Oct. 16, 2009.
Mostar is still undergoing reconstruction. The muted colors and homogeneity of regular streets are absent here. Walking down the wide main avenue is a foray into surreality, like walking past a giant upright checkerboard, the buildings are either white or black; white and newly rebuilt, or black and burnt out, with neat lines in between. Black and white, black and white... Fifteen years after the implosion of Yugoslavia, too many buildings still stand charred and bullet-scarred, awaiting the funding needed to fix them. Like beggars on the street, locals pass these decrepit buildings pretending not to notice, but surely wishing they would just go away.
In 1993 and 1994 city parks were hastily converted into cemeteries to accommodate the casualties of the war. Walking past these, it is too easy to contemplate the depths to which humanity is capable of descending, and to despair. And yet my group's experience in Mostar was a positive one, because as much as the city illustrates the extreme brutality we are capable of, it also exemplifies a fierce resilience. The incredible thing about the city is that after so much ugliness not everyone has surrendered to hate, something that would be easy - almost natural - to do. No one demonstrated this attitude more aptly than Maja Ahmec, our young local guide. Though only a child during the war, she lives with its legacy every day as she guides groups of tourists through the cobbled lanes of Mostar’s Old Town.
When we cross Santica Street, a road that used to divide the city into warring zones, she doesn’t refer to it as the street, but the dam street. When she talks about the war, it is not just the war, but the dam war. The dam street, the dam war. Maja is full of hate, but she doesn’t hate ‘the other,’ she doesn’t hate ‘the enemy.’ She hates hate itself; she has no tolerance for intolerance. She has no time for those that cling to the ethnic divisions of the nineties.
Maja wants to teach, to tell the next generation what really happened here, and ensure that it doesn’t happen again. More than the bricks and mortar that piece the broken buildings back together, Maja and those like her are the foundations of a better future for Mostar’s next generation.
