Some reflectionS on boSnia, Sarajevo, and goraŽde

Some Reflections on
bosnia, sarajevo, and goraŽde
by Joe Sacco
My impetus to go to Bosnia was anger over a war that seemed
more about slaughter than about combat between armies…
turbing but, somehow, also absurd, and for me it came out of
the blue. A short time later Croatia, too, broke its bond with
Yugoslavia, and fighting and ethnic cleansing on a large scale
began in earnest.
In an effort to get some inkling of what was going on, I
read experts and heard pundits who blathered about “ancient
hatreds,” which are always code words for “you wouldn’t understand anyway” and “it’s no business of ours.” Admittedly, it
was easy to read an article or two and look at a disturbing photograph, and then put the troubling thing out of mind with a
turn of a newspaper page. In any case, I was focused on another
conflict, the one between Israelis and Palestinians, and I was
busy with a series of comics about the trip I had taken to the
Occupied Territories.
In April 1992, it was Bosnia’s turn to break from Yugoslavia and face the consequences. At first, the outbreak of hostilities there compounded my confusion, adding more actors and
claims to the events in the Balkans. But Bosnia had something
special that soon anchored my mind and helped me focus. Bosnia had Sarajevo.
Sarajevo had been host city of the 1984 winter Olympics
as well as the spot where the First World War was ignited, so
its name was already familiar to me. But more than that, Sarajevo, which was under siege and suffering from fierce bombardment and sniper fire, almost immediately began to stand
for the human desire to live together rather than fracture along
ready-made fault lines. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims there
…If that assessment of the events in the early 1990s in the
newly independent Balkan state lacked nuance — and perhaps
it did — I still think it was correct: Bosnian civilians were being murdered and expelled by nationalist Bosnian Serbs, who
were aided by arms, soldiers, and militias from what was left of
Yugoslavia.
In conflicts subsequent to the First World War, civilians have
been the overwhelming victims, and in this regard what happened in Bosnia was much like any number of conflicts waged
in recent memory. What made the Bosnian war unusual and
even shocking for a Westerner was that it pitted European
against European, and such a thing hardly seemed conceivable to those of us lulled by the long “forever peace” that began in 1945. (This view admits to a certain Eurocentricity, and
later some of my colleagues and I wondered why we weren’t
in Rwanda, which was suffering an enormous cataclysm at the
same time, instead. I leave it to the pedants to sort out how we
should have answered the question.)
I must acknowledge my own difficulty grappling with the
ugly novelty of the Balkan situation when it spiraled out of
control in 1991. I was living in Berlin when Slovenia began
what was to be a string of secessions from Yugoslavia. On a
drive to Munich to see a rock show, I half-jokingly suggested
to my friend Christof Ellinghaus that we continue southward
for a few more hours to witness the spectacle of Yugoslav jets
strafing Slovenian roadways. The short but sharp violence — so
nearby — as Slovenia asserted its independence was disvii
followed NATO airstrikes on the Serbs mandated U.N. access
to the enclave. I was initially reluctant to visit Goražde because
it seemed like the story du jour, but eventually curiosity as well
as a feeling of stasis with my work in Sarajevo got the better of
me, and I joined a U.N. convoy on its way to deliver food and
parcels there.
I fell in love with Goražde on that first trip. The people were
warm and inviting and lacked the initial aloofness of Sarajevans, who had seen more international journalists than they
could stomach and had become wary of the benefits of “coverage”. In Goražde, people had had little opportunity to tell their
stories. Their situation was still precarious, and they wanted an
ear. Before my first drunken night was over, I had decided that
Goražde would be the primary subject of my work in Bosnia.
Here was a town that had, if anything, been tested more sorely
than Sarajevo, that had almost been conquered twice, that had
been even more overwhelmed by refugees, and that had escaped
the fate of Srebrenica, another so-called “Safe Area,” by a whisker. In Goražde I found people caught between the dreaded
possibility of the war erupting around them again and a growing hope that maybe, just maybe, the guns would stay silent and
life could move forward again, step by precious step. For my
own purposes, I couldn’t have arrived at a more revealing time.
Other journalists told me that after a few hours Goražde
had bored them. Some Sarajevans couldn’t understand my interest in a provincial backwater and were too caught up in their
own mythos to worry about its fate. But I longed to get back to
Goražde when I wasn’t there; I longed to see my friends and
find out how they were adjusting to the new, slowly improving
realities.
And once peace was an established fact, those individuals
moved on with varying degrees of success. Some of them left
Goražde. Some of them stayed because Goražde had always
been their home. Others, who had arrived as refugees during
the war, stayed because they had nowhere else to go; their former villages and towns were left in Serb-controlled territory
by the peace accords. In any case, individual stories could now
begin as the collective story, of all those individuals trapped in
a place together, ended. Goražde as a place had survived, linked
by a corridor to Sarajevo. Goražde as a people in a moment
between death and deliverance was gone forever, and it was that
moment I tried to preserve in this book. ◆
purposefully affirmed and proved that they could live and work
together despite the ethnic-based killing going on around them.
It is difficult to overestimate the sort of intellectual courage it
took for these individuals not to give in to paranoia or retreat
into their groups under such circumstances. Many Western
journalists were impressed, and their admiration shone through
in their articles and reports, which helped seduce me, too.
Of course, this beautiful Sarajevo was only a piece of the story. The other reality was the Sarajevo in which mostly Muslim,
quasi-criminal militias defending the city murdered scores of
Serbs or evicted them from their homes (which I would detail
in a later book called The Fixer). These groups were eventually
crushed by the Bosnian government as it slowly got to its feet,
but the ruptures they caused served as a disturbing counterpoint to the ideas of a much-touted but small group of Sarajevan cosmopolitans.
In any case, because of Sarajevo I began to pay close attention
to the wider war. I read everything I could about the politics of
the former Yugoslavia and the history of the region, and I began
to untangle the mess the media had dropped into my lap. I soon
became angry at the international community’s insistence on
treating Bosnia as a humanitarian case, as if feeding and clothing the victims of war was the issue and not the war itself. The
Serb nationalists were behaving monstrously, and I thought a
genuine effort — including using force, if necessary — should
be made to stop them. Eventually, the need to take some sort
of personal action, to impose myself constructively, became my
own imperative, and I decided to go to Sarajevo to report on
what was going on myself.
I arrived there in September 1995 after a long journey, which
I outline, perhaps for your amusement, in the pages of this
book. In Sarajevo, I did indeed find that kernel of humanity I
had been promised. It resided in, among other places, bars like
Club Obala and in the studios of Radio Zid. For the young
people who embodied the Sarajevan ideal, diversity per se was
not the issue and ethnicity was less a matter to celebrate than
ignore.
But there was something that troubled me about this educated, attractive, and culture-hungry group. Many of those
who could get past ethnic differences seemed to stumble on the
country-city divide. Some of them shared the rest of Sarajevo’s
antipathy for the refugees that had streamed into the city from
the war-ravaged countryside. The refugees, who had sometimes
arrived with little more than the clothes on their back, were
not a welcome sight. They were uncouth; they were bumpkins;
some of them had brought their farm animals with them. The
refugees were called hooves, and Sarajevans feared less that the
hooves would not assimilate to city ways than that they would
turn their beloved city into a smelly country village.
About six weeks after arriving in Sarajevo, I had the opportunity to go to Goražde, the last remaining town in eastern
Bosnia not under Serb control. Until that point, Goražde had
been under its own murderous siege and it was still cut off from
the rest of Bosnia, but the provisions of a cease-fire that
­— Joe Sacco
October 2010
viii