Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995

Safe Area is not just a catalogue of horrors and a condemnation of international indifference; it's also a moving portrayal of the human capacity to endure almost any hardship. Sacco refuses to fall into any clichés about the triumph of the human spirit here--the people of Gorazde themselves reject such notions--but he does offer up Safe Area as a testament to its survival. --Peter Darbyshire, Amazon.ca

Reader Reviews:

Disappointing (4/23 people found this helpful)

I was eager to read this book, as I love the idea of the graphic novel applied to history, and this format worked brilliantly in Maus (a graphic novel about the Holocaust). Unfortunately, this book copies a lot from Maus but it just doesn't succeed. Similar to Maus, the story is told through an interviewer who is also a character in the story, and the victims recount their experiences in an authentic-style broken English. Unfortunately, in this book there is too much focus on the writer's personal experiences and personality, which I found dull, and the coverage of the other events in the story is also relatively flat. On the positive side, the depictions of the actual political events (using maps, etc.) were very well done; unfortunately this only comprised a few pages and did not make up for the weakness of the rest of the book.

Whatever happened to "never again"? (11/12 people found this helpful)

While graphic novels have been around for quite a while, graphic journalism or history has not. Sacco is a pioneer of this extremely humanistic new genre, and here he bears witness to the horrors of the war in Bosnia. Sacco visited the so-called "safe area" four times in late 1995 and early 1996, and his portrait of a devastated city and its survivors is more affecting than any newspaper account could hope to be. His black ink panels capture in vivid detail not only the scars left on the landscape, but on the people themselves. Sacco alternates between detailing his own visits to Gorazde, a straightforward history of the war, and letting his friends and interviewees recount their own terrible experiences.

His own visits are fairly basic, everyone is frightened and devastated by the war and he experiences the guilt of one able to come and go as he pleases. The history of the war is very clearly told, with maps and pertinent statements from UN leaders, Clinton, Milosavich, et al. Sacco clearly highlights how ineffective and downright cowardly the UN approach was, singling out British Lt. General Rose and French Lt. General Janvier for lying and dissembling in order to avoid conflict, and the Clinton administration for being inept and vacillating toward the Serbs. The history is a stark reminder that in the absence of a superpower with a vested interest, one cannot expect loose multinational efforts to deter genocide. Throughout the war, due to a total lack of leadership and moral will from above, UN forces were pushed around, held hostage, and at times fled into the night rather than protect the civilians they were supposed to. Which brings one to the most compelling and disturbing parts of the book. Sacco supplies images to the testimonials of survivors and witnesses to execution, rape, nonstop civilian shelling, snipers, and even poison gas. Most of the voices from Gorazde are those of Muslim inhabitants or refugees "cleansed" from other areas, and while the stories are chilling enough, what also disturbs is the confusion and pain these people feel because in many cases, it was their former Serb neighbors who participated in it.

Sacco's artistic style may not be to everyone's taste, and certainly this is only a slice of the larger war, but he bears witness and hopefully makes the reader more conscious of the failings of leadership in preventing what was supposed to be "never again." American loves to pat itself on the back for kicking ass in the "good war" against the Nazis, but somehow we've managed to avoid any responsibility for allowing genocide to continue, even when it's been clearly within our ability to do so.

if you have a brain and a heart buy this book (7/8 people found this helpful)

This book manages to make history and current events real in a way that CNN etc will never manage. Sacco populates his book with real people who survive the most God-awful experiences possible with humour and hope. Even the characters who appear but briefly are so strongly drawn that you care about what happens to them. The honesty of the writing is on a par with the likes of journalists like John Pilger and it is almost a shame that this has been produced in a comic strip format because it will put of those readers who hold the strange prejudice that comics are for children.

If you buy this don't just keep it to yourself, share it with the people you care about who care about the world. This will make them understand the human cost of ignoring ethnic cleansing.

The Balkan War as you've never seen it: in personal terms. (9/9 people found this helpful)

What can I say about this book? It's incredible. When I started reading, I have to admit to being a bit disappointed. Sacco was going round, meeting people, socialising, not saying a lot about the war, and when he did mention it, it was all stuff I already knew, that anyone who's watched the news while it was going on knows. The backdrops indicated the war, the poverty was obvious, but I didn't feel like I was learning anything apart from seeing people sit around, drink, and chat. And then, about a third of the way through, boom. Suddenly it hit me. These people, I was starting to feel like I knew them. And then one left for the front line. And I was terrified to turn the page. I knew that he might not come back. And that this was a real man, not some work of fiction. And it was at that point, that the whole cruel, callousness of the war hit, and at that point, I started to learn something. Detail. Detail I'd never seen before, and might have been happier never knowing. And told by humans, real people. And it still terrifies me. This book has the potted history of the war, the enclave, and the human factor that we miss in so many, many of the war reports we're used to seeing. Sacco spent four weeks in Gorazde, and in that time he lived with some of the residents. And it's given him an insight into the place that I don't think you'll find anywhere else.

Oh, and a final note. It's a graphic novel. A comic. And this shouldn't put you off. This is one of the finest uses of the medium I've seen, and helps tell the story in a way straight prose can't. The horror presented starkly in front of you is something I doubt many can imagine, even through the greatest descriptions, because we don't want to. Here you have nowhere to hide. Buy this book. You will not regret it.

Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995

Joe Sacco

Editorial Review:

Reader Reviews:

Disappointing (4/23 people found this helpful)

Whatever happened to "never again"? (11/12 people found this helpful)

if you have a brain and a heart buy this book (7/8 people found this helpful)

The Balkan War as you've never seen it: in personal terms. (9/9 people found this helpful)

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