Mostar Restores Its Ancient Bridge, but Hangs on to Ethnic Politics

Mostar restores its ancient bridge, but hangs on to ethnic politics

The rebuilding of the Stari Most (Old Bridge) in Bosnia's city of Mostar may be an architectural miracle, but it will take more than this one miracle to restore the city's multiethnic flavor - at least if the obstructionist government has anything to say about it.

By Bakir Rahmanovic for ISN Security Watch

For the second time in 438 years, the Stari Most (OldBridge) in the Bosnian city of Mostar is being built. In 1566, the Ottoman Empire, under the rule of Sultan Suleiman the Great, built this complex and fascinating architectural wonder over the river dividing the city’s center. The bridge took nine years to complete. The slender and elegant 28-meter long and 20-meter high arched stone structure was originally intended to allow Ottoman Turk troops to cross on their way to Vienna and the territory of the rival Austro-Hungarian Empire - a purpose for which it was never used. For hundreds of years, the bridge - whose limestone blocks changed color with the rising and setting of the sun - stood as a marvel among the world’s greatest architectural achievements. The bridge’s design, influenced by the morphology of the ancient Ottoman stone towers that abut it, had a simple architectural beauty that required no additional ornamentation. In November 1993, the bridge met its fate when Bosnian Croat forces destroyed it with 20 grenades, watching it plunge into the river below. On 23 July, thousands of dignitaries and other visitors from all over the world are expected to attend the ceremony unveiling the rebuilt bridge, as one of the biggest architectural projects of the 20th century comes to a close. The reconstruction cost €16 million, all of which was donated by several European countries. While the citizens of ethnically divided Mostar have long awaited the rebuilding of the bridge as a symbol of a return to normalcy after the 1992-1995 war, the government - though applauding the reconstruction as a major success - remains bent on keeping the city ethnically divided at the expense of the people.

An architectural miracle

Mostar-born Maja Popovac is a PhD candidate at the PragueArchitecturalUniversity and a member of Turkish company ER-BU in charge of the reconstruction project. She compares the rebuilding of the Stari Most with the restoration of Egyptian pyramids. “This wasn’t just some ordinary restoration. We were dealing with a bridge whose original building technology was a secret for centuries,” she said, referring in part to the previously unknown fact that the stone bridge was actually hollow inside. Popovac also said that experts had not been aware from the onset that the original builders had used melted lead in the construction. Despite the difficulties and intricacies, the same techniques that were used in the 16th have been followed in the bridge’s reconstruction, she said. The rebuilt bridge has 1,088 heavy stone blocks - the same number in the original, and some are the original stones retrieved from the river. Even the new stone blocks have been extracted from a mine in the village of Ortijes, from whence the originals came. Each stone has been handcrafted to resemble the original. Engineer Izudin Djulovic was in charge of the stone masonry. “Each element was projected by computer and it was my duty to ensure that each was exactly the same as it predecessor,” he said, adding that each rock will bear the name of the person who modeled it. The shaping of a single stone block took hundreds of Bosnian and Turkish engravers, who, despite their years of engraving experience, underwent six-month training courses before starting.

‘Heaven’s rainbow’

One of the Stari Most’s first literary appearances was in a 17th-century travelogue, “Itinerary”, written by celebrated Turkish writer Evlija Celebija, who recorded his visit to Mostar. “In the city of Mostar, there is a bridge that looks like Heaven's rainbow, as if it were not made by the human hand or mind. I wish to say that I, Evlija, God's slave, have passed through 16 empires and have never seen a bridge so high that it seems to be connecting two clouds," wrote Celebija. For decades, Mostar’s OldBridge was the single-most visited tourist object in the former Yugoslavia. During the decades preceding the war, diving from the OldBridge into the NeretvaRiver became a national pastime. In the summer season, the banks of the river at the base of the bridge would be packed with foreigners and locals sunning themselves among the ancient stone walls and marveling at the divers who seemed as though they would plunge to certain death from the peak of the bridge to the fast, rocky, and shallow waters below. Emir Balic, a legendary Mostar diver who is now 67 years old, said that he was skeptical when reconstruction began. “I was against reconstruction because that new bridge could never be my OldBridge. I thought it would be best to leave the remains of bridge where they are, in the water, just to remind us what people are capable of,” he told Security Watch. But now, with the reconstruction essentially completed, fond memories have returned, though he has his doubts he will take the plunge again in his old age. But still, he says, “maybe once more for old times’ sake”. Architect Manfredo Romeo from the University of Florence’s general engineering working group, which provided the final designs for the Stari Most, described in a recent interview the relationship between the bridge and the citizens of Mostar as a “peculiar” one. “The OldBridge in Mostar is undoubtedly quite peculiar because of its symbolic value, because of the reason it was destroyed, and for all the political and social consequences that are related to it…”

A ‘military’ target

Mostar was historically one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s most ethnically mixed cities, boasting the greatest number of mixed marriages in the country. In 1991, one year before war broke out, Mostar’s population was roughly 35 per cent Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), 30 per cent Bosnian Croat, and 20 per cent Bosnian Serb. In the spring of 1992, Bosnian Serb forces, using the military equipment of the former Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), shelled the city from the surrounding mountains. Joining together, Mostar’s Croats and Bosniaks fought back the Serbs, forcing a retreat. But that Croat-Bosniak unity was a fragile one, and in early 1993 they turned against each other. The city’s residents began to move to those parts of the city under the control of their ethnically representative armies. Mostar became ethnically divided. The Stari Most was situated in a part of the city under the control of the Bosnian government, and was used at the start of the war by civilians carrying food and water supplies. Though it was only a pedestrian bridge, the Bosnian Croat army designated it a military target. Bosnian Croat Defense Council (HVO) forces demolished the OldBridge in just one day, on 9 November 1993, with 20 grenades. One amateur cameraman managed to capture the bridge's collapse into the river below on film, and that single piece of footage made its way around the world.

‘Just an old bridge’

A wartime HVO commander, General Slobodan Praljak, stands of accused of giving the orders to destroy the bridge. Even before charges were official charges were made against him, Praljak, a pre-war theater director and post-war cigarette tycoon, admitted to having given the orders for the bridge to be destroyed. After all, he said in several post-war interviews, “it was just an old bridge”. He said he would have destroyed hundreds of old bridges for the sake of “one of my soldiers’ pinky fingers”. “This is the war for territory and we saw bridge as military target,” he said. Praljak defined the war in terms of “Lebensraum”, the German word used by the Nazis to justify their expansion into Eastern Europe. When the bridge fell, then Croatian president Franjo Tudjman called for one of his high-ranking generals in Mostar and brought him back to Zagreb, where he was decorated with honors. But in the eyes of many others – including the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) – these officers were anything but heroes. In March 2004, the ICTY issued an indictment against Praljak and five other Bosnian Croat wartime leaders, charging them with crimes against humanity, the murder of Bosniaks in Mostar, and violations of the Geneva Convention. Specifically, Praljak was also charged with destroying the Stari Most and other historical monuments in Mostar.

The bridge of obstructionism

In the past seven years, Mostar has become a symbol for obstructionism. Geographically divided by two river banks and further divided by six ethnically based municipalities - with Bosniaks and Croats ruling three each - the city has floundered in the chaos of expensive, duplicate administrations. The international community has long sought to merge the Bosniak and Croat administrations, but the two sides have been unwilling to budge. The city’s two ruling nationalist parties - the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ) and the Bosniak Party of Democratic Action (SDA) - have feared that unification would jeopardize the position of the ethnic groups they purport to “represent”. Progress was made only earlier this year when the international community’s High Representative to Bosnia Paddy Ashdown took matters into his own hands - as he often does - and slapped hefty monetary fines on the two parties in an attempt to cure their obstructionism. He also slashed their government salaries. In January, the international community finally sidelined the quarreling nationalist parties and unilaterally passed a unification decree, removing the six ethnically based municipalities and replacing them with six electoral districts, bringing the city closer to unity. Throughout, the primary concern of Bosniak and Croat officials has been losing a grip on power. The effect of the division has been a disastrous one, with a huge, expensive bureaucracy funded by struggling taxpayers who are forced to maintain separate schools, separate utilities, and even separate health care systems. A poll conducted in January showed that 75 per cent of Mostar’s citizens supported the idea of a unified city, while some 83 per cent said that no one ethnic group should be in control. For those citizens, the rebuilding of the Stari Most represents a victory over obstructionist, nationalist politics. “I hope that rebuilding the OldBridge will lead to rebuilding friendship and harmony among the people of Mostar. [The bridge] had done that for centuries, and should do it again now,” Balic said.

No apologies

But Balic’s hopes were dashed earlier this month, as a government-inspired controversy over the bridge’s opening ceremony threatened to minimize its symbolic significance. The organizers of the event had invited Croatian singer Zlatan Stipisic “Gibonni” to perform his hit single “Oprosti” (I’m sorry) at the opening ceremony. But Croat officials protested the choice of music, and particularly, the song’s chorus, which reads: “Say to each other ‘I am sorry’…It may be that it is easier to die that to say ‘I am sorry’”. Though originally intended as a love song, Croat politicians say it could be misinterpreted as an apology for destroying the bridge - one that they are not willing to offer. Outraged, Gibonni backed out of the ceremony, saying he would not allow his music to be politicized. In the end, what is most likely to happen is that the organizers will play the music to Gibonni’s song, while the people of Mostar - Bosniaks and Croats alike - will sing the lyrics, leaving the politicians to grumble about the dangers of apologies and unity, waxing nostalgic for the days of the crumbled bridge and the political profits of division.

Bakir Rahmanovic is a Sarajevo-based freelance journalist and political cartoonist.