Ten employees of Charlie Hebdo were murdered on Wednesday simply because they were doing their job: expressing their beliefs. Along with religious, French and world topics, Hebdo was also covering the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Number 29, January 13th 1993.
The caricature from January 1993 points out at raping issue in B&H. The picture shows a soldier raping numerous women.
Tired of crimes, he uses a famous motto from the demonstrations in 1969 which refers to the “Resistance to the infernal norms of production” implying that he “rapes more than he can”.
Ironically and strongly, Charlie Hebdo refers to the reports coming from B&H talking about mass rapes committed by the members of the Army of Republic of Srpska.
Number 127, November 30st 1994
One month before Christmas 1994, the 127th edition of the Charlie was published showing a shocking caricature of a shop-window with parts of human bodies.
Beyond the window it is written “Toys” while the boy standing with his mother is pointing his finger to the shop saying “This is exactly what I wanted from the Santa”.
This number of Charlie was published during the shopping fever period in Paris so that carefree French citizens could see how a shop in Bosnia looks like and what the children could expect – nothing but the biggest horrors of the war.
Number 212, July 10th 1996
Three days after the first excavations of first mass graves in Srebrenica and its vicinity began, all under the jurisdiction of the ICTY, Charlie Hebdo published this edition. Its front page had a very unusual caricature.
At the picture there is a tourist with a pig’s nose lying on a freshly excavated mass grave in the sand. Above it there is a motto taken from the student demonstrations in France from 1969: “Under the pavement there is a beach”.
It’s a satiric metaphor. The students threw stone blocks at the police under which there was sand back then. Raising the stone symbolically meant raising the ‘poor society’ underneath which lies liberation represented by the sand.
Charlie Hebdo used the famous French metaphor in the case of Srebrenica where, underneath an apparent liberation there is death – a mass grave.
(Source: Klix)
