Cleansing the Soul of Loneliness:
A review of “Safe Area Gorazde” by Joe Sacco
In hindsight, it is never easy to justify the recourse to
war. So much suffering, so much death and destruction, so much passion and
anguish and manipulation all in the service of resolving conflicts and
defending causes that hardly seem to justify the extraordinary and immoral acts
that are committed.
Currently, we find ourselves in a blistering presidential
campaign season where the emotions and bickering rise to the level of the
exhausting and punishing temperatures we see here in southern California during
mid October. More and more it seems as if we don’t have much variation, and the
weather, as with the attacks and the negativity that accompany a
hotly-contested political campaign, are restricted to one note. It is highly
destructive, and it reduces everything else to brutally simplistic equation. If
you are not with us, you are wrong.
It is particularly frustrating to reflect on the eleven
years that have been spent in Afghanistan. It is the conflict that never seems
to be resolved, that ebbs and flows, but that takes a continual toll. The
objectives, as recognized back in the Bush era, seem to involve not only a
policy of containment and elimination of the terrorist threat, but also
nation-building. But any progress seems to be ephemeral, despite the
distortions circulated by both political parties here in our country. Things
don’t seem to be getting any better, and instead, we have the spectacle of an
intervention that is destabilizing neighboring countries. Nowhere is this more
worrisome than in Pakistan, where the central government seems to be unable
and, perhaps, unwilling to control the extremist forces that control so many of
the border areas.
We can’t help but recognize that there are geopolitical
goals at play. Pakistan, as always, is jockeying to gain leverage and support
in its eternal conflict with India. The Taliban are influenced by extremist
ideologies that seem to revolve around a rejection against Western values and a
return to a glorified past that, one may assuredly recognize, also encapsulated
its own imperialist ambitions and predation on other communities. And, of
course, we have the newest incarnation of a spectre that seems to be eternally
haunting the Middle East, one that takes the form of Iran’s nuclear ambitions
and the strategies that are being devised to contain that threat.
Will we ever see an end to these conflicts? Has the
nation-building impulse that was so championed by the Neo-Conservatives during
the Bush administration ever be fully repudiated, and will we ever fully
recognize that there is a military industrial complex that seems to be pursuing
its own ends, and that fastens onto these conflicts and even invents them in
order to bolster itself? How can we justify continuing to send American
soldiers to Afghanistan to battle an insurgency that only seems to grow more
and more powerful, when the conditions don’t seem to hold any promise of success?
And in the meantime, we have the terrible example of Syria and of a movement of
peaceful revolution that has been brutally repressed, one that may morph in
terrible ways to accommodate extremist ideologies because the world was unable
to come to a consensus as to the need to support this movement.
I was called to reflect on these matters after having read
Joe Sacco’s work, Safe Area Gorazde, that documents the war that took place in
Bosnia during the early to mid 90s. It details the stories of people who lived
in what had been declared a “safe enclave” during a period in which nationalist
ideologies were cultivated as a way to serve the political ambitions of a Serb
politician who was captured and taken to the Hague but was never judged due to
his sudden death, Slobodan Milosovic.
The people who inhabit this enclave are the Bosniacs,
inhabitants of the state known as Bosnia-Herzegovina who are distinguished by
being of Muslim heritage. It is never truly clear how religious they are, and
one suspects that during the Communist era they lost much of the religious
imperatives that had been operative previously, but they may nonetheless be
classified as “cultural Muslims”, whether or not they are observant.
In 1992 there was an outbreak of hostility as the states of
the former Yugoslavia were breaking up into independent republics. As we
recall, the German wall had fallen two years earlier, leading to the
reunification of the two German states, and the Soviet Union was also to break
up into independent republics. It seemed as if the Cold War had been won, and I
remember as a young man hearing about what this fact portended, with the
possibility of a so-called “Peace Dividend” as resources were supposedly to be
deflected from the Defense industry to serve other ends. It was a hopeful time,
even though it meant that I lost my job in this same defense industry and
undertook a career change. But that change was long overdue, and I shudder to
think what five or ten more years in that career would have meant for my
spiritual development. I would have atrophied, like a plant abandoned in a
basement.
It is not difficult to recall the news of the conflict in
the former Yugoslavia. First Slovenia broke away (I remember talking to an middle-aged
immigrant from that republic at work, and who also seemed to me to demonstrate
an old-world grace in our occasional conversations), then Croatia, and then we
heard of the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a state that was ethnically
diverse and in which the varying populations seemed to have integrated
successfully. It seemed that the Serbian population in that regions was being
urged to consolidate its territory, but also, in a way that was more worrisome,
to expel people of other ethnicity.
The idea of expulsion was nothing new to me. We have had
many examples of mass expulsions of populations, and most recently we can
recall that it was used as a tactic by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the
former Soviet Union. But there is no need to cast such a distant look for near
examples of these policies. Native-Americans had also been subject to expulsion
during our formative years, and we recall the plight of the Cherokees, who were
forced to leave their historic homelands in the east to migrate to the central
plains of what would become the expanded United States after the war with
Mexico. And, as a Mexican-American, in the personal histories transmitted to us by family members as well as friends, we have conserved the memory of other historical movements of expulsion that have affected us as a community, such as those that occurred during the 1930s in the
wake of the economic crisis that hit the country, or subsequent episodes such as the infamous "Operation Wetback" wherein hundreds of thousands of US citizens were expelled mainly because they were ethnically Mexican. This is an enduring motif in our history and is present even now in the rancorous debate that addresses the topic of undocumented immigration, and there is an enduring need to define an "alien" and threatening group that needs to be repressed, a need that gives rise to legislation such as SB1070 in Arizona. It proclaims a threat to national integrity, and what seems to be a sensible need to affirm law and order by advocating intrusive and aggressive policing that, despite the ruling of the Supreme Court, constitutes a threat to civil liberties. It is grounded on the hope that it will result in the removal ("self deportation", in Mitt Romney's infelicitous phrase) of millions of "illegal"aliens, to use their vindictive and dehumanizing label.
So, I remember being horrified by the spectacle of what was
happening in the former Yugoslavia. The Serb forces, who were apparently
incited by the extremist ideology of President Milosovic and the recourse to a
history of Serbian victimhood, were buoyed by arms that had been retained by
their side with the breakup of Yugoslavia. The Bosniacs were now portrayed in a
dehumanizing fashion, and they were seen as an inconvenient population that was
to be disposed of in service to an ideology that served, once again, to appeal
to a historical mission of correcting and avenging historical wrongs. It
sounded much the same as had happened before, in Germany, for example, but it
seemed all the more troubling because the crisis seemed so obviously manufactured.
These groups had lived together for hundreds of years. They spoke roughly the
same language, and they were integrated, with Serbs living next to Croats and
Bosniacs. If you lived in close proximity with each other, and were friends,
and attended the same schools and shared much of the same culture, how could it
be possible to suddenly demonize each other? Was this, once again, due to the
influence of politics, and the elaboration of ideologies that served as a
platform for ambitious figures to gain power?
Joe Sacco is a journalist who specializes in a special form
of graphic reporting. He not only is trained as a journalist, but also
incorporates techniques used by graphic novelists, and these techniques are
brought to play in his account of the war as it played out in the eastern city
of Gorazde, on the eastern frontier of the former state of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In the face of atrocious attacks and a murderous onslaught of Serbian forces,
Bosnian Muslims were in disarray, and were forced to abandon large areas of the
region and concentrate in what were to be subsequently declared “safe areas” by
the UN. However, as evident in the stories that were collected by Sacco, there
was no safety in this area, especially during the early years of the war. It
seemed, instead, to be a collection point for traumatized refugees who were
subject to immense suffering.
We see stories that are related by several Bosniac
narrators. Of course, the stories are filtered through individuals who seem to
be much more cosmopolitan, as evident in the fact that they speak English and
are able to communicate with Joe. One wonders if the stories would have changed
if he had had a chance to interview a truer cross-section of Bosniacs, and to
furthermore not rely on his small group of translators. But the stories are
nonetheless frightening for what they reveal not only of tactics that were used
against an unarmed civilian population, but for the fragility of human values
of tolerance and understanding and affection for neighbors and friends, those
social bonds that were swept away in the face of these extremist ideologies
that were portrayed in terms of historical imperatives to redeem groups and nations.
We are taught to be proud of our nation, and to cherish our
flag and our national institutions. We all have a degree of chauvism that is
grounded not on rational consideration but on familiarity with what seems right
and appropriate. Our way is the only way that we know, so we defend it
vigorously, even if an outsider might be able to point to incongruities and to
disadvantages that accrue to our system. And if we can ground on nationalism on
a sense of tradition that represents a thread of continuity, then it seems all
the more difficult to resist. We are an “in” group and the others are an “out”
group, and the imperative of exclusion seems fundamental to our right to
self-definition. In times of manufactured crisis, you are either “with” us or “against”
us, and we are quick to employ martial metaphors to declare all manner of “wars”
against movements and causes that seem to put limits on our rightful
aspirations. And, in case it isn’t evident enough, it perhaps behooves me to
declare how destructive and narcissistic this nationalism seems to me.
In this historical episode, we are finally privy to the
stories that offered by the Bosniacs as they related the shock and terror they
felt at being expelled from their villages, being rounded up and killed, having
their possessions defiled or destroyed, and being shelled by enemy forces as
occurred with the inhabitants of Gorazde, who were surrounded by Serb forces,
many of them former neighbors, who shot at them and then taunted them by name.
What could possibly justify this breaking of all social bonds, this recourse to
a type of madness?
These were terrible years for the refugees, unable as they
were to escape the enclave and unable to count on the protection of the UN and
administrators that were portrayed as vacillating or ineffectual, willing to
cede room for maneuvers to the Bosnian Serb forces in exchange for promises of
restraint that, according to the witnesses interviewed by Sacco, were illusory.
Promises were not kept, and instead, we have portraits in which the leaders of
these forces, people such as Radko Mladic, are portrayed as arrogant and
oblivious agents of violence, eager to shore up their authority in service to
these destructive ideologies of purity and vindication.
And the fact that Sacco is a graphic illustrator helps to
add another dimension to this form of reportage. He is an accomplished illustrator,
and the drawings are rendered in pure and bold lines, ones that seem to
simplify and accentuate the contrasts. There are no colors in this report, we
have instead a landscape and a form of portrayal that seems more stark, and the
episodes that are related, especially those that take place during periods of
duress, assume a greater dramatic power. How can we not have a visceral
reaction when we see the drawings that accompany the testimony of some of the
nurses and doctors who relate, in nightmare testimonies, those periods in which
they were flooded with wounded patients, almost all of them innocent civilians,
many of them women and children, who have suffered grevious wounds when shelled
or shot by Serbian paramilitaries? How can we not recoil in horror at the
narratives of people such as the old refugee who sees fellow Bosniacs butchered
on a bridge as if they were livestock, and thrown into the river? And how can
we not feel compassion for the characters who are secluded at night, and who
reflect on the dreariness of their circumstances, dreaming of being able to
escape to Sarajevo?
The stories have a cumulative effect on the reader, and we
feel horror but also a growing exhaustion in the face of so much suffering. And
this culminates in the episode of the mass slaughter of over 7,000 Bosniac men,
people who were trying to reach a safe area under the control of the Bosnian
Muslim authorities but who were intercepted, thus giving rise to one of the
signature atrocities of the late 20th century, atrocities that
seemed too common and also included episodes such as massacres in Rwanda where
over a million people were killed and the brutal war in Chechnya, where an
insurgent movement led to brutal repression and suffering inflicted on a civilian
population. What can possibly justify any war? Why do human beings who
otherwise would seem to be rational seem ready to give in to an atavistic
impulse to brutalize others, not only on an individual basis (we all are
familiar with episodes of bullying from our childhood, as well as all the ways
in which people try to exert dominance over others) but on an infinitely more
destructive collective basis, where this war led to the coining of a new
phrase, that of “ethnic cleansing” that also resulted in what we could term “sociocide”,
that breaking of all social bonds?
The narratives are terrible to read, and the images convey
this suffering, but they also convey the vigour of many of the characters,
people such as the graduate student Emir or the soldier Riki, he would spontaneously
bursts out into song, revealing what we can term an irrepressible nature. The
journalist himself recedes into the background, and he leaves the characters to
tell their stories, without interjecting himself excessively. He does provide background
material, however, and he does use it to help illustrate the historical causes
and episodes that constitute the grammar for this whole experience. Thus the
material relating to a previous episode of bloodshedding, the conflict between
the various insurgent groups during World War Two, and the suggestion that,
somehow, the seeds for this conflict had been planted long ago.
In the end, the final signing of a peace treaty that we know
as the Dayton Peace Accords somehow seems unreal. The misery and cumulative
nature of this suffering seems to take on a life of its own, and when combat
finally comes to an end, it is hard to believe that it won’t be only a
transitory stage before the next furious onslaught. Why should we give credence
to rational accords when the whole war and the display of furious irrationality
would seem to dictate that rationality itself is fragile? And how will these
groups ever reconcile and move on, if we reflect that one atrocity begets a
response, however delayed it may be? If the Serbs are still struggling with their
history of Ottoman domination, how will the Bosniacs ever overcome the memory
of the suffering they endured under the impetus of the Serbs?
It is still early, and it is still possible to believe in an
enduring peace and a reconciliation even if one recognized that the memories
will probably fester in the minds of the respective communities. One could hope
for reconciliation and readjustment. One could hope that the peace will last in
Rwanda and in South Africa and in Iraq and, hopefully, when the time comes, in
Afghanistan and in Syria, to return once again to two countries which seem to
be irreparably divided. But we also recall that grievances represent a currency
that can be wielded by unscrupulous political actors, as we recognize in other
episodes in which, for example, the Chinese seem to appeal to the history of
suffering under Japanese occupation during the early part of the 20th
century to justify territorial claims, leading to mass demonstrations and
beatings and bluster. Can it all be about a group of barren islands in the
Pacific, or is it about other aims, the need to assert economic advantage over
a rival, or to distract the population from the difficulties of political
succession as China prepares to hand over power to a new premier, or the need
to deflect internal frustration over growing inequality by trotting out old
episodes to channel this anger in more acceptable ways?
I am suspicious of wars and the ways in which they are
justified by ideologues. And yet, we seem to have an unacknowledged atavistic
streak that leaves us susceptible to manipulation, a troubling acknowledge to
the power of the metaphors of war. Nothing else suggests bonding and unity than
the coming together for a cause, that level of intimacy that is at play as well
in Sacco’s report on this conflict. It is troubling, and the reporter captures
these contradictions towards the end when he relates the difficulty that his
friend Amra has to adjusting to a post-war life, once she gets the chance to
escape to Sarajevo.
“Amra was getting nervous, and she apologized. I took her
home in a taxi. She’d been cleansed from Foca and had been living as a refugee
in Gorazde, about which she’d once told me, ‘I hate this little fucking town.’ ‘I
miss Gorazde. I miss my friends.’” (p. 226)
Maybe one of the most basic human needs is for intimacy, and
maybe it is possible to find it in experiences of mutual travail and suffering,
in the sense of victimhood that characterized the experience of the Bosniacs in
Gorazde but also, in mirror fashion, provided the fuel for ideologues such as
Slobodan Milosovic and his appeal to the Serbs.
War is, unfortunately, another social institution.
Copyrights ORomero 2013
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