Sacco does provide a few pieces of historical and political detail to establish the context of his stories, this book is not an overall account of the war in Bosnia. As he did in PALESTINE, he combines the oral histories of his interviewees with his own observations on conditions in the enclave as well as his feelings about being in a danger zone. He keeps his primary focus on roughly half a dozen people, which helps to structure the collection of vignettes into something of a narrative, while also including interviews with a number of other people. Sacco stands back and lets the interviewees tell their stories, keeping his editorializing and personal reflections to interludes. You can feel his outrage over the conditions and the circumstances, but he doesn't allow that outrage to boil over and distract from the story. Despite the comments of Christopher Hitchens in his introduction, I think this approach serves Sacco well. It ensures that the reader will not be able to distract himself from the brutality and suffering by getting caught up in critiquing the author's tone.

And there is plenty of brutality and devastation here. Sacco's artwork is detailed and expressive, not gruesome for shock value's sake but unflinching in its depictions of wartime injuries and combat medicine under the worst possible conditions. You can't help but wonder not only how human beings could be so cruel to each other, but how other human beings could stand back and let it happen.


This is not a comic book!   October 10, 2000
15 out of 18 found this review helpful

This is an astonishing book, for two reasons: first of all, it shows a side of the Balkan conflicts that is simply invisible in any other source. And secondly, the artwork in it is amazing. The art/text combination is unique and uniquely engaging and evocative. But make no mistake: this is not a comic book: it's a serious exploration of important events. Which is not to say that it is free of humor. There are some very funny parts, and the artist/narrator-character is keenly insightful on a human level. But there are some devastating sections, too, which made me have to put the book down for a while, though not for long, since I was always compelled to return to this product of Sacco's genius.


No easy answers, but a compelling narrative   January 24, 2002
nkname
15 out of 16 found this review helpful

First off: this book is difficult to read. To be honest, I picked up this book as a fan of graphic novels, not because I had a burning desire to learn about the Balkans. But this book never reads like a history lesson, and it draws you back in even after you think you might be finished with it, because Sacco smartly kept the scale small--the story of one medium-sized Bosnian town.

"Safe area"--a U.N. concept of a city that would be protected from war--is a sadly ironic title. The topic is huge: centuries-old ethnic conflict, generals, the U.N., Bill Clinton, personal stories and horrendous, Holocaust-like devastation. Where do you start?

If you're Joe Sacco, you venture into Gorazde in a U.N. reporter's convoy, but when the rest of the media leaves, you sleep on a local's couch. You hear their dreams, sometimes silly, like of owning a new pair of American-made jeans. You intersperse the banality of daily life with sweeping days of horror and historical fact. You present -all- sides of the story, including the violence against Serbs (Orthodox Christians), but primarily, the unreal savagery of that group against Muslims and Bosnians (Roman Catholics). You become friends with the people you come to know year in and year out. You are awkward and uncomfortable about your perfect American-orthodonture teeth. You try to wrap your mind around how someone could shell a child, or rape a pregnant woman, or take a sniper post in the town he grew up in, against neighbors he knows. You leave the bigger questions--like why one religious group turns against others so quickly and with such hatred--unanswered. In your straightforward story, you counterbalance reams of U.S.-based, simplistic, propagandist reporting about violence-prone Muslims and peace-loving Christians.

While reading this book, things would cross my mind: what would it be like to be in Gorazde and know that the U.N. "peacekeepers" left in the middle of the night? The ominous intent of that idea stays with me still. The images are incredibly disturbing, but not exploitive or disrespectful. He simply tells it like it was, and bears witness.