Mostar - Minot State University



Mostar

“You see just here to the right,” my driver said. “This was Muslim village. Completely destroyed. There is back of Mosque in that pile of rubble.” The rear section of the dome remained intact, its sacred interior presented in still sillouette near the hilltop, before the eastern sun.

Most of the villages we saw while driving from Dubrovnik, pearl city of the Adriatic, on route through the mountainous interior of Bosnia-Hercegovina, were likewise destroyed. Mostar, my destination, is no different. In this post-war world, broken stone structures now serve as museum pieces for a civilization that just a few years ago, busted its main spring. Amid this rubble, people go on living. Yet like their structures, something too remains broken or stilled in them.

The crisis began here in 1991, when first Slovenia and then Croatia declared its independence from the remnant communist Yugoslavia, dominated politically, economically, and militarily by Serbs and from the Serbian capital city, Belgrade. As a result of the Slovenian and Croatian votes of independence, the Serbs tried military action, first against the Slovenes, and then against Croatia. Since the Serbs controlled the war machine built up by Tito, former dictator of Yugoslavia, this presumably seemed a reasonable means by which to ensure that the Yugoslav Republic remained intact and under Serbian leadership. Seeing its own vulnerability as a lone target for Serbian aggression, the region of Bosnia-Hercegovina, populated mostly by Bosnian Muslims, with a strong Bosnian Serb minority and a lesser Bosnian-Croat minority, also declared its independence from Belgrade.

The Slovenes were organized and well armed from the beginning, however, so the Serbs turned towards unprepared Croatia. Regular Federal troops of the Serbian controlled Yugoslav army worked with paramilitary groups comprised of extreme Serbian nationalists and local Serbs in Croatia to wage war there. The paramilitary groups set up artillery positions on high mountaintops overlooking strategically located Croatian villages, then reigned terror and havoc down upon the local Croat populations. When it was safe, they entered the villages to clean up. This action pitted Serbian against Croatian neighbor. The rape, murder, mutilation and torture that occurred boggle the mind, even more so when considering that often, the victims grew up with those who victimized them, went to the same markets, showed their produce and sheep at the same provincial fairs.

One farmer who lives in the Croatian village of Pokupsca told of how the Serbs rounded up nine of his neighbors who had not heeded the warning to leave their homes. When the paramilitary Serbs arrived, the local Serbs helped bound their neighbors hand to hand and staked them to a barn. Each of the nine individuals was then gutted, and their entrails were wrapped around their necks. Such acts were not undertaken entirely without reason. They left a message of terror, so that without unnecessary expenditure of shells and ammunition, native populations who happened to be of the wrong ethnic group might very clearly get the message that it was time to leave their villages. But Croats eventually began to fight the Serbs instead, and repulsed the Serbian advance into Croatian territory. Likewise in Bosnia-Hercogovina to the south, Croatian Army regulars, Croatian paramilitary groups, Bosnian Muslims, and Bosnian Croats eventually combined forces to also drive the Serbs out of key areas. Then the international community stepped in.

The Vance-Owen Peace Accord of 1992 ended the Serbian aggression in Croatia. It also set up geographical enclaves for Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats in Bosnia-Hercegovina. These enclaves were to be portioned according to the percentage of each population living in the region. Unfortunately, the Vance-Owen Accord also caused problems. By designating these enclaves according to ethnic groups, despite the fact that the individual people who constituted such groups lived in different parts of Bosnia-Hercegovina, and by not drawing absolutely fixed lines on the map for these enclaves, it helped create a new war within the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Croats, who had fought with the Muslims against the Serbs, now started fighting the Muslims for territory, and while former allies were pitted against one another, the opportunistic Serbs continued their military press upon the Bosnian and Herzegovin people and land.

The Dayton Peace Accord of 1995 stopped these wars by drawing definite lines on the map in Bosnia-Hercegovina, giving 51% of the territory to the Croats and the Bosnians, and 49% to the Serbs. It also established United Nations military, legal, and economic oversight of the region. The SFOR Stabilization force remains in place throughout Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, as elsewhere around the Balkans. In Bosnia-Herzogovina especially, SFOR troops roam the streets with weapons, its helicopters flying overhead and its various bases of operations sandbagged, barb-wired, and on guard. Under United Nations mandate, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), headed by the American diplomat Robert Beecroft, monitors elections, facilitates political meetings, educates journalists in objectivity, and keeps a watch for human rights violations throughout the warring regions of these Balkan states. The Office of the Higher Representative (OHR), a position now held by an Austrian, Wolfgang Petritsch, oversees the entire region. The Representative has authority to take whatever actions he deems necessary to secure and build the peace. But that will not be easy. There is much that cannot be forgotten on all sides, and by all accounts, without the presence of the SFOR, the peace would not hold.

The city of Mostar experienced both wars in Bosnia-Hercegovina, one after the other. Serbs pummeled the city from the mountaintops, destroying nearly all of the buildings. Afterwards, the Croats, who generally live on one side of the river, fought street by street with the Muslims, who generally live on the other. As a result of wartime political rhetoric on television and radio, each had come to fear the other, and at the same time, the Croats, Serbian-style, tried to wrest territory from the Muslims. Yet as is so often the case in war, all of that fear and ambition did nothing but leave destruction in its wake. And while the war is over, even the air here seems to remain in conflict. Four times daily the strangely poetic song of the muzza calls all of Islam to prayer from the megaphones perched high up on the four minarets by the mosques. The hypnotic song of the muzza is countered by the hourly clanging of bells ringing out from all of the Croatian Catholic churches. Each sounds the voice of its people, whose national, ethnic, and spiritual will are combined and strong, even when nothing else in town remains so.

Five years after the imposed peace, as much as one fifth of Mostar remains completely destroyed. Virtually every city building is pocked with hundreds and thousands of holes from artillery shells, shrapnel, and small arms fire. Graffitti is everywhere. “Muslim area,” is written on one shelled out building, and “this is a bad street,” appears in black letters on the side of a building where entire blocks and neighborhoods stand destroyed. Structures once serving as homes to tens of thousands of people are now homes only to bats and pigeons, to ownerless dogs who nose through the rubble and fetid debris, and to furtive gypsies, who live in all of the dark corners of this part of the world. Were anyone looking for a message, these structures might serve as testament to all that can go wrong in society. But I am not sure anyone is yet looking, despite these structures, and despite the fact that even in the viable neighborhoods, old men and women dig through the trash that piles up in the streets, hoping to find something to eat. Eventually, someone sets fire to these piles before they grow too high. No city agency is able to regularly collect the garbage. Likewise, the rules of law and order have broken down here.

“I have very messy work in Mostar,” an undertaker told me as we sat in a small garden area where coffee and drinks are served. “So when I am not working, I always come here and drink.” What life war once claimed is now the plaything of organized crime, he told me, and by lunchtime, he was already on his fifth glass of grappa. Perhaps he speaks the truth. Just last week, SFOR troops, using tanks, guns, and helicopters, took control of the Croatian bank in Mostar. Its assets are now confiscated, and the political party with which it is affiliated has been banned by order of the Office of the Higher Representative. Misappropriations, schetchy bookeeping, criminal influences, and missing funds gave the OHR its warrant for the military operation. Yet Croats throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina feel that the bank was set-up by the OHR, whom they are sure wants to eliminate Croatian nationalists throughout the region as a political expediency. In the face of such actions, Croatian radio warns, armed conflict may very well again be on the horizon. Croatians, it adds, will not be denied their democratic rights, at any cost. But what really is there left to fight about?

There is no functioning economy left in Mostar. Nearly all of the infrastructure and all of the means by which to produce an economy were destroyed by the wars. There is only coffee, the black market, grappa, and lots of time. Any work that gets done here is the result of humanitarian aid, funneled into the city by Swedes, Finns, Danes, and Americans. None of this work generates real profit. It just keeps things going. Further, a great many people living in Mostar do so without electricity, and without paying rent. They are refugees from the countryside whose lives elsewhere were destroyed. They live in the apartments of those we are now dead, or in ones that belonged to Muslims and Croats who were living on the wrong side of the river before the war. And no office or agency knows who owns what anymore. “My house is over the river” one man told me, “and a Muslim lives there now. I can see him from the old bridge.” That bridge—an old medieval masterpiece of engineering—was destroyed by Croats to serve as the symbol of their desire to cleanse themselves of anything Muslim.

And why not? One young man with whom I spoke came home to his village to find that Muslims had cut off his father’s head and his mother’s hands. The Bosnian military commander who had ordered that particular assault appeared in yesterday’s newspaper from Sarajevo, the young man stammered, showing me the photograph of a man who had just been appointed to a high government position. “We have the proof, but the war crimes people do not want to hear it.” “How can they?” my contact in Mostar, a Mr Menix, later asked me. Menix, who is nominated as Bosnian-Hercegovinan Ambassador to Holland, added that “such things must be overlooked now. If we start blaming people for the war, everyone will go to jail.” Better just to forget.

And indeed, it seems as if most citizens of Mostar do what they can to overlook the world in which they live, one way or another. Whether that is the same as forgetting is another story. War, it is said, often mutes the sensibilities of those who have experienced it. Others it makes hilarious. Much of Mostar’s youth have thus become particularly full of forgetful hilarity. When night falls, they step out of the shadows by the thousands into the lights of the bars and cafes, wearing the latest in Italian fashions, being young, beautiful, full of laughter, and free, so free. Music pulses from the scores of cafes and bars, and to its rhythms these young and beautiful people parade en masse and in high feather from café to bar to café. Later, they will make their lone way into battered apartment complexes where the lights are off and where others sleep in huddles on the floor.

Life has become for the youth of Mostar a kind of theater, a parade of the moment. They come out to the cafes both to see and to be seen. Yet they are always a little nervous, and constantly fidget with their stylish outfits, holding desperately to a kind of idea of immaculate perfection, perhaps, whose definition seems very much to depend on those outfits. If so, it is an idea that only lives on the high boulevards. It cannot stand up to the gritty and pervasive rubble of the surrounding streets. Yet how else should life be lived, they might ask, if ever they formulated such questions. There may be no tomorrow, and if it occurs, will there be anything about it that is different from what we already avoid today? Better to be beautiful, not think about things, and dance. Not everyone, however, lives the high and hilarious life in Mostar. There are also the many muted ones, those who drudge through the day, little trace of emotion on their faces, living as if lost someplace where no one goes.

Mr. Menix and I had a lunch of lamb kebabs and turkish coffee between the meetings that had brought me to Mostar in the first place. People moved up and down on the hot stone streets. A group of children ran back and forth, laughing and kicking a ball past each other and against the buildings. Women of various ages, homemakers, walked along from small shop to shop, plastic satchels caught in the crutch of their elbows, buying here cabbage, there tomatoes, elsewhere veal or lamb for kebabs. Groups of thin, unshaven men leaned against the walls, talking and smoking in the sun. I particularly noticed a young woman across the way, standing in the shade, her body half hid behind a wall, her one hand placed upon the flat of the wall to the side of her, by her face. She had stood like that for at least the twenty or so minutes that Menix and I had been having lunch. Her one visible eye never broke from its gaze down the road.

The young woman reminded me of several other people whom I had seen in the past few days. One man stared from the third floor of a completely destroyed apartment building. Nothing was left—no windows, no interior walls--just the concrete stairs spanning from floor to empty floor, exposed to the winds. Yet he stared out over the edge, and did not move. And an old woman in black dress and scarf counted her rosary beads while sitting on the corner of a cobbled crossroad, never looking up during all of the many times that I passed her through the course of a day. “Perhaps she is waiting for someone,” I ventured, after Menix noticed me staring at the young woman. He paused, laughed, and said yes, maybe so. “Or perhaps she is waiting for God.”

Whoever it is for whom she waits, I do not think he will come very soon.

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