Sarajevo, Jajce and the Republika Srbka

Jasmina met me at the door of Hostel Enjoy.

"Ah, you must be Ian. I have very nice hostel for you. Number one hostel in Sarajevo. I keep very clean". She brandished a chammy at me and wiped her brow theatrically. Dropping the chammy she gave me a hi five, "You will like it here" and then lead me to the dorm. It was a nice simple place. Five beds, an old 486 computer against one wall and a TV with bad reception in an ancient cabinet.

After settling I asked to use the Internet. Jasmina looked at her watch. "No can" she said. "After four the UN, he take Internet." By way of explanation she pointed at the two gleaming blue UN towers through the window. They seemed a shock of Manhattan virility against the mostly flat Sarajevan cityscape. Confused I let it pass, and thanked Jasmina (a brilliant host for the length of my stay) after dumping my bags made my way into town.

Sarajevo was not what I expected. As you walk up from the south you are confronted at first by a handsome mosque, and then a wide boulevard flanked by finely appointed late nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian buildings of state. And then a grand modern six floor shopping mall of glass and wood panelling which would honour the centre of any of London or Paris or Madrid. Followed by a dominating Catholic Church which is a street away from a quaint Orhodox chapel. And then cafes. Good God thousands of cafes selling fine Bosnian coffee, ludicrously cheap Italian ice cream and delicious Sarajevan beer. And beyond that further still you get the apex of the circuit, the old Turkish town where you can toke on a hookah, or sit and work your way through suguary Turkish delight, all the while surrounded by eight minarets and the songs of prayer drifting fuzzily by at dusk.

The Sarajevo I had experienced and vaguely recalled from the nightly news of 1992 to 1995 was one of ashes. The custard yellow Holiday Inn housing hundreds of journalists who would emerge in dark macs or flak jackets to tell solemnly of the death that rained from the hills which thrust up a thousand feet in the air on all side. An artillery commander's and sniper's paradise during the siege it is sad to say. In 1984 Sarajevo held an Winter Olympics. It took much of the late nineties to de-mine the pistes.

 The rebuild, in the centre at least (but even in the suburbs you see a lot of bullet holes but few entirely derilict shells of housing), has been phenomenal. Architecturally the centre may contain few individual buildings of true glamour, yet as a mix there is something powerfully wholesome about it.

"This is so the New Prague" I heard someone say. Well, in many ways it could not be more different - architecturally, historically, socially - yet I did agree with the statement on one point. That the mixed blessings of the British stag-do will descend upon the city seems a fait accompli, only awaiting Ryan Air or Easy Jet to secure berths at the airport.

The museums tell a story which is so profoundly different from that of the Europe that I know. Bosnia was one of the furthest western cantons of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman royalty ran a state both vast and tolerant, relative to the draconian context of its period. Sarajevo was founded as Muslim city, but developed with provisions for Jews, Orthodox and Catholics to be involved in local government. In the Museum of Sarajevo there is a scale model of how the town looked around 1880. Wooden, undulating with the terrain of the river basin, and run through with fountains and hostelries.

When the Austro-Hungarians took it, by force it has to be said, in 1880 after the Congress of Berlin they added the buildings of state, and replaced the Muslim with a Catholic ascendancy, yet largely maintained the tolerant thread, giving greater self rule to Bosnia in the early nineteen hundreds. The city flourished and the population expanded.

The death of Franz-Ferdinand at the hands of a Serb perhaps ended all that, alongside the growing nationalist thread of politics that began to dominate Europe during the early 20th century. Not only that of the three communities within Sarajevo and Bosnia - Bosniak (Muslim), Serb (Orthodox) and Croatian (the city saw a burgeoning political-national journal trend in the 1900s)  - but also that of peoples without the region (at this time it was now a province within the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes). Croatian national movements were put into puppet government in the 40s, backed by the Nazis and Mussolini's fascists, murdered Serbs, Roma and Jews across the Kingdom creating deep scars. Tito, from my limited understanding, expelled the Nazis in a great popular movement in the latter stages of WWII and managed to bind together the disparate super state of Yugoslavia with a markedly tolerant Communist doctrine, especially after the split with Moscow in 1948. But with his death in 1980 Yugoslavia regressed once again into nationalist divisions which eventually resulted in the series of civil wars in 1991 and 1995 during which Sarajevo became a perfect killing zone.

Between 1992 and 1995 10,000 died in the city, without much discrimination between fighting troops and civilian men, women and children. The resistance was only sustained through huge popular support within the city and a lifeline provided by the curiosities of the most modern type of warfare. The UN secured the airport in 1992 for humanitarian aid, preventing bombardment by the Serbs. The inhabitants cleverly used this cover to tunnel under the airport to free Bosnian territory where supplies could enter Sarajevo. In 1995 Serbian shelling causing several civilian massacres such as the two Markale incidents, which were both observed by a heavy Western media presence, leading the UN to call in air strikes which ultimately broke the siege.

It is strange to think that here, only a few hundred miles from Vienna, all of this could have occurred while I sat and gawked at the World Cup in America.

We increasingly tend to think of Europe as a unit, or at least I do. However this divergence in the continent's history, the difference of the Balkans to the West, seems to highlight that the territory you enter from Italy's Trieste or south through Austria is somehow alien. A radically different religious and cultural heritage, riven with social and ethnic divisions, and fuzzily and contentiously defined. Yet in this era, more than any era, society is ploughed up and started afresh at breakneck pace - societies are remoulded by international institutions such as the World Bank and the UN. 

On this note Europe and the US are a bold presence in Sarajevo. Euros act as a defacto second currency. European countries are rebuilding the national monuments. In Jajce, a town I stopped off on the way to Banja Luka, the descriptive signs are put together and sponsored by the British Council. Sarajevo's UNITEC towers, those shards of steel which stole Jasmina's internet, were funded by US money.

And these contributions are hardly gifts per se, the Balkans is still a hugely important strategic region. Against a resurgent and volatile Russia the EU and America seek to paint the constituent nations in their own colours through winning new friends. And this is a game not without difficulty -many in Sarajevo would ask where were NATO in '93 and '94 when the city was being turned to rubble by overwhelming and disproportionate Serb aggression, and would point to Slovenia's faltering experience with price inflation after joining the EU. Similarly in the Republika Srbska, the Bosnian-Serb administrated region in the north of the country, many of those I have spoken to feel that the Serbs have been too heavily penalised by the governmental provisions of post civil war Bosnia, particularly by the UN High Representative who wields vast power over government, and is able to disqualify candidates considered too radical from standing for parliament.

Yet here, as in everywhere I have been so far, I have felt that this is the future of Europe as well as the past. In a world which increasingly trends towards supra national bodies, such as the EU, for trade and security, it seems hard to envisage that Bosnia and the rest of the Balkans will not be tied to the West within the next two decades. Slovenia is already a member (although you could quibble whether it is really a 'Balkan' country, despite being a part of the former Yugoslavia) and Croatia should achieve membership as soon as 2012.  If these developments can bring the stability that the area demands - a stability that has again suffered challenges in recent years - and membership is solicited by the people's elected will at referendum, that can only be a good thing. 

Mostar

  The hotel proprietor stood at the end of the ally in the fading sunlight. From 30 yards away in the bustling main street he waved his hand encouragingly, ushering me into the bombed out courtyard I hesitated beside. Apparently a man who could give me a room for the night was waiting for me in there. Hiding somewhere, I thought.
  I had only been in Mostar for an hour and was desperate to get a room before dusk vaporised into night. Decked with my backpack and laptop case in my mind's eye I screamed target.

 

   In an internal appeal to calm I reminded myself that the hotelier seemed to be from a nice hotel, what would he have to gain from a shadowy set to round the back of the premises? Nervously I looked back again. He waved. "Inside!" he shouted grinning. Half propelled by foolishness, half by politeness - two emotions that can flatten any trepidation - I stepped into the ruin.
    It was empty. Stacks of rubble surrounded me. I felt like I would have to fight or run. I ducked my head back to see the hotelier laughing with two young men on the street. Presumably about me. Presumably about my idiocy, my simpleton nature, my nerves. How right they were.
    I heard a footstep inside the courtyard and I swivelled back again. A young man now stood in the middle of the space. Thin, his hair greasy to his forehead, wearing shorts and a t-shirt and an apron. In a moment of pure fear I made out a revolver holster under his arm. For a moment then I thought perhaps this was it. I hadn't been mugged before. Maybe I could run? With a 15kg pack and the right sole coming away from my shoe? I stayed rooted to the spot.
    The greasy haired man looked up and out of thin air he plucked falling keys, presumably from a window high above. "Room?" he said flashing his own toothy smile winningly. "We go"

    Knowing not really what to do I followed his lead through more rubble, past a pizza restaurant and then over a foot bridge. As we banked round the second corner I realised the holster was a bumbag tucked into his armpit. I could have wept with relief. I experimented with tentative talk about football. A bottomless well of communication that I always dip into. We exchanged names. I relaxed, he chatted. About his mother who had left Mostar for Uppsala, Sweden. That he had never been to London. That he loved his city. Steadily we ate up the dusty yards and the conversation lulled.
    "I came from Split" I said, to build our tentative understanding.
    "Ah" he said, suddenly flat once again, the smile dropping from his face. "Croatia".
    We didn't speak again until we had crossed another dyke of rubble to stand outside a tower block riddled with bullet holes and stark in bare concrete, the frontage having dropped off.

    Dabor showed me the keys and we stepped inside the stairwell to climb seven flights to the top floor flat. He opened three locks one by one.
    My blossoming feeling of security was squashed by more questions that emerged agitated from my sub conscious.What did I know of this man? Could he prey on people like me? Who was inside the flat? I did not even know the address. Would I ever be seen again?

   As it happened no one was inside. Dabor left me after a quick tour of the bath room and laying out some sheets on the bed. The flat was well kept. Family photographs. The stern mother, now in Sweden. Grainy images of the father. "He is dead" Dabor said. In my room sat a Koran above my bed, alongside, rather incongruously, a clock whose face formed a map of Australia.
   40% of Bosnia is Muslim. They once fought alongside the Croats. Then they turned against one another. The Croats murdered 8000 in one particular massacre.
   Dabor quickly left, politely and saying I should pay tomorrow. He trusted me completely, passing me the key and giving me free reign over his own house as he returned to work. A good TV sat on the side table. A nice L shape of a couch. A fully equipped kitchen. I walked onto the balcony to look at the vast panorama of shelled concrete, new building and the rehabilitated medieval Ottoman quaint architecture that surrounded the famous rebuilt Mostar bridge.

   In the evening I braved the dark to eat at a local pizza place. My table was surrounded by eight kittens and a mother cat, purring and fawning, and gathering. I tried to ignore them as I worked my way through The Ghost and a prosciutto pizza. The Ghost is a plot about the International Criminal Court, a theme that resonates here in Mostar I suppose.
   I glanced up to see each emaciated furry creature looking at me with fearless eyes. One climbed up and onto the table, sniffing at a serviette covered in mayonnaise. A group of children across the ally laughed as I equivocated. Should I pick them up? Or shoo them? Or indulge them? Before I decided the kitten hopped down once again.
    All the while from the footbridge on my right the people of Mostar emerged to promenade into town. From their bombed out streets in cotton dresses and checked shorts, tanned and at ease amongst this lunar scape. To me it seemed so inconsistent.
    Abashed I slunk across the bridge, over the river far below. The water itself A former front line, the flow bequeathed by nature to be deep enough and wide enough for divers to cast themselves from 21m at the bridge's apex while friends collect cash from onlooking tourists.

    I did not sleep that well at first, in a strange house, on Dabor's mother's departed bed, surrounded by pictures of his dead father in military uniform looking down on me.
    Yet I drifted off finally into a deep and surprisingly secure sleep, from which woke intact, lying on that same bed, looking up into the image of Australia, the tickling clock, and a woven image on the wall of an old lady in a headdress peering down with imperturbable eye.
    After using the bathroom to shower and change I paid Dabor's brother who was still in the house, Dabor having gone to work, who spoke no english but refilled my water bottle and shook my hand.