May 2001

SAFE AREA/GORAZDE – THE WAR IN EASTERN BOSNIA 1992–1995

Unfashionable and inaccessible, the little town of Gorazde, with its 57,000 inhabitants, was "not one of the war's more chic or celebrated spots," says Christopher Hitchens in his introduction to Joe Sacco's comics journalism book. But in Gorazde as in other U.N. designated "safe areas", ethnic cleansing reached its murderous zenith, away from the attention of the media that was focused on Sarajevo, and without the help of NATO peace keepers' army, who never made it down the road from the capital. Still, Gorazde is the only town to have survived three and a half years of war against the Muslims in Eastern Bosnia, and it did it pretty much on its own.

Sacco is at his best when he captures the individual features of a score of village characters and weaves interviews and flashbacks with fragments of his diary. Through his scenarios the stuff of everyday life, the details of landscape and language come alive: the lack of everything from a pencil to a pair of jeans, the children's games in the streets, clothes-washing in the river, food preparation, partying, and the paddle-wheel generators fashioned from pieces of washing machines and cartwheels that turn in the river waters, providing electricity to the houses. As three and a half years of war and resistance unfold vividly before us, we are made to hear the victims' screams, but also the eerie silence of a town without cars.