If you are like me, the Yugoslavia war will have passed you by in the 1990's. I watched the news on TV and heard the iconic words Sarajevo, Kosovo and Bosnia as if they were from the other side of the moon. The politicians talked, the shots kept firing and shells kept falling - and tens of thousands of people died.In the last few years, I worked with people form the former Yugoslav region and made friends with Serbians, Croatians, Bosnians and Slovenians. The message I heard from all of them is always the same - "we never thought about ourselves as anything other than Yugoslavians. The politicians are the ones who stirred up the problems."
One location of a brutal part of the war was Mostar in Bosnia. It was the site of a 400 year-old bridge, and as a city divided between Muslims and Christians, it became a target. I don't want to say who was bombing who because I don't take any sides in this subject - atrocities happened on all sides, and there was no right or wrong, just politics that caused mayhem. But one truth is that the ancient bridge was bombed until it broke.To understand more, there is an amazing documentary from the front line of East Mostar in 1993, made by a BBC journalist called Jeremy Bowen. It is a shocking series of clips - I only recommend it for the brave-hearted.
I had the privelege to visit Mostar recently. It's now a UNESCO
protected World Heritage site, and thanks to that funding the brdge was restored in 2004. You can see some of the pictures of development in this blog - it is incredible how ruined it was, and what an incredible job has been done to bring the bridge and the town back to life.As I wandered through the streets of the small old town, the atmosphere was lovely - warm, friendly and interesting influences of East and Western culture. My time in Bosnia and Hercegoviona gave me a sense of a country recovering and resurgent. I felt like crying half the time in Mostar - how could human beings be so cruel? But of course, people are continuing with their lives and moving on to their future, the only possible thing to do.
Yet reminders of the recent brutal past exist here and there, my favourite being the stone with the message "Don't Forget".
And it is hard to forget when you see the bullet holes still there in older buildings on the edge of the town.
