"Dear God, please spare me Serb heroism and Croatian culture," ("Sacuvaj me boze srpskog junastva i hrvatske kulture") was a famous quip of Miroslav Krleza (1893-1981), the greatest Yugoslav and Croatian writer of the 20th century.
Krleza did not live long enough to witness the destruction of Yugoslavia and the wars of the 1990s, but he unerringly identified -- and mocked in his typically acerbic style -- the nationalist conceits that played no small part in the breakup of the country. A major element in Serb national identity has long been their supposed martial spirit, while the Croats have sought to distinguish themselves from their Balkan neighbors by claiming to possess a superior, more authentically Western culture. Both of these national myths were given the lie in the war.
The Serbs showed little of their military prowess in the 1990s wars, contriving to lose ground in all the conflicts -- in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo -- despite enjoying overwhelming superiority in weapons and personnel. On the other hand, some of the most notorious acts of destruction of cultural heritage -- aimed at removing all traces of the Muslim population from areas of Bosnia that the Croats considered to be "theirs" -- were masterminded or carried out by men who before the war had built a reputation as "promoters of culture." The case of Slobodan Praljak is typical, and one of the crimes for which he has been convicted in the first instance at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is the destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar.
'Prlic Five'
Slobodan Praljak (72) is one of "the Prlic Five," a group of Croat political and military leaders tried along with Jadranko Prlic, the former president of the wartime statelet of "Herceg-Bosna." The six men were convicted in 2013 and given prison sentences of 16 to 25 years. They are awaiting judgments on appeal on November 29.
While the Bosnian Serb Army was busy carving out the borders of what became Republika Srpska, in the southwest, Bosnian Croat forces -- with significant support from Croatia proper -- turned on the Bosnian Army and set out to establish their own ethnically homogenous space, using some of the same methods of ethnic cleansing employed by the Serbs.
Before the war, Praljak had been a writer and film director. He had also been the director of various theaters, including in Mostar. With the outbreak of the war, the man of culture became a general and an adviser to Croatian President Franjo Tudjman. He was eventually accused of command responsibility for the destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar, one of the most striking Ottoman monuments in the Balkans, and a jewel of Bosnia's Islamic heritage.
The Old Bridge in Mostar following its reconstruction in 2004. (file photo)
The 16th-century bridge over the Neretva River was commissioned by Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent and built by the Ottoman architect Mimar Hayruddin. Its construction is wrapped in myth and legend, but it became the symbol of the city of Mostar, which got its name from it. According to the 17th-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi, the name "Mostar" means "bridge-keeper."
Celebi wrote that the bridge was "like a rainbow arch soaring up to the skies, extending from one cliff to the other.... I, a poor and miserable slave of Allah, have passed through 16 countries but I have never seen such a high bridge. It is thrown from rock to rock as high as the sky."
The graceful arch stood for more than four centuries, surviving not only the fall of the Ottoman Empire, but two world wars -- including the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. But like so much of Bosnia's Ottoman heritage, it was not spared by the merciless onslaught of Serb and -- in this case -- Croat nationalists intent on erasing the country's Islamic past.
Overwhelmed By Sorrow
During the trial in The Hague, Praljak denied all charges, and his defense lawyers spun conspiracy theories backed by "experts" who asserted that the Old Bridge in Mostar was "most likely destroyed by explosives rigged on the bridge [by the Bosnian Army], not when it was hit by a shell fired from HVO [Bosnian Croat forces] tank."
However it was not merely a stray shell, but over 60 projectiles that were fired at the bridge between November 8 and 9, 1993, from HVO positions before the Old Bridge collapsed. In a recent tweet, a resident of Mostar described the sorrow that overwhelmed him the moment the bridge collapsed.
There was a belief among Bosnians that only someone without education or culture -- a barbarian -- could destroy an ancient monument that preserves the footprints of past centuries. But that was far from the case. The Croatian group of six held responsible for the act was extremely well-educated, and it's likely that Praljak has more academic diplomas than any other member of the Prlic Five. He initially studied engineering and graduated with distinction from Zagreb University, but this was followed by degrees in Philosophy and Sociology. A year after that, he graduated from the Film Academy.
The day the Old Bridge was destroyed, the Sarajevo-based newspaper "Oslobodjenje" published an editorial with the headline: "They Have Killed The Oldest Resident Of Mostar."
The Old Bridge was rebuilt after the war, in 2004, thanks to foreign funds as well as expertise and backing by UNESCO.
'Extended Cease-Fire'
One of the traditions that became inextricably associated with the Old Bridge was the annual diving competition, organized every summer by the "Mostari" club. This year, they marked the anniversary of the destruction of the bridge on November 9 in a special manner. There was a gathering of students from Mostar schools, as well as residents and local politicians, but they were predominantly from one side of the Neretva, with Croat officials conspicuous by their absence.
Air-raid sirens were sounded, flowers were cast into the river below, and a single diver jumped off the bridge followed by silence, without the usual applause.
Mostar resident Zeljko Laketic was in the Bosnian military in 1993, and stood only a few dozen meters away from the Old Bridge when it was destroyed.
"I saw that everyone was in tears, as if a member of their family had been killed. I saw hardened men, veterans of two years of war who had seen everything, crying like little children," Laketic told RFE/RL.
Meanwhile, the Croat politicians only show up on the anniversary of the reopening of the bridge, preferring to ignore the circumstances of its destruction.
Apart from its beauty, the Old Bridge in Mostar had over the centuries become a symbol of this multiethnic Bosnian city, uniting the two banks of the Neretva River. Its destruction was thus not only about erasing the Islamic past, but symbolically breaking the bonds between the city's various peoples. The bridge may have been rebuilt, but the fabric of Bosnia's -- and Mostar's -- multiethnic society has not been stitched back together.
As a local RFE/RL correspondent recently lamented to me: "Here [in Mostar] we do not have peace, only an extended cease-fire."