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Published: September 29th 2005
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The Beautiful Neretva River
View of Mostar from the riverside restaurants....complete with smoke from the cevapcici stands in the corner Whatever her sister Croatia was lacking in personality, Bosnia made up for tenfold. The sayings that “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” and that conflict breeds character serve to explain why this last of my Balkan sisters was not only the most controversial, but also the most interesting as well.
Though I had been easily mesmerized by the physical beauty of Croatia, it was about on par with Tijuana or Cancun in offering any sort of memorable cultural insight and I was thirsting for real inspiration. In addition, my EU area tourist visa was due to expire soon and the border patrols failed to even look at my passport upon entry into Croatia, let alone to stamp it (the underlying reason behind this whole trip!) So I started flipping through my excursion options from the Dalmatian coast and settled on a foray into the neighbor to the east after reading a picturesque little commentary on the town of Mostar.
But despite the quaintness of that description, I couldn’t help forming some less-than-stellar expectations in my mind. Images of ugliness, dreariness, and an overall tenebrous atmosphere dominated my thoughts, and I reminded myself that I could come back as
Mostar Gymnasium
The scars of the past on the city high school soon as I got my little stamp if it was horrible. However, as I boarded the bus, the bright rays of sunshine wiped out any hint of gloom from the sky, as if the heavens themselves were scoffing at me, giving me notice with a sly wink that this little sidetrip was to be so much more than just a visa run.
Immediately upon entering Bosnia, I was enchanted by the landscapes....climbing steadily through the white-tipped mountains with wild greenery in the valleys, it seemed to be an untouched paradise. With the sky sporting a shade of blue I can honestly say I have never seen before - almost a neon, Crayola box color - I was momentarily swept off my feet, so to say.
Of course, it is anything but untouched, and the illusion of an idyllic nature wonderland was broken with the first of the old stone houses I saw along the road. As with many more to come along the road from the border to Mostar, the roofs were blown off, the windows broken, the interior reclaimed by plants and trees that now took the place of couches and kitchens. And the realization of the
dangerous nature of that landscape became clear....an explorative hike through the landmine-ridden fields would be an invitation to death or dismemberment.
When we reached Medugoraje, a Catholic pilgrimage site, the bus emptied out, and I was the only passenger left on the bus -- a circumstance which only served to heighten the sense of eeriness I felt. I began to wonder where on earth I was going as the bus driver and I continued our slow trek through the winding mountain roads alone. When we finally descended into the valley below and navigated through the city streets towards the bus station, however, I realized that it is actually quite a touristed city. I was met at the bus station by a girl who offered accommodation and was driven to the apartment by her mother, who pointed out buildings in the city and their past and present functions along the way.
I had a hard time really concentrating, however, as the shocking images I was witnessing invoked in me feelings that I am having an extremely difficult time verbalizing. Passing over the river into the western half of town, we crossed the former front line of the 1992-1993 fighting,
The Old Turkish Quarter
Rebuilt and thriving with tourists nowadays where the carcasses of former houses, schools, and businesses haunt your imagination with the horror that took place here. Former conservatories are left crumbling, the greatness of centuries-old Turkish architecture has been reduced to rubble, the stately Austro-Hungarian style high school and apartment buildings are still pockmarked with the scars of gunfire.
Realizing how unprepared I was for what I was witnessing, I read through a concise history of the city and the country before setting out on foot to have a look around. The long history of division dates back to 395 AD when Bosnia became the division point of the Roman empire from the Byzantine Empire, but this was just one of many divisions to come. The Turks took over and held power in the area for about 400 years, and the country marked the division point of the Christian and Islamic worlds before the Austro-Hungarians seized control. After reading about the long and rich history on the fault line between opposing forces, perhaps it should come as no surprise that a city where east and west meet is still divided today, with the predominantly Catholic Croats residing on the west side of the river and the
Along the front lines
Austro-Hungarian building taken over by plant life Bosniak Muslims occupying the eastern side of town.
But to be able to understand how that division, along with the simultaneous "ethnic cleansing" Bosnian Serb movements throughout the country, could instigate the Croats to siege and destroy the Muslim quarter of the city is somehow incomprehensible to me. I was only 13 years old when the fighting here broke out, and really remember Bosnia more as a buzzword of regional turmoil than having any actual knowledge of what was going on or why it started. But seeing the immense cemeteries, with stone after stone after stone showing date of death: 1993, I was overcome with sadness, with fear, with terror, particularly as I saw a grave marker showing the same year of birth as mine. I started thinking about how arbitrary it is that you are born in one country or another, that whether you are rich or poor, whether you exist in an environment of stability or chaos, whether you live with freedom to practice your religion or voice your political dissent, and sometimes, whether you live or die, largely depends on where you happen to come into the world.
It shocked me that, 12 years after
Timelessness
These stone buildings in the Turkish quarter were renovated after the war, but still seem to maintain an untouched medieval appearance the big shelling of 93, these gaping beasts were still standing in the same form they must have been in over a decade ago -- with jagged broken windows like the sharp teeth of a hungry wolf waiting to devour us, always looming in the background as a reminder of the fragility of life. I wondered why these buildings were still standing, if it didn't serve as constant salt in the wounds of everyone who had lost a family member, friend, limb, or home in the ordeal -- why wouldn't they bulldoze them?
And yet, when I saw children playing tag in the park under the shadow of one of these ugly multi-story monsters -- children who were born after the war -- I thought it was also a good education for the next generation. For these children, with the curiosity of all youth, must at some point ask why these buildings look that way. The scary, or rather suspenseful, moment in that seeking of knowledge is the answer that is given them. On the one hand, it could serve to foster more hatred, if children are told that the reason for this destruction was because of "them", creating
a division between humans based on religion once again. On the other hand, the utter pointlessness and horrible nature of war could be emphasized and parents could foster a feeling of unity, a love for humanity, and tolerance in their children. It made me curious as to the current sentiment running beneath the surface…of peace beyond the tourist souvenirs…of life walking past these memorials everyday.
My answers were to come, but not until I had contemplated more on my own.... What is it that drives us as humans to hate? What can possess us strongly enough to make us believe that we are justified in taking the life of another? Why do we divide ourselves into "us v. them" camps? Why do we see differences as dangerous instead of as the spice that keeps us interesting despite all our similarities?
I paid a visit to the Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose film highlights the elegant Stari Most bridge, which arched over the jade green Neretva River, and its former bridge-jumping contests, where local boys would take the 21 meter plunge in front of applauding audiences on the banks below. Aerial footage from 1984, presumably used for the
Stari Most
Mostar's famous bridge that was reconstructed in July 2004 showcasing of the country's highlights as host of the Winter Olympics that year, gives the viewer a sense of how absolutely amazing this city was before the carnage of the nineties. Home video captures the shelling and destruction of the Stari Most on November 8 and 9, 1993 and also shows the skeletons of the buildings (many of which still look the same today minus the now swept-up debris) after this storm of gunfire. The film goes on to show the later efforts to remove the remains of the bridge from the river, its reconstruction, and the new bridge’s inauguration in July last year.
If I hadn’t been a full-fledged pacifist before, I definitely am now. Seeing the bullet-ridden schools, the gravestones of 8-year old children, the videos of the shelling and a teenage boy running through a bombed-out building with the sheer terror of someone literally running for his life -- it made me feel fear and horror. I was on the verge of tears contemplating the atrocities these people had seen and experienced. What a strange sensation -- seeing with my own eyes how war can destroy a city, how savage and brutal it really is. And
yet at the same time I see how resilient the human spirit is: how life goes on, how we find a way to pick ourselves up from the ashes and start over again.
I really couldn't make sense of the conflict, however, neither in Mostar itself nor in Bosnia at large, so I was lucky to have met Ned and Miedl. I was fumbling at expressing myself in the internet cafe and needed a break to think, and Ned invited me to have a coffee with the staff in the next room. He’s from Sarajevo and runs a number of these language and informatics schools. His friend Miedl was there visiting him and was trying to get up the nerve to ask the girl Sonja out for a drink. It snapped me into real life again: of course these people have gone on with their 'normal' lives -- they spend their time thinking about work and romantic interests and everyday things, not war and destruction. But they were nice enough to share their experiences with me when I requested relief from my ignorance, so this is their story.
Ned and Miedl grew up in Sarajevo, which, despite being
Standing ruins
View of Mostar from the hill east of the city a communist country, was quite tolerant of all religions, with a synagogue, mosque, Catholic cathedral, and Orthodox church all within a stone’s throw of each other in the city center. As Miedl explained to me, although Yugoslavia was communist, there was a liberal element to it: one could still move up the ranks within a company and people practiced their religions during these times as well -- you just would never get top-level positions if you chose to do so. However, in general they were pretty satisfied until the corruption got to be extreme and the war for independence brought about a separate state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1992, Ned and Miedl were teenagers, 17- & 18-year olds playing basketball outside their school when they saw a peculiar sight: army tanks rolling down the street. As any curious teenagers who had never seen tanks in real life rolling down the street in their peace-loving hometown, they all gathered around to examine the strange new attraction in town. Two days later, however, their curiosity turned to sheer horror as the tanks had now surrounded the city and from the mountains above town started to rain down drops of death in
Inside the Turkish House
A centuries-old house from a wealthy Turkish family preserved with furnishings of the time the form of bullets.
Suddenly the violence and atrocity of war they had only known on TV in the Middle East or somewhere else in the world, the kind of frightful event that could "never happen here" in their own backyard where everyone got along peacefully with each other...suddenly this was their reality, and they learned that peace, that adolescent invincibility, was just an illusion. Suddenly they learned that they were under attack for their religion, and where they had previously seen all their classmates, neighbors, friends as fellow human beings who were all equal, they were now getting a crash course in drawing lines and distinguishing differences, in determining friend from foe. The “ethnic” cleansing by the Serbs had indeed nothing to do with ethnicity, as the Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks are all from the same ethnic roots and visually indiscernible from each other. What distinguishes the three groups is religion; the Croats are Catholic, the Serbs are Orthodox, and the Bosniaks are Muslim. However, to say it was merely a religious war would also raise a lot of controversy, as there are many conspiracy theories out there on the political motives, which we unfortunately didn’t have time
Picturesque river view
This is the Mostar they write about in guidebooks. to properly discuss. At any rate, I was a bit confused as to how one could wage a war of this kind when all these different religions lived intermingled with each other in the same apartment blocks and neighbourhoods, and all looked relatively the same. “It’s all in the name,” Ned told me, as he admitted that he had never until that pmint made any distinction between who his friends were or what religion they practiced based on their name; but that it now became a survival issue to know who was on his side and who was against him.
The crazy thing was, when I asked, “But how did it happen? How did it come about?” they were, and in some ways still are, equally as confused. Admittedly, it just doesn’t make much sense, but they were at least able to clarify the rather warped logic behind it all a little. (And if any of this seems to go against any fact you know of, please keep in mind that certain things may have gotten lost in translation as Miedl had not spoken English in many years.) Miedl told of some Serbian Scientific Academy who, even before the war for independence, had started dragging up one small battle that had occurred 600 years ago when the Turks were invading and conquering the region. In that battle, many Orthodox Serbs were killed, and suddenly this event was injected into the spotlight once again as some sort of rallying point for the demagogues to use in a pro-Serbia movement. Of course this sounds quite ridiculous, considering that it was six centuries ago, especially considering that there is probably an equal amount of Turkish ethnic background mixed around through all 3 of the present groups inhabiting the area through intermarriage throughout the all those hundreds of years. The only thing that in some way linked the Bosniaks to the ancient Turks was a common religion. But among this scientific academy community, they started calling for revenge for the blood of the Orthodox Serbs and the way to accomplish this was to drive out the Bosniak Muslims. They also had the wherewithal to act on their demands, as after the war for independence from the former Yugoslavia, the ex-Yugoslav army and its armaments were taken over by the Serbian state and became the Serbian army. Given the seeming irrationality of the argument and the somewhat bizarre involvement of a scientific community, I can understand why so many theories on other motives and conspiracies exist. Whatever the motivations, however, the end results are not so easily debatable: the calls for “ethnic cleansing” and the mob mentality seem to have taken root quite swiftly among the Serbs within Bosnia as well.
The Serbs were demanding that the Muslims leave their land in Bosnia, and if they did not, they would be killed. Miedl explained how one day as he came home, his neighbour, a Serb who he had lived next to all his life and with whom his family had always had good relations, was standing there with a gun telling him to get out because he wasn’t allowed to be there. Miedl and his family escaped with the clothes on their backs and lived as refugees in their own country for four years, but the horror that he survived was written all over his face. He told me how his best friend, the one he had been blood buddies with as a child, was killed along with his younger brother and his parents; how he, who had never even seen a gun before that incident, was given a weapon by his grandfather to defend his own life; how they lived in terror for their own survival for a three-year siege of their city. He told of soldiers who laughed and joked that this was their passage to become “Serbian knights” as they shot the 14- and 15-year old sons of one of his loved ones. And he asked, “Why? Why them and not me?”
But what will become of Bosnia and Herzegovina? In Mostar it seems that the Croats and the Bosniaks have found peace, and in 2004 the Muslim and Catholic children resumed school together in the war-scarred Gymnasium once again. And to hear Miedl’s story, Ned’s story, the stories of their loved ones and friends who had suffered the losses, it was something akin to a miracle to hear him say, “But it’s over. And we don’t want revenge. As the mother of nine who lost all her children and her husband said, >>No amount of killing or revenge will bring any one of them back.<< Revenge is not ours to be had, it is God/Allah’s.”
The existence of the Federation of Bosnia & Herzegovina alongside a Serb Republic within the country of Bosnia, however, left me wondering if the peace of the Dayton Accords’ agreement is merely ephemeral. Ned explained that, yes, it is possible to go into the Serb Republic part of the country as a Muslim and even to live there, but you will most definitely still be harassed and have a difficult time finding anything other than menial labor. Perhaps more disturbing, however, is the fact that many of the leaders of the Serbian army forces during the war who were not the two or three big name war criminals have simply been shuffled around to other government positions within the Serb Republic, and are therefore still “leading” their people. We spoke of Srebrenica and the mass killings that took place there, and how even now certain Serbian officials claim that it did not actually happen, that the visual evidence was simply a photo montage. Of course, even more tragically, as Miedl noted, “Ah, Srebrenica....the problem is, there were a hundred Srebrenicas.”
Of course, this is just one side of the story; to be diplomatic, I should really also travel to the Serb Republic and to Serbia & Montenegro and hope to have a similar experience of firsthand accounts. However, I have to say I would probably have a hard time being unbiased, as if listening to Hitler’s contemporaries trying to rationalize why the Holocaust was carried out. Of course, even then many average citizens got caught up in the hoopla and supported him before he really came to power and then were afraid to publicly denounce him once he did for fear of their own lives if they spoke out against the heinous racial crimes. And there were those who flat out did resist. So I suppose that is a similar possibility that I might encounter there. Regardless, it is obvious that not all Serbs are bad, not all Bosniaks are good, and vice versa; however, the fragile peace guarded by foreign patrols seems evanescent at best.
When I asked Miedl his thoughts on the future of his country, he told me that, honestly, he just doesn’t care. He has too much to do, he lost everything he owned, his family lost everything they owned, and they have been busy rebuilding their lives ever since the war ended. He has a career and his brother’s future to worry about; he just doesn’t wish to waste any more precious time speculating. He can’t imagine, however, that they will ever be able to enter into the EU as a divided country, and given the aforementioned issues in the Serb Republic, it doesn’t seem that a joining of the two sections is a likely event in the foreseeable future.
Miedl’s current sentiment seemed to be reflected in the song playing in the café where he, Sonja, and I had gathered to chat: “Life goes on….” In fact, after Ned finished up working and joined us there, our conversation topics finally changed to the ordinary and we later went out to clubs for a little dancing, although, to be honest, I still haven’t been able to turn off my brain from continuing to ponder these subjects. I am so glad I missed my ride to Sarajevo that morning, for my experience in Mostar would have been one of endless wondering had I not had such in-depth firsthand accounts from two of the most generous, respectful, and polite men I have come across in my travels. As I sat in the old Turkish quarter the next day marveling at the shade of green in the river, with the smokey grilled meat smells of the cevapcici stands wafting under my nose and the quiet chatter of the tourists only interrupted by the subdued call to prayer from the closest mosque, I saw the town in a much different light from the same dinnertime seat that I had sat in just a few days prior.
Being in Bosnia opened doors in my heart that I didn’t even realize I had. From the windows of my mind, smokescreens that I hadn’t known to exist suddenly evaporated. And I moved beyond the words in a history book and the images in a film to really FEEL something of this place and its history, and to FEEL how interconnected my life, my loves, my passions, my fears, and my hopes are with those of these people I had just met. And is that not why we travel? To break down stereotypes and simple expectations to find out how situations and people really are? To move beyond any artificial, superficial, or manmade barriers to feel our common humanity?
Ironically, I got a message the same day from some "Linda" telling me that I am selfish because I travel, since travel is inherently selfish. I pondered that a moment and then had to laugh out loud. Because travelling makes the difference between looking and really seeing, between hearing and really listening, between memorizing and really knowing, between touching and really feeling. And if learning to feel, understand, and care more about other people in this world is egoistic, then I beg to hold the gold medal in selfishness.
(Note to the fam and friends: I have been traveling computer-free for a few weeks so I am a little behind on things but I will catch up to my current continent's travels soon and fill you in! Sorry for my lapses in returning emails!)
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Linda
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If you need travel to allow you to ``feel, understand and care more about people``....you have serious issues that no amount of travelling can help.