bih2

Mostar

I spent three days training journalists in Mostar, a town in the southeast corner of Bosnia. It is unlike any town I have been to so far because tensions are higher. The town is split down the middle roughly along the Neretva river. On the west side, the town is Croat. The Muslim population is on the east bank. In between stood a bridge. That bridge, physically and spiritually has not yet been repaired.

Physically, Mostar is beautiful and ugly. Like all towns in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is built in a valley between high, arid mountains. When I was there it was unmercifully hot and dry. It is known as the hottest city in Bosnia. The mountains, sharp and angular, tend to be barren, with rocks and low scrub cut closely like a crew cut.

Mostar is an old Ottoman town that got it's start when the Sulleiman the Magnificent decided to build a bridge across a steep gorge at the river's narrowest point. A patron of the arts, especially architecture, Sulleiman was responsible for some of the worlds greatest treasures in his empire that stretched from Yemen to Vienna.

The bridge, finally completed in 1566 after 9 years work, was an ascetic and engineering marvel at the time and soon became famous. It's white marble and beautiful arching lines became a symbol for Mostar and later for Bosnia-Herzegovina itself. The town even owes it's name to the bridge: most means bridge in Slavic and Mostar referred to the tenders of the bridge.

But in November of 1993, Mostar was at war. Serbian forces controlled the hills overlooking the city. Croat forces controlled the west bank. There was little military reason for Croat forces to attack the bridge. Muslim defenders tried putting tires and mattresses on the bridge to protect it.

It took 75 tank rounds at point blank range and two days to do it but the old bridge finally fell. In the next year of the war, most the old Turkish town on the east bank, homely medieval looking boxes that are built on top of each other, and old mosques, were systematically destroyed...a cultural cleansing of what had once been a popular tourist attraction. Included in the casualties were a number of notable mosques and a series of 16 century buildings which fell to mortars and sticks of dynamite. European dollars are trying to rebuild the east bank including a reconstruction project for the bridge. The bridges stones were retrieved from the Nevetna and work is slowly progressing.

The bridge was not alone. Many other parts of Mostar were badly damaged during the war but it never was featured much in the western press. Whole blocks of apartment houses stand along streets looking like something out of the firebombing of Dresden in World War II. Sarajevo received most of the attention. But while Sarajevo is peaceful today, tensions are higher in Mostar where the enemies that fought each other now must try to live and work together. The city remains half Bosniak and half Croatian.

Each side still tries to out-do each other in strange little ways....the prayer chants from the mosques are played on a higher volume than you might hear in other cities. The Catholic Croats have erected a giant cross overlooking the city and are building one of the largest church's in the country with the highest bell tower...some think so they can play their bells on high volume.

The people in Mostar seemed less friendly than in other parts of the country. It's a small town and it has that small town feel. But in small towns, people also know who is guilty and who is not. That part of the healing may take longer to reconstruct than the bridge. Thousands of the towns members are still missing from the war and those wounds heal slowly.

While there, I trained both Croat and Muslim journalists. It was a great sign of progress that journalists from both ethnic groups trained together, a first for the town.

But my stay in Mostar was uncomfortable. It was the hottest anyone could remember and quite humid as well. I called the Hotel Ero the "hot box." It had no air conditioning and very little ventilation. Juice was served warm. Fried eggs were served luke warm. Ice in drinks were rationed.

Adding to the general pensive feelings of the town were the nightly light shows in the mountains. Wild fires seemed to spring up from nowhere in the mountains. The fires were ignored but they've cast a dark cloud over the city. Since there are no street lights, you walk in darkened alleys all night with cracks of fire outlining the tops of mountains. It gave the city an unearthly eariness.