ABSTRACT
The violent and bloody breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia gave the late twentieth century the resonant euphemism ‘ethnic cleansing’ and graphic images of forced displacement, gutted houses and distraught civilians. Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter BiH), a compellingly beautiful land of religious diversity and distinctive regions at the centre of the former Yugoslavia, tore itself apart, destroying long-established traditions of neighbourliness and common life. Bridges, literally and figuratively, were blown up. The most famous of all, the Stari Most, commissioned in 1566 by Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman emperor, survived 400 years of eventful history but not direct targeting by the guns of the Croatian General Slobodan Praljak’s HVO (Hrvatske Vijece Odbrane). Its filmed collapse into the Neretva River on 9 November 1993 symbolised the destruction not only of BiH but Yugoslavia as a whole, just as Bloody Sunday’s images symbolised a Northern Ireland unravelling two decades before. BiH arguably displaced Northern Ireland as the European signifier for intractable sectarian conflict and hate. During the dark years of the Troubles, Northern Ireland generated outsized images of sectarian strife: families burnt from their homes, civil rights marchers under fire and lying dead on the street, bombings, shootings, mass imprisonment, security forces ambushed, people disappeared and the seemingly endless attrition of sectarian conflict; ‘great hatred, little room’, to use William Butler Yeats’ immortal phrase. Then, in the late 1990s with enormous assistance from outside, it conjured up a seeming miracle, the Good Friday Agreement. The signifier changed and as President Obama remarked in Belfast in 2013 ‘clenched fists gave way to outstretched hands’. ‘Few conflicts in the world seemed more intractable than the one here in Northern Ireland,’ Obama remarked. ‘And when peace was achieved here, it gave the entire world hope’ (Obama 2013). This discourse of hatred and then hope, of darkness and then the dawning of a new day of (potential) peace is as affectively compelling as it is analytically superficial in describing Northern Ireland and BiH. Both places are intrinsically complex polities, with histories and geographies that are dense with signification and contested meanings. Comparing the two, and further comparing two regional cities within each, Mostar and Derry, each wrestling with its own traumatic
events, is a hazardous exercise not least because the Troubles and the Bosnian War are incomparable events in so many ways: 4,000 plus dead from low intensity conflict over decades in Nothern Ireland compared to two million displaced persons and almost 100,000 dead in a vicious civil war in BiH from April 1992 to December 1995. Yet contemporary Mostar is a town that Derry’s residents would find somewhat familiar. The city is divided into two distinct community zones; west and east Mostar (overwhelmingly Croat and Bosniak respectively). In addition, there are some Bosnian Serbs and other ethnicities, as well as those who choose not to play the game of group identity. There are separate schools, restaurants, coffee shops, football teams (Velež for the Bosniaks and Zrinjski for the Croats, each with a separate stadium), bus companies, water and sewage companies, telephone and postal systems and universities (the University of Mostar and University Dzemal Bijedic of Mostar). One side, the Catholic side, routinely asserts its belonging and affinity to a neighbouring state, whereas the other side celebrates the state within which they legally reside. The river Neretva serves as the dividing line at the northern and southern edges but not in the old city centre. Bosniak merchants own tourist stores on the west side of the Stari Most, while the annual bridge-jumping competition is an event that few Croats from Mostar attend. Thus, Mostar’s most famous symbol does not physically bridge the two communities. One crosses from one to the other a few blocks away via the wartime frontline, an avenue now simply named Bulevar (Boulevard), known in Tito’s time as Bulevar Narodne Revolucije (Boulevard of the National Revolution) and unilaterally renamed as Bulevar Hrvatskim Braniteljima (Boulevard of Croat Defenders) during the war. Figuratively and materially, Mostar’s divisions are un-bridged (Gunsburger Makaš 2011). It was not always so. Indeed before Yugoslavia’s collapse Mostar was a relatively prosperous multi-ethnic city. In 1991 35 per cent of the municipality’s population (126,000) identified themselves as Muslims, 34 per cent as Croats, 19 as Serbs, 10 per cent as Yugoslavs and 2 per cent as ‘others’. Since most Yugoslavs were culturally Muslim in pre-war Mostar, it is estimated that Muslims outnumbered Croats four to three before the war; put differently, one-third of Mostar’s pre-war population did not identify themselves as Croat or Muslim and the city had none of today’s ethnic segregation. Thousands of Muslims lived in West Mostar, and mixed marriage abounded in multi-ethnic communities. The ‘living together separately’ that characterised rural areas in Bosnia did not apply to urban Mostar. Indeed the city’s ethnic mix was a product of the resource and defence-driven modernisation undertaken during Tito’s Yugoslavia. Aluminij Mostar, an enormous bauxite-processing plant that employed 5,000 workers at its height, and SOKO, an aeronautics-engineering industrial group that produced military helicopters, provided the main drivers of the city’s economy. How then did this seemingly successful multiethnic city get so divided? Nothing more than the sketch of an answer is possible here, but it will commence by isolating five geopolitical structures and processes that have some resonance with the structural forces that have shaped contemporary Derry.
