A case study The representation of genocide and the

592
European Journal of International Relations 23(3)
cleansing’. Adopting a humanitarian responsibility position that sought to bridge between genocide and Balkan representations of the war, Western governments deployed the peacekeeping operation UNPROFOR and promoted a series of peace plans between 1992 and 1995. After the July 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the so-called safe area of Srebrenica, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO) undertook Operation Deliberate Force and Richard Holbrooke negotiated a settlement with the three parties in Dayton, Ohio.
Sarajevo Tango
Sarajevo Tango might at first seem like a routine comics performance the format is the standard Franco-Belgium album, published in colour, on glossy paper and the French- language version in hardcover by Belgium comics heavyweight Dupuis. It was published in nine languages with a print-run of 75,000 copies, including 600 in a deluxe edition.
6
These numbers testify to the prominent status of its creator, Hermann, one of the leading figures on the Belgian comics scene since the late s. Hermann is the drawer of popular series, including the western Comanche and the action-adventure Bernard Prince, and the drawer and writer of the acclaimed The Towers of Bois-Maury and post-apoca- lyptic Jeremiah. Yeti Sarajevo Tango was in crucial respects an unusual comics performance. Published in the autumn of 1995, it opens with a page-long written Comment dated 10 July, the day before the massacre at Srebrenica. Ambiguously part and not part of the album, such explanatory openings are unusual outside of the genres of graphic journalism and autobiography. Written in the summer of 1995, Hermann’s text provides a strong articulation of the genocide discourse that had been voiced by journalists, artists and part of Western media since 1992 (Hansen, 2006: 179–210). The international community whose leading representatives showed a genuine sympathy for the killers
— is condemned by Hermann for its unwillingness to stop the Serbs from repeated slaughter and running concentration camps This discourse becomes personalized as
Hermann describes the fate of his agent in Sarajevo, Ervin Rustemagic, who got trapped in the Bosnian capital when the war began and whose mother was murdered outside her nursing home. As another unusual performance, Sarajevo Tango opens with along list of politicians and representatives from international institutions and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who have received copies of Sarajevo Tango. Through the opening text and the account of the targeted distribution of the comics, Hermann is practising Sarajevo Tango as an uncommonly political album with an explicit intertex- tual connection to contemporary events.
Moving into the drawn pages, Sarajevo Tango illustrates aptly how subjectivities and atrocities can be represented through the medium of comics. Sarajevo Tango unfolds along two intersecting narratives a fictive story and the Bosnian War. The fictive story follows Zvonko Duprez, a former member of the French Foreign Legion, who is being paid by a wealthy Swiss woman, Sylvia, to go to Sarajevo to retrieve her daughter, Maja, who has been kidnapped by her father, Sylvia’s ex-husband. As Zvonko runs through the snow on the book’s last pages carrying Maja to the safety of an armoured United Nations UN) vehicle leaving the city, Maja loses her stuffed rabbit. Returning to retrieve it,
Zvonko is shot dead, presumably by Serb snipers. While narrating this story, Sarajevo

Hansen
593
Tango uses recurring wordless panels to quote events, institutions and scenery that, by
1995, would be familiar to Western readers massacres at the Sarajevo marketplace, shelling of apartment buildings, snipers shooting civilians and cramped hospital quarters. In terms of narrative pace, the story of Zvonko is that of a sequence of events, whereas the story of the Bosnian War is one of repetition of Serbian violence and the failure of the international community.
Focusing more closely on the constitution of the Serbian subject, Hermann adopts a number of techniques. The first is to use the medium of drawing to homogenize and radicalize. In Figure 1 (reproduced in colour in the online version of this article, we are looking directly at a row of square-faced, empty-eyed soldiers marching towards us. The words First there was Vukovar.. then Dubrovnik …’ mark them as Serbian as these are the places of atrocities inflicted by Serbian troops during the Croatian War that preceded the one in Bosnia. This visual construction of identity effectively works to constitute Serbian Otherness through brutality, inhumanity and the lack of individuality as each soldier seems hard to distinguish from the next. The menacing appearance and absence of differentiation can also be seen as evoking a particular construction of military hyper- masculinity as disciplined, yet lacking the humanity of a more just warrior (Duncanson,
2009; Elshtain, Another technique used by Hermann is to quote — or remediate — iconic photographs most strikingly in Figure 1 (Hansen, 2015; Hariman and Lucaites, 2007). The panel taking up the lower half is based on a photograph by Ron Haviv (see Figure 2; reproduced in colour in the online version of this article. The intended verisimilitude is so strong that Haviv’s copyright is noted underneath. Haviv’s iconic photo, into which
Hermann had added Then others in the top-left corner, is from the first days of war in Bosnia in early April 1992, from the town of Bijeljina, showing members of ‘Arkan’s’ elite unit The Tigers This invests Hermann’s drawing — and Sarajevo Tango — with an element of realism, for example, through the detailed reproduction of the clothing of the three victims and the body postures of the three soldiers. Yet, Hermann’s image elaborates on the original photo, heightening the degree of destruction with bombed-out houses and burning doors added and blood pouring into the foreground from a source outside the frame By 1995, when Sarajevo Tango came out, the use of Haviv’s image is temporally significant in dating the atrocities as having gone on for more than three years, thus underscoring that the international community has immorally stood by watching genocide unfold.
The constitution of the Serbs as undifferentiated cyborg killers is one side of their subjectivity. The other side is that of an unruly, primitive, barbaric identity that lacks control, a theme personified in ‘Isteriko’, an unkempt, smoking, drinking weekend
Chetnik’ sniper who comes down from Belgrade on Fridays. In Figure 3 (reproduced in colour in the online version of this article, the temporal constitution of this subject is accomplished as the windshield mirror look at the drunken Serbian snipers shifts to a depiction of medieval barbarians, a decapitated head added to the scene. The move from seeing the group framed by the windshield mirror to a direct, unframed image leaves an ambiguity as to whether this is Zvonko’s subjective, personal view, or whether it is
Hermann informing us of an essential Serbian subject whose origin goes back centuries. In the final panel, Dave, a journalist, asks Zvonko if the barbarians disgust you Here,

594
European Journal of International Relations 23(3)
the text is, in fact, superfluous as the representation of barbarism has been established through the preceding panel. As a discourse on the Bosnian War, this resonates with the variation of the genocide discourse that situated Serbian responsibility with ancient identity rather than modern nationalism (Hansen, 2006: The critique of the international community is visually enhanced by the use of satire, caricature and metaphors. As Hall (2014: 228) points out, those using satire intend to make their audience angry, uncomfortable, discontented, restless or irritated with the subject of the satire. The warnings extended from the UN to the Bosnian Serbs are

Download 1.29 Mb.

Share with your friends: