Beside the Seaside

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Mostar

Route: Sučuraj - Drvenik - Metcovič - Dračevo (Bosnia-Hercegovina) - Mostar

Happy anniversary to uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuus
Happy anniversary to uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuus
Happy anniversary dear Mike'n'Smaaaaanf
Happy anniversary tooooooooooooooooo us

Serious head on, today.

This is besidetheseaside. I could have stayed on the coast south of Hvar, ridden the 10 miles or so where Bosnia reaches the coast -- a slice of geopolitical diplomacy which cuts Croatia in two down in the south -- towards Dubrovnik.

I could have stayed on the coast.. in theory.. but I couldn't just ride by. So I've taken a detour.. all of 25 miles inland.. to Mostar. (The last time I came this far inland was to see the Godfather town of Corleone. If I can break the rules for that, I have to break the rules for Mostar.

Pictures. Because words cannot describe.

The old bridge at Mostar ('Stari Most' -- it even gave its name to the town). Recognise it? The destruction of the old bridge was one of the most symbolic, and most terrible, moments of the wars in the former Yugoslavia. There's hope that the rebuilding of the bridge is more than symbolic, too.

My road map is full of names that must resonate with anybody who remembers the 1990s -- Banja Luca, Goražde, Vukovar, Bihač, Tuzla, Sarajevo. That's just Bosnia-Hercegovina: it's quite enough to be getting on with.

Mostar. The bridge that served literally and metaphorically as a link between the (Catholic) Bosnian Croats on one side and the Bosnian Muslims on the other.

(Don't get me started on religion, please.)

Mostar: you can read more here or http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/mostar.html or here. Or you can buy Noel Malcolm's Bosnia: A Short History (on sale everywhere in Mostar: it's the kind of place where you arrive and want to know.. Why?)

Mostar: so many questions. How can a country, a city, a street, an apartment building become divided to the point of death, ethnic cleansing, rape-as-a-weapon-of-war? How can it happen so quickly? In the heart of Europe? In our lifetime? How could we stand by as it happened? (How can the politicians pretend it was anything other than standing by? How can we blame the politicians and not ourselves?)

How can religion mean so much to people that they'll kill their neighbours for it? When they played together as children? Lived in each other's pockets? Shared a common life, a common history? Common blood -- for all the arguments of ethnicity, the 'Serbs' and 'Croats' and 'Bosniaks' are much of a muchness. Except when they are exactly the same -- who do these people think they've been marrying and reproducing with all these centuries? And this can turn to war?

There are bullet holes in buildings all over town. Yes, and that's unutterably hard to see. How much harder, then, to see buildings that were bombed, half-destroyed by grenades or mortars or tank shells or arson.. and sit here still, to this day, TODAY, destroyed? Who decides that Building A has been rebuilt, and Building B (and C, and D) remain in ruins? Who lived in this one? Who died in that one? Where are the children who played in that garden? Why was this one, on the corner of the main shopping street, bombed? Look: it says "bonbonniere". It was a sweet shop, for god's sake! (Not for god's sake. Not in Her/ His name.. despite what the men with guns told you.)

And who is that man, sitting in a cafe, reading the sports pages? He's my age. He'd have been, what?, mid-20s when war came to Mostar in 1992. Fighting age. Because this could have been *my* war. There is war across the world but I am European and so this was on my doorstep. And the people who were killing and dying looked like me. I would have been of an age. I *was* of an age.. but I was in London falling in love and commentating on the mighty Canaries and recording Mystic bloody Meg fergoodnesssake and buying shoes and going on holiday and a million-and-one things but I wasn't at war. So I ask again. Who is that man, reading the sports pages? Did he fight? Did he kill? And that woman. Was she raped and raped again because she's a Muslim? So that the people of her faith would disown her own child because the father, one of untold numbers who raped her, was a quoteunquote 'Christian'? That couple walking to the shop - did their children survive? Did they kill? And their neighbours?

How is it possible to live in a city and a country where so much bloody destruction is still everywhere to be seen? Just how many cemeteries are there in Mostar? How many graves dated 1992 and 1993? Because I've lost count. There's another one. On an ordinary street. What happened to the building that must have stood here? Who decided to turn the ground into a cemetery? What do those kids think, the ones sitting on a gravestone playing cards? How old are they? Ten? What happened to their parents five years before they were born? How do their parents cope? How do they hide the ugliness from their children? Do they? Do they want to? Do they hate people because they are 'Serbs' or 'Croats' or 'Bosniaks'? How can they? What do the children think? How can their grandparents bear to watch them growing up in the shadows of the war?

Are you a Serb? (Unlikely: one-in-five of the people of Mostar were Serb in 1992. Over 20,000 people. Just a handful live here now.) Or are you a Bosnian Croat? Are you a Bosnian Muslim? Can you tell just by looking? I've seen a handful of women with heads covered. Before the war, I read, there were next to none. No burkas. Yet. Yet? At night, people are out on both sides of the river, on both sides of the bridge. More headscarves.. clearly Muslims as well as Catholics as well as tourists. Could you kill again? Well, could you?

Everybody has been particularly kind & generous & friendly & helpful to me. There's plenty for tourists to see. There are plenty of tourists. I have no doubt our money helps. I think they would like to see more of us: I can recommend a visit to Mostar if you don't mind asking questions.

But I have made a conscious effort not to ask these questions of anyone who lives here.

I don't want to stick my big foot in it if that person has particularly hard memories.

But more than that, I know I'm only here for 24 hours. I can't begin to start working out what the questions, the real questions, are; let alone expect to find any answers. And I fear what some of those answers (and some of the questions) would be. I don't trust what I'd learn about other people.. or myself. But, for me, this is a start.

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