Heather Roberson

This is a must-read for anyone who read Joe Sacco's tale of war in the former Yugoslavia, "Safe Area Gorazde". "Macedonia" is the chronicle not of war in the Balkans, but the tenuous job of preventing armed conflict in an ethnically diverse Balkan state. Told through the point of view of an American graduate student, we follow her progress in trying to uncover how Macedonia has kept the peace. That this country has managed to keep the peace is surprising, as her visit finds Macedonia rife with ignorance and mistrust between the ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians. If I could change anything about this book, it would be for the artist to give us more panoramic views of the country in bigger splash panels.… (meer)

http://nhw.livejournal.com/980610.html

This is the story of peace activist Heather Roberson, who went there in the summer of 2003 to find out how the 2001 conflict had been prevented from escalating into another full-scale Balkan war, and acquired an obsession to match my own. She and Pekar portray well her fascination with this paradoxical, contradictory country, exploring Skopje and Tetovo with excursions to Belgrade and Pristina, and I found much to agree with - the curious mixture of paranoia and pessimism which otherwise enlightened individuals sometimes display; the Hotel Ambasador and the Irish Pub in Skopje, the Hotel Moskva in Belgrade, the attitudes of the international officials involved with the local process. Indeed, one or two of the internationals depicted are people I know - mostly identifiable because of the positions they hold, though they are not named and their physical appearance in the book is quite different in real life. One particularly impressive character, who oddly enough has just renewed contact with me via Facebook and LinkedIn, is given a completely different profession in the book to real life but is none the less clearly recognisable to anyone who has met him.

I'm not sure how interesting the book would be to people who don't share the same level of fascination with the country as me and Roberson. It's very text-heavy in places, with an awful lot of background information needed to set her experiences in context (though it seemed to me mostly accurate, with only one or two points where my eyebrows rose in disagreement). Her basic paradigm, that conflicts can be resolved through application of the rule of law, is quite a complex area to explore through the medium of the graphic novel and it's not quite clear what her conclusion actually is, once she has seen her idealistic propositions tested in practice. Also, I'm not sure that she and Pekar quite manage to communicate the sheer charm of the country and its people of all ethnicities; I think the casual reader may end up being rather surprised or sceptical that she likes the country as much as she says she does. And there were a number of annoying errors in the Macedonia/Serbian phrases and street signs shown.

It may not be up to the standards of Safe Area Goražde, but it is nonetheless a fine effort, and certainly would be good reading for anyone thinking of getting involved in Balkan politics these days.… (meer)