Mostar Travelogue: Occidente all’Oriente (Oct 2013)
A Bridge
Bridges unite and separate. People look across, and sometimes they shoot across. When they don’t want the others to come over, they destroy bridge(s). Mostari was a profession known as bridge keepers; their profession’s name is derived from the Serbo-Croat word for bridge, most. But this bridge is more than a bridge. Built by the Ottomans in 1566 to replace an older wooden bridge, it facilitated transport, commerce and integration between the eastern and the western part of the town, named after this very bridge and its keepers, Mostar. Beneath it runs, some 21 meters lower, the river Neretva, flowing north-to-south, the other geographic axis in this sun-flooded valley with mountains on most sides, high ones; they make good shelling positions, as the many ruins in town attest to this day.
Some History
In the wake of the disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia, and pursuant to the misguided and hasty recognition of Croatia’s 1991 declaration of independence by the EU, pushed through in ignorance of the likely implications by Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Helmut Kohl of Germany, the Bosnian fraction of the governing Croatian party declared the independence of the ‘Croat’ parts of Bosnia & Hercegovina. A three-year long fratricidal war commenced, ethnic cleansing, untold horrors, neighbour versus neighbour, village against village, Serbs versus Croats versus Muslims, civilians versus militias versus a professional army.
The Jugoslav National Army and various militias, under the political command of the only recently turned-in Karadzic and the military command of the only recently turned-over Mladic, but moving to the strings pulled by Belgrade-based Serbian president Milosevic, committed many crimes against humanity in these mountains and valleys, with Srebrenica the most extreme mass killing of some 8,300 Muslim civilians. But Mostar was also ferociously attacked since April 1992, being the cultural capital of BiH with a strong tripartite ethnic mix. The victims were mostly Croats and Muslims in a town of 125,000 where these two nationalities constituted about 1/3 each with some 43,000 inhabitants each, on top of some 23,000 Serbs and others (mostly ‘Yugoslavs’ according to the 1991 census; I would still like to call my friends from this part of the world that, that’s who they were when we studied together at UWC Adriatic in the 1980s – but they definitely disagree with that today).
By June 1992, the victims joined forces and were able to repel the JNA, which had already occupied part of the town. But once the joint enemy was weakened and removed from the theatre (after an 18-month siege), the neighbours and century-old cohabitants went onto a brutal fratricidal war of their own, seeking to carve out their parts of the disintegrating Bosnia & Hercegovina. BiH today is a tripartite state, each nation having their own governance arrangements, and often not able to find compromise and workable solutions, having to invoke the UN or EU or their delegates to implement or dictate compromises (such as the former High Representative, Paddy Ashdown).
Some Background
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. It is 6 pm, the sun slowly sets on this beautiful valley. The muezzin from a dozen mosques compete in their singsong, beckoning the evening worshippers to their mosques. This is Europe, a mere two hours’ drive NE from Dubrovnik. But as a European, even a moderately well-read one and well-travelled one, one is not familiar with these latitudes. Dalmatian coastline, Zagreb, Belgrade, there is a familiarity with the more accessible parts of the former Yugoslavia. But not with the ‘hinterland’, the ‘Balkan’ part of the Balkans. (Balkan, it turns out, was a misnomer by a German geographer, assuming the mountain range dominating Bulgaria to run all the way to the coast, when it in fact ends in eastern Serbia.) [According to Misha Glenny, Balkans. 1804-1999. Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (1999)]
In one’s mind and faulty memory, there are confusing little nations with maps that appear incongruent and hard to retain, a multitude of religions, joint languages (Serbo-Croat) that appear also to have made declarations of independence, and to have changed in less than twenty years into allegedly distinct Croatian and Serbian languages (not that I would know, I bought the dictionaries and CDs but have not yet mastered any of it). In my mental baggage, I carry Misha Glenny’s The Fall of Yugoslavia (1991). It is a harrowing and fascinating account by the BBC’s (post-)Yugo journalist of the close links between nationhood, independence, international recognition and/or lack of foresight, which led to a sequence of wars that brought bloodshed, rape and murder to Europe on a scale not seen since WW2. And all this happened in the immediate aftermath of the end of socialism and single-party states, a happy and facilitating juncture that led some to announce the ‘End of History’. [Francis Fukuyama, a US political scientist, in his famous 1989 article commenting the end of the Cold War.]
It allowed many nations caught up since the Yalta conference of 1945 in the western-condoned occupation and domination of Central and Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union [Historic perception is partial not only in the Former Yugoslavia. On a recent visit to Churchill’s Chartwell House in Kent, now a museum run by the UK’s National Trust, one could not find any mention about Churchill selling out Poland and some 200,000 Polish soldiers fighting with the allies, nor any mention of the magnitude of his lapse of judgment when gloating that ‘Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.’ (Wikipedia on Yalta)] to seek to redress that geographic imbalance and to seek a closer integration with the West, symbolized by NATO and the much-maligned EU. In the Former Yugoslavia, Slovenia was the first to ‘want out’; Croatia followed, held back forcibly by Serbia. When Bosnia felt it was its turn, all alarm lights should have flashed red that this would unleash the worst of civil wars, right in Europe. The EU and Western Europe failed badly, if one follows Glenny’s account.
An Edifying Visit
Against this background, and driving up my Yamaha FJR 1300 from the golden Dalmatian coast of the EU’s newly-minted member, Croatia, one is unsure what to expect. The difference in affluence upon entering BIH is quickly apparent and the repeated sights of deserted and decaying houses along the road up from the Adriatic Side alongside the Neretva confirms pre-read images. But some 17km before the city of Mostar, a beautiful church and monastery catches one’s eye. It turns out to have been a Serbian Orthodox monastery, Zitomislic. In a history not untypical of these lands, it was built with theapproval of the Ottoman Empire around 1600; its library and other historic artifacts were destroyed by the Croatian Ustaha in 1941. Rebuilt after the war, it was destroyed by the Croatian-Bosnian forces in 1992. But, a Bosnian commission tasked with rebuilding churches and buildings of cultural and historic and national relevance to all three of Bosnia’s nations, made it its task – with EU funding, again that much-maligned institution rearing its head – to restore and uphold the monastery. It was a harbinger of things to come in Mostar.
Mostar used to have 20 mosques, of which some 13 from Ottoman times. [Now it is 7pm; the bell tower of the Catholic Church chimes out a nice melody; one wonders if the timetabling was a piece of successful governance by the City Council or common sense by the clergymen…] Having survived 3 to 4 centuries of nature and vicissitudes, it took only three years of human warfare to destroy 14 of these historic mosques. But today, the visitor to this thriving and lively town can see many of them restored, with a good running history on architecture, history and meaning, with a small EU sign denominating the paymaster; Brussels is not good at PR, but it has all the wherewithal to do so much better, having done much good to atone for its policy mistakes (in a country that is far from being a member, notabene).
The town now holds only some 100,000 inhabitants, some 25,000 less than in 1991 when the last census was done. By most accounts, the Croat population has somewhat increased, the Muslim one is somewhat smaller [You never forget where you are. Next to the Karabozbegna Dzarija mosque of 1557 is an eerily beautiful little graveyard full of [nisin] gravestones, right next to the Old Town. All the deceased are Muslim, all died in the same year, 1993 … (What meaningful thing can I remember from 1993 from my own life? What if had ended then?)], but the Serbs have been the biggest long-term victim here of the civil war, and most have left for good, it would appear. Walking through the town, some 18 years after the end of the war, one is struck by the number of dilapidated buildings, ridden with bullet holes, which have not been restored or rebuilt. But the city grows around them, and mankind has learned its lesson here. The EU has made a special effort, nominating well-regarded politicians here as administrators (such as Paddy Ashdown, and Hans Koschnick, the former mayor of Bremen). The World Bank, the Aga Khan Foundation, and many others such as the Spanish and the Norwegian governments and Prince Charles have made funds available to rebuild the Old Town, the local Gymnasium (more on which below), the Turkish Public Baths (hammam), the mosques, the churches – and of course the Bridge. The economy has recovered, cultural life appears rich and varied, and tourists crowd the small streets, the bridge, and the many attractions.
UWC - Newly Defined Mission
At a recent visit to one of the UK’s premier public schools (i.e. a private fee-paying one), the Registrar for the 6th form, having himself been a teacher at a UWC for some years, pointedly asked me the question whether the UWC’s mission statement was not somewhat out of date. The UWC movement, as bears repeating, was founded in the 1960s by a German pedagogue and a British diplomat, Kurt Hahn and Lord Mountbatten, in order to foster living- and learning-together of 16-19 year olds from diverse nations, with the explicit aim of fostering their getting-to-know-each-other, international mindedness, tolerance, and an institutional forum for international understanding that would advance peace and avoid the kind of human destruction visited upon Europe by its civilized nations in WW1 and WW2. – I must admit, the question struck me as not being entirely without merit in the global village of 2013. Having been educated myself at the UWC of the Adriatic, founded in 1982 to foster intra-European dialogue between the western half and the eastern half beyond the Iron Curtain, 20km east of the school past Trieste, and having married my Polish UWC sweetheart and having overcome our own iron curtain, going so far as to settle since 1996 in formerly drab and socialist Poland, now a thriving young nation, it appeared at first that the Registrar had a point.
Well, he probably never met David Sutcliffe, who would have sought to (re-)convert him in an instant. David was the enthusiastic and at times stern headmaster at UWC Adriatic (Italy), and for a time something of an anti-father figure for me. Only with the passing of distance and time did I come to respect and like his point of view and manner; the same can be said, mutatis mutandis, about my relationship with my father, come to think of it. Well, David, not content with retiring, having been headmaster at the first UWC of the Atlantic in Wales and the oldest IB school in the UK, which celebrated 50 years of its existence in 2012, as well as founding headmaster of UWC Adriatic, felt the need to make the UWC movement more relevant to the 21st century, together with a small group of like-minded musketeers, some of whom had an unrelated affinity for Bosnia. David was of the view that “International education in the 21st century must adopt a more adventurous and idealistic approach to the world’s problems, taking the expertise and resources, especially human resources, that is has developed over the past fifty years in countries of political and financial stability to regions and communities that, themselves lacking these advantages, have the most pressing need for international and intercultural understanding among the young. It is also time for the United World Colleges to place themselves once again in the vanguard as they were in the 1960’s and 1970’s […] and for both cost and educational reasons, the future of international education lies in a recognition that its principles and its people (staff and students) must operate in a close and influential relationship with state education and state schools.” [This and the following quotes are from: The United World College in Mostar. Facts, Figures, Stories and Reflections. Published in May 2013 by Education in Action].
To cut a long story short: One of Mostar’s most famous buildings and institutions, the Gimnazja Mostar, founded in 1893 and once home to over 1,000 students, housed in a stunning building erected in 1902 and architecturally influenced by the reign of the Austro-Hungarian empire over Bosnia between 1878 and 1918, had also been severely damaged in the war, as buildings surrounding it to this day attest to with their empty windows and bullet holes. When the opportunity arose to seed a new UWC into this famous Mostar school, which had been attended by all three ethnic groups resident in Bosnia, David and some like-minded pioneers took the opportunity. Bosnia, they recognized, had suffered beyond description in the short but brutal war, some 100,000 people of its 4m population killed, the majority of which civilians, and roughly 50% of the population displaced. Mostar, it was felt, was a very suitable place for the new college, as David argued in a November 2000 note that first outlined the idea: “Mostar is suggested both for its enormous symbolic significance as well as its favourable climate and geographical location. Furthermore, there is convincing evidence of the two main ethnic groups, the Croats and the Moslems, to build new bridge between their communities. There also continues to be a small Serb presence.”
NB:
1. There is the word bridge again.
2. The Stari Most was not rebuilt until 2004.
3. The UWC Mostar opened in 2006.
Well, David kindly organized for me, through the good offices of the Headmistress, Valentina Mindoljevic, a visit to the school. Perfectly organized by the Head of PR and herself a Mostar alumni, Irma Husic, I had the chance to meet a young Polish and Croatian teacher as well as IB students from Germany/Korea, Sarajevo, Iraq and Russia. Thirty years after having commenced my own UWC initiation, the enthusiasm and curiosity were much the same, the openness to dialogue and to people and matters new and different just as commendable. I wish the Registrar from the UK school could have been with me, he might have changed his mind.
About one third of the 150 students come from BiH, all ethnic groups I am told. Selection is strictly based on merit, and through national UWC committees (see www.uwc.org for details). No gifted rich kids here – (which I hasten to add is none of their fault, you cannot pick your parents). That is no trifle. As is evident from a slew of books about the structural socioeconomic challenges in the United States (e.g. from economics Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz’ The Price of Inequality (2012), or from the FT’s US correspondent, Edward Luce’s Time to Start Thinking. America in the Age of Descent, (2012)), inequality of opportunity is becoming the biggest obstacle to the realization of the American dream – which the US has done such a good job of exporting around the world since 1945. While the causes are many, the effects are statistically unequivocal and deflating: it matters less and less how bright you are as an American child, but it matters more and more into which household and social environment you were born. The best predicator of US college admissions and US tertiary educational success is the wealth of the applicant’s parents. QED. [Luce quotes the depressing recent statistic that a full 75% of graduates from the 146 best universities in the US are from the richest 25% of US households. (p.173). Stiglitz cites a Stanford study that has found that “the gap in test scores between rich and poor American children is roughly 30-40% wider than it was 25 years ago.” (p. xv) Lawrence Summers, the brilliant and occasionally abrasive Harvard economist that did not get the nod to become the new head of the US FED, put it bluntly: ‘It is easier to graduate if you are dumb and rich than smart and poor.’ (cited in Luce)].
Back to Mostar’s UWC: Selection based on merit. One third of the students from BIH itself, the rest from some 30 nations, near and afar. Measurable Success? Of the May 2012 graduating class of 51 students, 41 went to US/UK/international universities, 2 to BIH universities, 1 into military service and 7 into a gap year. 18 of the 22 local students from BIH went to US universities, that is 82%.[While arguments about ‘brain drain’ may come up, UWC experience has shown that over time, students come back to their home countries, often with valuable qualifications and professional experience.] It must be hoped that their international experience will seed a new perspective on the difficult issues still facing their country. All UWC students in Mostar perform social service, often in the local community. There are programs to share teacher qualifications and experiences with local teachers at local schools. Etc etc. QED.
However, success has not come easy, and the institutions’ survival is not guaranteed, funding being the key issue. As David Sutcliffe put it, ‘Our enterprise in Bosnia is still so new that each successive year of survival has a touch of the miraculous.’ A grant by the Norwegian government has ensured financial sustainability through 2014, but more efforts are needed, and DONATIONS from all are welcome. [At the end of this post you can find full payment details]
Epilogue
Nowadays, there are new mostari. This is the name of the high-diving artists that stand on top of the bridge, some 21 metres above the moving Neretva, skimpily dressed in front of throngs of tourists from Italia and Serbia and Slovenia and Croatia and Japan; once they collect commitments of some EUR 50, they jump, acrobatically and courageously, into the river. That’s the new normal in Mostar, more courageous than shelling civilians from the heights. Banality is also welcome: newlyweds pose in front of the nearly-restored bridge, finished in 2004 after seven years of reconstruction, co-financed by the EU, and declared a world heritage in 2005 by UNESCO.
Mostar holds a heritage and lessons for us in more ways than one. There is courage and optimism where there was fratricide and untold cruelty. There is reconstruction and a new dialogue where there was destruction and blind hatred. There are new opportunities for local Muslims and Croats to get an education at the Gimnazija Mostar, and then graduate from the United World College Mostar with the International Baccalaureat, and use it as a springboard to the wider world.
One comes away feeling grateful and elated, optimistic and encouraged. Mostar has shown that integration between Muslims and Christians in Europe is possible, despite a shared difficult history. Bosnia may be ‘at the footsteps of Europe’, as Tony Blair mistakenly stated, but it has a thing or two to teach the bigger European nations struggling to integrate their Muslim brethren. Germany at last is considering dual citizenship, some 60 years after first recruiting Turkish Gastarbeiter, which now number over 5m in the country including dependents. The UK is continuously working to improve the integration of the Muslim population from its former Commonwealth, , and France has come to realize par force what problems it has in its banlieues, the first step in seeking to formulate policies that aid integration, foster tolerance, and reduce social tensions.
Here’s to Mostar. Here’s to UWC. Here’s to Europe!
Or, to give David Sutcliffe the last word:“Our human strength grows term by term.It is this that, in the end, will win the day.” [Message from the Chairman of the Foundation, Annual Report School Year 2011-12, UWC Mostar]
Attachment 1: Account Details for UWC Mostar (for Donations)
