Symbolic bridge reopened in Mostar

Mostar reclaims Ottoman heritage
Celebrations as ancient bridge destroyed by Croats is reopened

Ian Traynor in Mostar
Saturday July 24, 2004

The Guardian

Hundreds of international leaders and officials gathered on the banks of the river Neretva in Herzegovina yesterday to mark the opening of Mostar's rebuilt 16th century bridge, one of the most outstanding artefacts of Ottoman Europe, shelled more 10 years ago by Roman Catholic Croatian extremists.
There were marching bands and rock bands, whirling dervishes and fireworks, orchestras and heartbreaking ballads on a sweltering evening as Mostar reclaimed its heritage with pride, joy and not a little dread.

Mostar's Old Bridge, a single arch of local limestone spanning the Neretva, was erected in 1566 on the orders of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman ruler.

"The Old Bridge was the most perfect construction, defying all the rules," said Amir Pasic, the local architect who supervised the rebuilding project. "When you put all the coordinates in the computer, the thing doesn't stand up. Yet it's very simple, very perfect."

The Old Bridge stood for 427 years until a failed Croatian theatre director-turned militia leader, Slobodan Praljak, trained his artillery on the structure in November 1993, when his forces were driving Mostar's Muslim population into an east bank enclave.

The three-year project to rebuild the bridge was completed last April, just as Mr Praljak was extradited to the tribunal in The Hague to face war crimes charges. He was joined by another five wartime Croat leaders from Mostar.

"The Croats are feeling guilty, and Praljak should go to jail for what he did. It's our bridge," said Nino Gvozdic, a Mostar lawyer of mixed Serb-Croat parentage. "My children, eight and six years old, never got to walk over the Old Bridge. Tomorrow they are going to walk over the new Old Bridge."

International officials from Chris Patten, the EU external affairs commissioner, to Paddy Ashdown, the governor of Bosnia, stressed that the reopening signalled a new era of hope and reconciliation. There was plenty of Croatian recalcitrance, however, in what remains a city of 100,000 partitioned along ethnic lines.

"To be honest, we prefer it destroyed," said Damir, a former Croat fighter. "They're making a lot of fuss about it and all the money goes on the bridge. But it's got nothing to do with us. It's a Muslim bridge."

The attack on the original bridge was gratuitous, since the small pedestrian structure connected two Muslim parts of the city and had no strategic value. Psychologically, though, it was a devastating act of iconoclasm.

Mr Gvozdic said he hoped the new bridge meant the "radical Croatian project" of the past decade was finished. But the landmarks of Roman Catholic redneck triumphalism remain. A new steeple on the cathedral has been built to dwarf the tallest minaret of the city's 16th century mosques. And the Croats have erected a 100ft high (30 metre) illuminated cross on Hum hill overlooking the Muslim old sector of Mostar.

Mostar, town, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mostar is the chief city and, historically, the capital of Herzegovina. It is situated in mountainous country along the Neretva River and lies on the Sarajevo-Ploce rail line. First mentioned in 1452, Mostar became a Turkish garrison town in the 16th century. In 1566 the Turks replaced the town's wooden suspension bridge over the Neretva with a stone arch one, whence the name Mostar (from Serbo-Croatian most, "bridge"). This stone bridge had a single arch 90 feet (27 m) wide and was a masterpiece of Ottoman engineering. In November 1993, during the Bosnian civil war, the bridge was destroyed by artillery fire from Bosnian Croat forces. The town served as a centre for crafts and trade, and its reconstructed coppersmith's bazaar is a tourist attraction. While under Austrian rule (1878-1918), Mostar became a centre for Serbian scholars and poets and for a strong nationalistic movement.
The region is noted for its quality wines (zilovka and blatina), tobacco, fruit, and vegetables. Pocitelj, just south of Mostar, is famous for its Muslim architecture with a mosque, madrasah (school), and Turkish houses. An aluminum works, completed in 1976, processes locally mined bauxite, utilizing power from a nearby hydroelectric plant. Mostar University was founded in 1977.

The spectacular diving display revived an old Mostar tradition
One of the highlights of Friday's celebrations came as, one by one, nine men leapt from the bridge into the rushing waters of the Neretva river below.

It is the revival of an old tradition by which young men prove their bravery.

Hundreds of Mostar's citizens, international dignitaries and tourists watched the ceremony perched in cafes.

Great stuff

Bridging the Bosnian divide

By Allan Little
BBC world affairs correspondent


As the Mostar bridge reopens 10 years after it was destroyed by Croat nationalists, Allan Little considers reconciliation between Bosnian Serbs and Croats.

The bridge was originally built by Turkish architects in 1566
There was something spectral about the sight of the old bridge at Mostar - as though the normal laws of the physical universe did not apply to it.

A single span of shining white cobalt suspended high above a churning river pool of pale blue water.

As the wide sweep of the Neretva river runs down from the high ground, it enters the city of Mostar where it narrows between steep-sided river banks.

At the narrowest point, in 1566, the Turkish sultan had ordered the building of the bridge.

Rebecca West saw it in 1936. "It is one of the most beautiful bridges in the world," she wrote.

"A slender arch between two round towers, its parapets bent in a shallow angle at the centre. I know of no country, not even Italy or Spain, that shows such invariable taste and such pleasing results."

She also said that she was pleased that the spring had come late that year to Bosnia, for this had enabled her to see snow on the roof of a mosque, an image whose incongruity pleased her for it spoke of the incongruity of Bosnia itself - a European country where Muslims and Christians co-existed in apparent harmony, where the traditions of East and West had met and, over centuries, mingled.

Freedom and division

That is why the bridge is so powerful a symbol in Bosnia, a country that knows better than most about why divides - cultural, religious, ethnic - have to be spanned - that knows more than most the fatal consequences of divisions that cannot be bridged.

And that is why that same bridge came to be so detested by those whose artillery pummelled it again and again until it fell into the water, on 9 November 1993.


They were destroying the very idea of bridge building, the very idea that different national groups could, or should, try to live together


When I first went to Croatia at the start of the war there in 1991, the country was in the grip of a liberation fever.
Croats were free for the first time in half a century to assert who they held themselves to be.

"Listen to me," one young man said.

"Here in Croatia we are central Europe. We belong to the civilisation that produced Mozart. But cross the Sava River into Bosnia, or the Danube into Serbia and that is the east. That is the civilisation that produced Saddam Hussein and all that Asiatic way of thinking."

The Croat nationalists who destroyed the bridge in 1993 were in their minds not only destroying a detested remnant of the Ottoman civilisation they despised.

They were destroying the very idea of bridge building, the very idea that different national groups could, or should, try to live together.


For them it wasn't only the Bosnian Muslims and the Ottoman legacy that was the enemy - they were at war with the very idea of multiculturalism.
My closest friends in Bosnia at that time were a family of five.

The husband, Ivo, was a Bosnian Croat, his wife, Gordana, a Bosnian Serb.

They had three children who were simply Bosnian.

The Bosnia that Ivo and Gordana wanted was a secular civic republic of citizens, in which the law recognised no tribal distinction.

The Bosnia they got was one that was divided up by a succession of Western-backed peace plans, into ethnically exclusive zones.

They could not live in such a place.

When I visited them in their Sarajevo flat under the rockets and guns, they used to joke about dividing their living room up into separate Croat and Serb cantons.

But the ethnic supremacists won the war in Bosnia.

Ivo and Gordana went to Canada where they swore allegiance to - and became subjects of - Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors.


Bosnians will live together again, because they always have and because ethnic separation has never made any kind of sense


Ivo was never reconciled to the loss of his homeland, and to the betrayal of the multiethnic - or, more properly the non-ethnic - ideal.
When he died, still in his 50s, a couple of years ago, a few weeks after I last saw him, he did so with a broken heart.

Reconciliation

As the bridge reopens I think of them and the war they fought and lost.

Bosnians will live together again, because they always have and because ethnic separation has never made any kind of sense - not economic, not political, not cultural - and could only ever be achieved through the barrel of a gun.

The bridge will take its place again as an enduring symbol of something quite special about that part of the world - the incongruity that Rebecca West saw on the domed roof coated with white frost.

But not yet. Not for a long time.

And too late for all those who clung to the ideal a decade ago and were betrayed.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 24 July 2004 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times