Blog #6: What kind of knowledge(s) of the Bosnian Civil War did you bring to Safe Area: Gorazde and how has the book affected your understanding of this history?

Welcome back guys, hope you had a wonderful holiday and new year. This week, in ASTU, we were reading and discussing Safe Area Gorazde by American journalist Joe Sacco, which talks of the war in Bosnia from 1992-1995, and the details of the experiences of various survivors in the Safe Area like Edin and Rasim collected through Sacco’s stay in the safe area, along with the relevant historical details of what happened in the course of the Bosnian war.

While some of you may be shocked by some of the graphic detail presented in particular in Safe Area: Gorazde, in particular the descriptions of some of the atrocities that had happened in the war, in which Joe Sacco clearly portrays in much more detail when compared to the abstraction shown by Marjane Satrapi in Persepolis, to me it was more of an experience of the visualization and the putting of material and knowledge from conversations and sources that I have acquired into perspective. From the reading of Safe Area Gorazde, it was more of a rediscovery and the understanding of another point of view of something which I had personally researched on during my high school history project, when I read reports about the Srebrenica Massacre such as the Srebrenica, a ‘safe area’ written by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), and reports on the massacre by organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, along with things that I have found myself discussing with people I have encountered, namely the Bosnian War.

Through the reading of Safe Area Gorazde, not only was I able to increase my understanding of the conflict in Bosnia through the eyes of Joe Sacco, and through the accounts by the people he interviewed, but I was also able to relate to both my knowledge gained through various documents and interactions with other people, and as a result increase my understanding and further my perceptions in regards to the Bosnian War.

First of all, to a large extent, I find that at the end of the day, Srebrenica and Gorazde were not too different in character, which enabled me to further relate Safe Area Gorazde to sources such as the NIOD report, which has given a very comprehensive explanation of the situation, especially in the eyes of the Dutch Peacekeepers stationed in Srebrenica. For example, Joe Sacco’s presentation of some of the misconceptions and values imposed upon Bosnians by the west, along with the inaction of the peacekeepers in the eyes of the Bosnian Muslims was also something reflected in the Dutch training to Peacekeepers at the time of the Bosnian War, as mentioned in the NIOD report. At that time, misconceptions such as Bosnian Muslims being as devout as muslims of other middle eastern countries were rife in the Dutch training, and peacekeepers and Bosnians in the safe areas didn’t share good relationships, which often resulted in conflicts between the peacekeepers and locals.

Secondly, perhaps one of the most relevant experiences that I was able to find myself bringing to class in relation to the general theme of memory thus far, was the perceptions of Bosnian Muslims towards the Bosnian Serbs after the Bosnian War. In Safe Area Gorazde, Sacco provides to the characters in his book with the question ‘Can you Live with the Serbs again?’, and many of the responses ranged from outright distrust of the Serbs to simply blaming the main perpetrators behind the escalation of the Bosnian War. Similarly, this was somehow echoed during my experience back in the summer of 2016, when I was attending an international academic competition, and was able to meet some Bosnians from Sarajevo who were at around the same age as me, possibly younger, in multiple instances such as the cultural fair and flag bearing ceremony. With my researched knowledge about Srebrenica and the Bosnian War still fresh in mind, I was able meet and talk with Bosnians who were born after the war, and broached upon the topic of their view on the war and the Bosnian Serb. While it was not identified as intergenerational trauma and national memory as discussed in ASTU throughout the term, what I observed from their responses was certainly something similar to what Joe Sacco would have heard from the Bosnians in the writing of his book. To quote from one of the group, it went as follows, ‘I hope they learn their lesson, but until they learn their mistakes, we cannot forgive them.’ Looking back with the knowledge gained from ASTU in mind, and with one of the subjects tested in that particular academic competition being an imperfect world and the concepts of fragile and failing states, one can easily understand why subsequent generations of Bosnian Muslims would still hold a grudge against the Bosnian Serbs. Yet, perhaps ironically, the group were still willing to display Bosnian Serb outfits in the cultural fair, in which, I hope, is part of efforts to mend the tear made between the two parties in the Bosnian War, and to resolve the trauma between both sides. Aside from being able to observe the existence of intergenerational national trauma and memory existing in Bosnian Muslim society, from my interactions with them there I was also able, in addition, to learn of some of the ‘technologies of memory’ that the Bosnians have about the war to this day, such as the book of lilies given to those who have served in the war.

However, something which I was slightly disappointed about Joe Sacco’s work on Safe Area Gorazde, and believed that Joe Sacco was unable to portray in his work, was perhaps some of the memories and trauma suffered by another actor in the Bosnian War, namely the many peacekeepers and troops deployed in Bosnia during the war, troops of countries from Canada to the Netherlands to Ukraine. Whilst these people may not have suffered the horrendous losses of family and property as the Bosnian Muslims may have had, it is still important to note that many peacekeepers also suffered from significant trauma serving in the Bosnian War, and that they could, contrary to Sacco’s portrayal of Janvier in Safe Area Gorazde, not necessarily agree with the views of those of their commanders. From reading the NioD report, these peacekeepers not only suffered from the lack of mobility that Joe Sacco and the UN convoys enjoyed by the end of the war, finding themselves trapped in like the Bosnians in the safe area, but have also shared the trauma of losing fellow peacekeepers in action, such as the deaths of peacekeepers in Srebrenica. After the war, the NioD report also noted the trauma and stress that many of those peacekeepers in Srebrenica went through, and yet, sometimes the outside world, fails to report on the things that these peacekeepers were going through, just like how Joe Sacco noted how the situation in Gorazde was sidelined by the western world.

While I have yet to meet someone who was in the thick of the action, through the various instances where I got to meet veterans in remembrance services, the Bosnian War was clearly something traumatic. In one instance, shortly after the Remembrance Day Ceremony held in UBC, a major who served in Cyprus during the Bosnian War whom I had a conversation with, noted how although some of his friends were in Bosnia during the war, the Bosnian War itself was something not talked of and that they did not want to talk about it.

Another instance when I encountered a peacekeeper from the Bosnian War was during the Canadian Commemorative ceremony organized by the Consulate General of Canada in Hong Kong and Macau, who served in Yugoslavia during the time of the Bosnian War. Though he stated he wasn’t always on the front line as a peacekeeper, one thing he did note was the high amount of ambushes and snipers in the Yugoslav Civil War, a scenario, in which I believe would be not too far from the one described by Joe Sacco in Safe Area Gorazde. From the experience shared by him, it would not be hard to understand the difficulty of having access in and out of war zones by the peacekeepers themselves and the psychological and emotional barriers that they themselves have to face.

All in all, while I certainly appreciate the efforts of Joe Sacco in reflecting the experiences of those he kept in touch with in the Gorazde Safe Area, and utilizing Safe Area Gorazde both as a technology of memory and as a tool to allow the outside world to further understand the Bosnian War in safe areas like Gorazde as a whole, a subject which, as reflected in Safe Area Gorazde, which was not as important in the eyes of the press, and was often subject the the stereotypes imposed by western society.

Yet at the end of the day, having read Safe Area Gorazde, the book, coupled with my prior research and relevant experiences with people who were in Bosnia both during and after the war, one of my greatest reflections was that how it was truly remarkable, in my opinion, how a population of 3.5 million, of Bosnian Serbs and Muslims, from the words of one of my Bosnian friends, half the size of the population of Hong Kong, the place I grew up in, could develop so much hate based on the lines of ethnicity and religion in a short span of time, with certainly long lasting consequences such as memories and trauma acting on not only in the immediate victims, but also the others who were there, such as the peacekeepers. It sometimes makes me wonder how fragile and imperfect this world actually is.