Bridging the Divide

By early afternoon the hordes were already gathering on the bridge.  One diver strutted back and forth along the parapet, flexing and posing, while another worked the crowd, taking BAM, Euros and even Kuna from the tourists who had flocked to Mostar on day trips from the Dalmatian coast. They hadn’t timed it right this time.  They'd waited too long and the crowds had become bored, dispersing off into the old town to search for coffee pots and ice cream, post cards and paintings.  Or perhaps they’d timed it perfectly, returning to the club house on the turret of the bridge with a wodge of notes.

Two hours later we return to the bridge and the diver is back.  This time he jumps, arms outstretched before pulling himself pencil thin to plunge feet first into the fast-flowing bright green waters of the River Neretva below.  Young men have been diving off the Stari Most for centuries to impress the local girls and during the summer months the divers of the Mostar Diving Club earn a fair trade from tourists who pay to photograph them making the iconic 22-metre jump.

Twenty years ago today, on 9 November 1993, the 427-year-old Stari Most was destroyed by Bosnian Croat forces during the Bosnian war.  Its destruction served no strategic military purpose – there were other modern bridges across the river – but was instead an act of cultural vandalism.  The bridge was demolished for the Ottoman heritage it represented and the place it held in the hearts of the city’s inhabitants.

Footage of the bridge’s destruction was shown around the world and for some reason, as the shelling of Dubrovnik’s old town had done during the Croatian War in 1991, stirred feelings of outrage with westerners.  The war had been morally unambiguous when Bosnian Serbs, sponsored by Serbia, launched an offensive against the dream of an independent multi-ethnic Bosnia, but when fighting broke out between the Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks, it transformed the conflict into one far more complex, as western politicians never tired of telling reporters.  How could they possibly be expected to intervene in such a complicated civil war, where all sides were attacking one another?

Mostar served as the frontline between the Bosnian Croat forces (HVO) and the Bosnian government forces (ARBiH) during the early years of the war and was the scene of fierce fighting.  The fragile alliance between the HVO and ARBiH in the latter half of the war did nothing but paper thinly over the fissures in Mostar’s society.  

When the rebuilt bridge opened in July 2004 it was hoped that, in the ultimate act of symbolism, it would reunite a city that had been torn apart during the war.  Nine years on, the divisions are as evident as they ever were.  Mostar truly is a tale of two cities, divided by the Neretva, with the Bosniak population on the east bank and the Croats on the west.  The city duplicates all its municipal services – two central post offices, two water suppliers, even two fire services.  Infighting between Croat and Bosniak politicians brought the local government to a standstill earlier this year.  The western half of the city is noticeably more affluent, with Croatian flags flying and Croatian nationalist graffiti scrawled on the buildings.  Try finding a Sarajevska on this side of the river.

This uneasy coexistence is mirrored across Bosnia.  The recent debacle over ID numbers in the Parliament has only enflamed tensions between the Republika Srpska and the Bosnian Federation.  Bosnia-Herzegovina qualified for their first World Cup in October – it was celebrated in Sarajevo; less so in Banja Luka and Mostar.  What comes across strongest in eyewitness accounts of the war is a certainty that the majority of Bosnians were good, peace-loving people, that they all got along exceptionally well before the war, and that the fighting was perpetrated by outsiders.[1]  Yet a war was fought there and for many the memories are still raw.

Today the shell-marked bombed-out buildings interspersed amongst the renovated ones along the old frontline are a stark reminder of the fighting that devastated Mostar just twenty years ago.  The words “don’t forget” are painted on a stone in the old town so unobtrusively small that many miss it.  But it turns out that many of Mostar’s citizens have not forgotten.  And whilst the tourists queue up to take photos of the local divers, browse for trinkets in the cobbled streets of the old town and then get back on their coaches for a whistle stop tour of Medjugorje before heading back to Croatia, it is painfully obvious that it will take a lot more than rebuilding a bridge to bring many Bosnians back together.

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[1] Svetlana Broz, Good People in an Evil Time: Portraits of Complicity and Resistance in the Bosnian War (New York: Other Press, 2004).