Mostar: where hope still burns

Paul Hockenos gives an eye-witness account of how the Catholic Church is helping the people of Mostar, devastated by the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina.
HIGH ABOVE THE turquoise-green Neretva river, a suspended rope walkway links the crumbling bridgeheads that once belonged to Mostar's Start Most, or old bridge. For five centuries, the magnificent stone bridge was a symbol of the peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Christian Serbs in this picturesque city in West Hercegovina.
Six months after the termination of the fierce Croat-Muslim war, the city is divided, its multi ethnic community as shattered as its famous bridge. On the east side of the Neretva now live now the city's 55,000 Muslims, in West Mostar the 35,000 Croats.
The 20,000 Serbs have left for Serboccupied Bosnia. But under European Union (EU) administration since June, Mostar is the site of an ambitious pilot project of reconstruction and ethnic reconciliation, an experiment which could serve as model should a similar peace ever come to the rest of this country.
In contrast to the few bullet-scarred buildings in West Mostar, the historical Old City of East Mostar lies in ruin. The Turkish marketplace, the vinecovered houses and cobbled passageways are piles of rubble, the work of Bosnian forces that relentlessly shelled the east bank for almost ten months.
When the Bosnian Croat army attacked the Muslims in April 1993, ending their common alliance against the Bosnian Serbs, its leadership set out to cleanse West Hercegovina of nonCroats and eventually annex "Croatian" parts of Bosnia-Hercegovina to Croatia proper.
The Croat government in Zagreb, as well as the Catholic hierarchy in West Herceeovina. threw its full suovort behind the extremist Bosnian Croat leadership, encouraging and aiding the expulsion of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims from their homes.
The vicious, senseless war within the war ended early this spring, when Zagreb buckled under heavy pressure from the international community, as well as from the Catholic hierarchies in Sarajevo and Croatia, to abandon its dream of a Greater Croatia. As abruptly as the war began, it ended. The Croation government agreed to the Washington Plan, which proposed a sovereign federation, governed from Sarajevo and made up of Croat, Muslim and mixed cantons.
But even the EU's $40million 1994 budget for Mostar, a figure to be doubled next year, may not be enough to quell the resentment on both sides of the Neretva. At their headquarters in the deluxe Hotel Ero in West Mostar, the teams of EU architects, health experts, social workers and lawyers, as well as a German-led 186-man Western European Union police force, know that the stakes are high.
"If Mostar can succeed, the federation can succeed," says the barrenchested project chief Hans Koschnick, a German social democrat and former mayor of Bremen for 20 years.
After two months on the job, the EU team has restored electricity and running water to most of the city. But in East Mostar, extended families live in cellars and the skeletal remains of housing blocks. An emergency reconstruction project to make 3000 homes livable by winter's onset will be too little, too late, say the people of East Mostar, exhausted and still in shock after the siege.
At night, the sound of Serb artillery echoes through the mountains behind East Mostar, where the Bosnian federation ends and Bosnian Serb-held territory begins. In 1992, the Bosnian Serbs overran Mostar, only to be repelled months later by combined CroatMuslim forces.
Although not on one of the war's current hot-fronts," Mostar remains in the Serbs' sights and could well come under sustained attack again should the Bosnian Serbs make it a priority.
At the terraced central park, now a cemetery crowded with wooden gravemarkers, a group of older Muslim men sit along a stonewall, smoking rolled up cigarettes.
"The Serbs and Croats say we're fundamentalists, that we're fighting in jihad, an Islamic Holy War," says 60year-old Enver. "But that's simply not true. We want to live together, as we have in the past. This is our kind of Islam."
But even so, most Muslims in East Mostar find it difficult to imagine living together again with the Croats. The question the East Mostar' ask is "Why?" Why did the Croat nationalists do this? They shake their heads in disbelief.
The question of the refugees in East as well as West Mostar remains an intractable sticking point in restoring "peace and normal living conditions" to Mostar, as the EU's mandate spedfies. The Croats "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims in West Mostar, as well as other parts of West Hercegovina and Central Bosnia, was every bit as ruthless as the Serbs' mass expulsions of the Croats and Muslims.
Today, 20-25,000 Muslim refugees live in East Mostar, expelled from their homes at gun point by Bosnian Croat troops. On paper, the EU has the mandate to "facilitate the return of all persons to their homes." But Bosnian Croat nationalists still wield the power in West Mostar, which they refuse to relinquish to the EU or moderate Croats. The Bosnian Croat soldiers living in Muslim homes are under no pressure to leave and expulsions continue against the handful of Muslims still in the West.
In West Mostar's garish night clubs, Bosnian Croat troops sit behind dark sunglasses, rifles in their laps. In more than one of their hangouts, the portrait of Ante Pavelic, the leader of Croatia's World War II clerical fascist movement, the Ustashe, adorns the walls. The rough, barren hills of West Hercegovina, Pavelic's birthplace and Ustashe stronghold, are still the home of the most extreme proponents of Croatian nationalism.
Until the outbreak of war in 1992, Croats made up 17 percent (about 800,000) of the populations of BosniaHercegovina. Most came from the ethnically mixed regions in Central Bosnia. Only in West Hercegovina did the 170,000 Croats compose the major
The Catholic Church in West Hercegovina, which openly backed Pavelic's Nazi-allied state, is also the most conservative and nationalistic of the Catholic churches in Croatia and Bosnia. Its sermons against "Muslim over-population" and "the green tide of Islam" helped nationalists fuel the passions that turned neighbour against neighbour.
In contrast to West Hercegovina's Bishop Peric, Sarajevo's Archbishop, now Cardinal, Vinko Puljic, and Zagreb's Cardinal Franjo Kuharic sharply criticised Croatian motives for backing West Hercegovina's Croat extremists. Kuharic's famous spring 1993 open letter to the Bosnian Croat leadership was a decisive factor in pressuring the Bosnian Croats to back down from the war.
His intervention, however, came too late. Until the war, most of the Croats in Central Bosnia referred to themselves not as "Croats" but simply as "Catholic Bosnians." Although the extremists lost their own war, they succeeded in nationalising the Central Bosnian Catholics and destroying multicultural society.
Today, the Bosnian Croat leadership and administration, the same that was behind the 1993-94 war, is deliberately resisting the reintegration of Muslim and Croat societies. "The West Hercegovina Croats haven't given up," confided one EU official. "They're fighting us every inch of the way."
But since the Washington agreement, the West Hercegovinian Church has backed away from the Bosnian Croat radicals. Koschnick meets weekly Bishop Peric, as well as the Muslim leaders. "My Protestant upbringing Is too ingrained in me to involve the religious communities in a process of reconciliation,"he says.
But the bad spirits in the war will be difficult to exorcise, particularly given the limited mandate of the EU administration. Koschnick, however, is pragmatic.
"The people here may not want to live with one another again," he says, "but perhaps they can at least live peacefully next to one another. In the Balkans, that's a start."