Hello reader! I am sorry I have not been posting as regularly as I should, because of the blog post due dates and my adherence to complete such tasks on the week it is due is always in the way! But all is well because I am going to school you, reader, on why Joe Sacco’s book Safe Area Gorazde is a brilliant graphic documentary that reflects on the state of the international climate at that time and how every state representative involved embraces forgetting and denial! Doesn’t that sound fun, especially when the topic of memory bleeds into politics?

In a very brief summary that could never do Sacco’s book justice, Safe Area Gorazde is a documentary-like book in the style of a graphic narrative that tells the story of Sacco in the “UN-deemed safe area” of Gorazde, in the post-Yugoslavia country of Bosnia, observing the aftermath of the Bosnian War and the effect it had on the city of Gorazde. The book is told through Sacco’s personal moments with the people of Gorazde, through interviews with various people around Gorazde, through brief but very informative history lessons regarding the Bosnian War by Sacco himself, and through Sacco’s dialogue with his translator and confidant, Edin. In one of the history lesson segments, Sacco mentions the UN’s odd desire to stay neutral throughout the conflict, trying very very hard to not pick sides. Ironically, this odd desire is also found in the US, a country seen as the country to liberate the Gorazdans from the conflict. Sacco mentions the UN even goes as far as calling the Srebrenica massacre‘s casualty numbers “exaggerated,” proving that the UN was in the state of denial. Why, you might ask, were the UN would deny the massive amounts of casualties and still insist to have a neutral position in the war?

While doing my literature review for my Art Studies class, I came across an article by a scholar (whose name escapes me at this moment) that pointed out the world’s fascination with the Holocaust. He noticed Holocaust memorials and museums being built around the world and argues that this has been deeply ingrained in today’s society’s collective memory, much like how Santa Claus and consumerism is deeply ingrained in today’s society’s collective memory. The scholar calls this the Holocaust discourse, and explains that the UN’s denial regarding the Srebenica massacre and the UN’s desire to keep a neutral (ie. useless) stance in the war is all because of the Holocaust discourse. The article by the scholar, Andreas Huyssen, focused on the effects of the media has on politics and forgetting, and mainly focused on what he calls the “Americanization of the Holocaust memory” and the usage of the Holocaust as a universal trope for historical/collective trauma. However, according to Huyssen:

It is actually interesting to note how in the case of the organized massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia in the early 1990s, comparisons with the Holocaust were at first fiercely resisted by politicians, the media, […] because of a desire to resist intervention.

Since the United Nations serve to represent the whole world and its states, it is safe to assume that UN’s desire to maintain a neutral stance and let the Serbian nationalists do whatever they feel like doing was a desire shared by most of the world, for fear of another Holocaust. The adherence to remember an event that traumatized the whole world and left it scarred prevented it from preventing a similar occurrence from happening.

When I was first reading Sacco’s book, I had thought that the UN’s desire to maintain a neutral stance made sense and even if the UN-designated safe areas didn’t accomplish anything in the end, the UN reflected its position as a peacekeeper, to maintain peace amidst the chaos of war. But the UN’s denial on the amounts of casualties of the Srebenica massacre and their non-interventionist raises doubts on the UN’s effectiveness in acting as the world’s peacekeeper. Could one argue that during the Bosnian war the UN was simply representing other state’s desire to pursue self-interest and the non-interventionist nature of realism? How is it that the Bosnian war ended with the NATO bombings of Serbian nationalists, or in other words, ended in violence?