Mostar Greets me with Silence

Last week, I went back to Mostar for the last time before I take off for the US. I struggled to say good-bye to the city I once called my hometown, but the city was silent. I walked the streets of my neighborhood and stared at the familiar names sprawled in graffiti on the stadium walls, many of the names now dead, but most scattered across the world. My interaction with the names of my childhood friends echoed the seductive power of nationalist thinking that reigns over the city: "Denis, Dado, Coba, Sano, I wonder if they were Serb, or Croat? Jasko, he must have been Muslim." I had forgotten the faces and voices of these people, but their names could help me place them into neat labels which now replaced any personal memories erased by the passage of time. The trouble was that these labels could not help me remember if it had been Jasko or Denis who helped me hide our neighborhood stray dog from the murderous animal control deputies. Was it Sano or someone else against whom I won my first fist fight at our makeshift stadium, now a garbage dump? Was it Coba who taught my brother how to play a guitar in our building's basement? Time had emptied these names of any substance they had possessed and has turned them into Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. The most disturbing aspect of this interaction was that I had become very skilled at guessing their nationality based on their first or last names (just that day I had spent several hours "counting" mixed marriages in the city's marriage office). I had become an accomplice to the crime that had made me a stranger in my hometown.

Trying to fit into the routines of my relatives, who live scattered across the two divided sides of the city, only increased my feelings of alienation. I would call each of them several times per day in an attempt to arrange a coffee or lunch date, and with each additional equivocal response my melancholy deepened and my intense desire to leave soon became unbearable. After trying to convince myself that I had done nothing wrong to deserve such aloofness, I finally had to face the fact that yes, I had committed an act for which the city would never forgive me: I left. Leaving the city as it literally burned down under the barrage of artillery fire might not have been my choice and the city would have forgiven me. But not coming back after the war was my choice and for this, the city would never forgive me. The indifference with which it greeted me mimicked an awkward meeting of two former lovers who after a long and passionate relationship had gone their separate ways. And now, so many years after the flame of passion had been extinguished, they were no longer angry at each other. They simply had nothing to talk about.

On my last day the metaphorical silence of the city became literal. East (Muslim) Mostar was commemorating the brutal murder of thirteen Bosnian Army soldiers who had been captured in their command center on West (Croat) side on May 9, 1993, the first day the war between Muslims and Croats broke out. With heavy anti-aircraft fire the Bosnian Croat Army (HVO), which they had parked literally in front of our building, burned down the command center, and arrested the thirteen young men. They were paraded on the Croatian national television and never seen again. Only last year, thirteen years after that horrible day, their remains were found in a secondary mass grave on the outskirts of Mostar. One of my best friends' brother was among the "missing thirteen" as they became known. The trials against those responsible for the crime (being held in Mostar and the Hague) revealed that after their arrest, the young men were taken to the university building, brutally tortured and murdered.

Last week, May 9 2008, East Mostar held a public Muslim funeral for the thirteen and they were buried with highest military honors. The funeral was attended by the country's highest political and religious Muslim leaders (and a pro-Muslim Croat member of our presidency) and the East side of the city declared a day of mourning. Some stores and cafes were open but there was no music. People were also respectfully restrained in that there was no shouting, singing, laughing as a result of which, the East side was eerily quiet on that Friday morning. In contrast, if you walked across the bridge and onto the West side, you were greeted with music blaring from cafes. For the Croat part of the city, this was just another day.

As my taxi drove me from the West side to the bus station on the East side, I asked the cab driver (a big Catholic cross hanging around his rear view mirror) about the funeral. "Oh those poor souls," he said giving me hope that finally, here is a Croat who commiserates with these men. "They were murdered by their own," he exclaimed. "What do you mean?" I asked, trying not to get angry and thinking of my friend who lost his brother. "Well, Juka killed them. He was a Muslim wasn't he?!" he almost shouted as if he could sense my anger. "I guess so," I dropped the matter as we approached the station. Indeed, the men were murdered by a unit led by Juka Prazina, a Muslim thug and a bandit who after fighting for the Bosnian army, switched sides and fought on the side of the HVO. The fact that at the time of the murders Juka's militia was an HVO unit and that the attack on the Bosnian army command center was conducted by HVO and ordered by top HVO generals (many of them now in the Hague) did not disturb the seemingly flawless logic of my cab driver. This logic suggested that Juka was a murderer with a Muslim name and this relieved the collective Croat body of any responsibility. Disturbingly, the cab driver felt the need to speak on behalf of this collectivity and act as its public defender.

As our bus rolled out of Mostar and towards Sarajevo, I looked at the throngs of people walking towards the main square where the funeral was to be held. I felt utterly exhausted. I could not wait to get home. I never felt more American that on that day.