In the middle of last month, after a long time, I spent a few days in Mostar. The occasion was the promotion of my novel "The Touch of a Nun", which was held in the Cultural Center there. It was very hot and it took me time to recover from the stunning Mostar sun after returning to Sarajevo, but not to get rid of the impressions I took from the city that has a special place in my life. It didn't work for me even after I read in the newspaper, about forty days later, an extensive text about the international conference at which the "Mostar joint declaration", a kind of look into the future, signed by the representatives of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Turkey, and North Macedonia was adopted. and Albania. The symbolic patron of this gathering was the Stari most, which 20 years ago, after being restored, "emerged" from the Neretva, began its second life. It was an event worthy of attention, because Mostar would not be Mostar without the Old Bridge, but one should not attribute properties that it does not have to that old stone, a masterpiece of the famous Ottoman builder Mimar, and impose obligations that it is not obliged to fulfill. The bridge was built out of the simple need for merchant caravans to cross from one bank of the river to the other and continue their journey, not because, as it is said in the name of its worship, it connects people and nations or to be a symbol of peace and freedom. We should stop with that story and return to its architectural glory and monetize it as much as possible, and leave the artistic inspiration of its exceptionality to poets and painters.
Some other big words were used lightly on that occasion, such as the fact that Mostar, apart from being the only multi-ethnic city in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is proof that people of different religions and nations can live together. That's what you're talking about, what the hell, a high representative of the party whose politics organized the expulsion, taking to camps and killing of Bosniaks from Mostar!? My problem in this case is that I trust my eyes more, what I saw and heard in those few days, than the opportunist interpreters of the Mostar reality. And I saw two completely different "cities" in one, inhabited by two constitutionally equal peoples, the more numerous Croats on the right and Bosniaks on the left bank of the Neretva. The most urban part of the former Mostar went to the Croats, with thousands of social housing and other buildings built in the era of socialism, with the Aluminij Kombinat as an economic giant and the unrepentant Velež Stadium under Bijeli Brijeg. New residential and commercial buildings are harmoniously integrated among the old buildings. When I came to visit a Croatian family, who lives in one of the buildings near the stadium, I was surprised how tidy that part of the city is, the streets are clean, there is a lot of greenery. For a few moments, I looked nostalgically at the balcony of the apartment where my father, a retired JNA officer, lived with his wife. From that balcony, the Velež playground could be seen as if in the palm of your hand. A large number of Croats from western Herzegovina moved into Serb and Bosniak apartments. Mostar has become their place of work for many citizens of Herzegovina, a vital and enterprising world, so every morning convoys of cars come to the city from the direction of Široki Brijeg, and return back around five o'clock in the afternoon. All in all, more than half of the city became exclusively Croatian.
On the other side, in a narrow area with two parallel streets, Bosniaks live, among whom there are very few pre-war inhabitants of Mostar. One of those streets is still the main one and bears Tito's name, but it is in a terrible state, with dilapidated buildings and inexplicably neglected. It's as if someone is paying attention to her past. The new residents are mostly refugees from the region of Gatac, Bilec and Nevesinje. They built an entire city of ten thousand inhabitants on the hillside parts of Mostar, between the Railway Station in the north and the former small settlement of Opina with a few houses in the south. The SDA gave them salaries for free, and they gave her votes in the elections. This is how the biggest urban mockery of Mostar was born, which will never disappear. In it lives a rural world that does not hold much to either Mostar or the Old Bridge, uprooted from its roots it is frustrated and cannot find its way in a completely new environment. Almost the entire social life in the Bosniak part of the city takes place in the cafes in the narrow Fejića street, where pedestrians and cyclists, women with prams, beggars and tourists take turns all day long. I was also a resident of that street for those few days, since I was staying with my youngest brother Sloba, and I could see noticeable differences between the eastern and western parts of Mostar. And that produced some questions. Why, for example, is life in every respect better in one half of the city than in the other? Why is one nation, in this case the Bosniaks, significantly poorer than the other? And isn't today's Mostar, in contrast to the former, only a place of contact, but not of the permeation of two different cultures? "There is that," says my friend and longtime journalist Alija Behram, "but don't forget that about 30 Bosniaks and XNUMX Serbs were expelled or left Mostar. And the best people went with them."
I spoke with several Mostars about the relationship between Bosniaks and Croats, since the few Serbs have become a negligible factor. Hate, some say, would be too strong a word. Hatred, others say, has not disappeared, it is even more pronounced among young people than among those who fought. Few of them go from "their" to another part of the city. The huge concrete cross erected immediately after the war on the top of Hum hill is still a thorn in the side of Bosniaks, as a targeted symbol of the religious schism and the division of the inhabitants of Mostar into Catholics and Muslims. They are also frustrated by the absence of any empathy of the current Hadeze elite towards the crimes committed against the Bosniaks of Mostar. And why do the Croatian nationalists, followers of the departed Herceg-Bosna in The Hague, harbor such animosity towards Bosniaks? That's why, psychologists would say, that they disturb their conscience with their existence. Mostar is still tired of the traumas of the Croat-Bosniak conflict on the one hand and timid attempts to make life normal on the other. "We" and "they" have become determinants of their identity in everyday jargon. The city on the Neretva is thoroughly divided along all ethnic lines, this has become its "natural" state. There is hardly any way back from that.
Bonus video:
