"Sarajevo-Tango" -- strip-cartoon by Hermann
Why "Sarajevo-Tango"
The driving force behind this strip cartoon, where the very content goes beyond a mere picture book for entertainment, is indignation. More and more indignation. It tells of the drama experienced by a close friend of Hermann, the author and the instigator.
Held in Sarajevo with his wife and their two children from the start of hostilities, they have been trapped there for 18 months. This friend is Ervin Rustemagic, a publishing agent.
During these 18 months, he has been able to communicate with Hermann, mainly by fax. The messages are often barely legible because of the unstable electricity supply, when the transmissions were not interrupted by power cuts.
The news could be summed up in a few words: shells, mortars, grenades, snipers, fires, ruins, wounds, blood, death, cellars, darkness, hope, despair, women, children, old people, illness, fear, winter, cold, hunger.
What can be done to help Ervin? How can he and his family be spared the madness of the carnage of Sarajevo? It is a question of life and death. It haunted his thoughts, night and day.
At the same time, he discovers the merciless steam roller of human stupidity, denying intelligence, knowing no compassion, crushing victims in Sarajevo, just as millions of others all over the world, whose only fault it is to be born and live in the wrong part of the planet and in our time.
As Hermann went through more and more official (and unofficial) procedures to extricate Ervin Rustemagic and his family from their prison, he generally encountered polite interest or blatant indifference, and when formal promises were made, but not kept, his anger began to rise and ferment.
Compared with the news broadcast by the media, the real day-to-day situation from a reliable source in the heart of the besieged city only served to strengthen his sense of urgency and feelings of impotence. And anger.
Empty words, vain promises; betrayal of commitments, the attitude at the highest levels of the United Nations and among Western heads of state or their representatives can do nothing to hide the policy of "saying nothing and letting them get on with it". Important people - at least in name - close to home were informed and contacted. They made promises, forgot, and turned a deaf ear.
Hermann sent urgent requests to for invention to help Ervin Rustemagic and his family all over the world, but without success. Requests which were usually not treated with the simple honesty or courtesy of a reply, even if it had to be negative.
And while people were dying in Sarajevo every day live on our television screens, between chat shows and football matches, the attention of the general public was ebbing away. Widespread indifference had taken over.
Hermann has the good fortune to be able to give shape to his indignation and anger through writing and drawing. His voice, his weapons, are words and pictures. Ervin and his family have been safe since September 1993, safe at last! Hermann decides not to pass on the story of his friend or an account of their shared disillusionment, but to communicate the disappointment and fury which have never ceased raging within him.
A huge outpouring.
A catharsis.
This is the story of "Sarajevo-Tango".
* The Story
It takes place in Sarajevo. In exchange for a large amount of money, Zvonko Duprez, a former legionnaire now working as a mercenary, attempts to bring a young girl back to her mother in Switzerland.
For odious reasons relating to his inheritance, the wealthy lady's second husband does not want the rescue operation to succeed, and sets a hired assassin on the trail of Duprez.
A tale of adventure unfolds amid the exploding shells and the anonymous and deadly snipers'bullets, against the background of the icy-cold winter and the lack of food and medicines.
This is a case of reality going beyond the realms of fiction.
Sarajevo is here and now. This is the setting for Sarajevo-Tango.There is not much room for sob-stories here, that would be underestimating Hermann. The kid is a real pain, and Duprez only goes to Sarajevo for the money, not out of any noble feelings.
If he carries out his job with cautiousness, boldness and the cynicism and apparent nonchalance of a hardened professional, the idea does come to mind that Hermann may have put something of himself into the character. And in the darkest hours of despair, might he not have contemplated going to extricate his friend with his family from the trap in which they were entangled?
This is not far removed from the stuff of revolutionary pamphlets or diatribe.
The violence of these feelings, fed by months of anxiety, disappointment, powerlessness and stifled rage certainly play an important role in the narrative.
Hermann does not launch an all-out attack. His purpose is to expose the liars who refuse even to admit that there is a problem. His concern is to use the fury of his pencil to pinpoint the real culprits of the failure to offer succour to people in danger, who thus become accessories to murder.
The artist caricatures the senior officials of the United Nations with acerbic irony, showing each of them comfortably housed in a huge block of cheese, in which each has carved out his own hole. This is intended to represent the famous steel and glass building on the bank of the East River in New York.
As for the blue berets in UNPROFOR, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea in a real-life mission impossible, literally paralysed by the eternal evasiveness and subterfuges of the decision-makers, Hermann gives them distinctly Smurf-like berets, a symbol of his impression of the pointlessness of the token interventions by the UN in the war-torn former Yugoslavia.
* About the author
Hermann is one of the most renowned comic strip authors in Europe.
Over the last thirty years, his books have been read by countless thousands of readers, translated into many different languages and published worldwide.He has often condemned injustice, the folly of mankind, the unquenchable thirst for power.
This is the case in the "Jeremiah" series, in which most of the eighteen titles deal with the thirst for power and the abuses this engenders. You can also read other works by Hermann about the hidden control exerted by certain powers over the politics of some countries in Missi Vandisandi.
There is no lack of subjects, with the entire planet rocked by armed conflict. There is bloodshed everywhere, crimes go unpunished, assassins and their accomplices can arrogantly sit untroubled alongside those in power. The words "ethnic cleansing" and all the horror they convey have become banal to the point of nausea.
Hermann expresses and condemns this in all its forms in his work which already includes sixty books.
