War-Weary Muslims, Croats Strive to Bury a Bitter Past

Perhaps, concedes an aide to the Croatian leadership on the west bank of this divided city, local politicians were a bit “overzealous” in proclaiming their own state within Bosnia and driving out their Muslim neighbors.

“Mistakes have been made by both sides,” allows Tony Vucic, an Australian adviser to the self-styled Bosnian Croat presidency that proclaimed the rogue state of Herzeg-Bosna and took most of this once-integrated city for its capital.

On the Muslim-held east bank, there is a stunning new willingness to forgive the majority of Croats, as long as the outside world does not forget those most guilty of bringing this centuries-old cosmopolitan society to segregation and ruin.

“It is my hope and belief that we will come to a good understanding for all people involved,” predicts Alija Alikadic, a member of Muslim-held east Mostar’s war council, in a reference to the peace talks that engendered a Muslim-Croat federation agreement signed Friday. “We want a multicultural state, and the Croats, except for the extremists, also realize this is the only way. As long as a war crimes tribunal punishes the most guilty, I’m sure a cosmopolitan Mostar will survive.”

Although Croats and Muslims only a few weeks ago were blasting each other with artillery and fanning the flames of hate, both now take on the same aggrieved tones in contending they would never have been compelled to turn on each other if the West had intervened to halt the Serbian aggression that tore the former Yugoslav federation apart.

Like a reconciling couple eager to blame outsiders for their breakup so each can forgive the other, the Croats and Muslims of central Bosnia are so desperate for a return to peace that they are accepting without question the 180-degree turn in the propaganda course executed in recent days by their respective political leaders.

The suddenly softened rhetoric from both sides of the Neretva River that divides this once-scenic city has probably been the most powerful inducement to the brutalized and exhausted populations to believe their war may really be over, their heartaches on the mend.

“We Balkan peoples are like livestock,” a 50-year-old Croatian woman says in self-derision. “Whichever way our leaders push us, that’s where we go.”

The succession of wars that have ravaged the former Yugoslav republics since 1991 were largely spurred by propaganda and official manipulation of historic grievances.

And it has long been expected that a change in thinking at the top would be the only means of bringing the violence to an end.

How strongly the Croatian leadership in Zagreb and the Muslim-led Bosnian government in Sarajevo are committed to making their newly restored alliance work remains to be seen.

But the groundswell toward peace has taken on its own momentum now, as Muslim and Croatian civilians, equally sickened by a war neither side can win, are taking their leaders at their word and struggling to ensure an enduring reunion.

U.N. troops from Spain, Malaysia, Britain and Canada are also scurrying to take advantage of the current change of heart, corralling both sides’ heavy weapons to guard against a resumption of artillery shelling in the event of some local flare-up along the circuitous and still-volatile front line.

“We are optimistic about the prospects,” says Jose Luis Gutierrez, spokesman for the U.N. Spanish battalion in nearby Medjugorje. He noted that not a single violation of the March 7 deadline for withdrawal of heavy weapons has been discovered in this area, which until last week was one of the bloodiest ethnic fault lines.

“There is a change in will on both sides that I think had to come from the top,” says Kirsten Young, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ security officer for the Mostar region. “The two sides have been having discussions about all kinds of things, even about people evicted from west Mostar to east Mostar being able to go back to the west side for family visits.”

The change in the official message is most obvious among the designated mouthpieces: For most of the past year, they have publicly demonized the rival population. Now they assert with great sincerity that reconciliation and re-integration are the only paths to a secure future.

“It’s going to be very difficult, but it has to be that way,” Bosnian Croat military spokesman Veso Vegar said when asked if he expected Muslims and Croats to rebuild Mostar without social walls and ethnic divisions. “Time is the only cure for what has happened here. But there is a basic human instinct to push out of consciousness what has been most painful.”

Distrust remains rampant, and there are signs that not everyone is so keen to simply relegate the past year of savagery to the status of a bad memory.

“We hope the cease-fire will stay in effect, but after all the destruction and all the terrible things that have happened here, we can’t be that optimistic or confident,” says Alija Behram, director of an underground radio station on the east side. His station has kept the Muslim community’s pain fresh with daily first-person accounts of atrocities committed by extremist Croats.

Yet Behram concedes that the attitude discernible from Sarajevo is one of emphasizing the positive and helping people, through balanced media presentation, to come to grips with their fears and resentments.

“I would like to say to everyone, ‘Go home, go back where you belong.’ But how can I say that when I don’t know if someone will shoot at them, or who would defend them, or what kind of reception they would get from the Croats on the other side?” says Behram, who lost his older sister to a Croatian mortar blast and has been holed up with his wife, two daughters, younger sister and displaced parents in an apartment cellar shared with 16 other refugees.

But the voices of naysayers and antagonists are being drowned out by the war-weary civilians who, though still suspicious of a peace proclaimed so suddenly, want nothing more than a lasting rapprochement.

Since the shelling that reduced east Mostar to rubble stopped a few hours ahead of a March 7 U.N. deadline, life has returned to the streets and a daylight curfew has been lifted.

Children who had spent months in dank, fetid cellars have turned the shattered landscape into new playgrounds, clambering over bullet-riddled cars and shell-toppled fountains and monuments. Lovers kiss and soak up the early spring sunshine on park benches, seemingly oblivious to the graves that have been tucked into the urban greenbelts for lack of space or access to cemeteries for the 1,300 of their neighbors killed over the past year.

The more Mostar returns to normal--or as much normalcy as can be salvaged from among the ruins--the more fiercely civilians on both sides will resist any retreat to the ethnic bloodletting.

“Even though I’ve lost everything, all that I worked for throughout 40 years, I can’t hate anybody for what has happened,” insists 59-year-old Alija Hadzajlic, a former military college professor who now teaches math and science to refugee children. “There are thousands in Mostar who have suffered at least as much as I have, and we all have to realize that hatred is not the way.”

On the west side, 19-year-old Croatian waitress Anna Maria Lovric observes it will be hard to ever again trust Muslims, who have been unquestionably blamed by state-run Croatian media for the Croat-Muslim rift. But she concedes Mostar cannot be divided without losing its soul.

“We have to find some way to live together again,” she says, expressing perplexity over the eviction last summer of a Muslim friend and neighbor.

The cessation of shelling and the reduction in small-arms fire to little more than a few stray shots each day has given both communities the confidence to dare to think they are heading into better days.

“There has been a calming on the field, and this will force the political process,” says Albert Benabou, U.N. civil affairs officer for the region. “This may be the turning point, although we should be careful not to jump to conclusions.”

The ultimate success of the Muslim-Croat reconciliation may depend on moves that neither community can deliver, as their new federal alliance within Bosnia counts on recovering considerable territory from the Bosnian Serbs.

Serbian nationalist gunmen who instigated Bosnia’s fighting by rising in arms against an April, 1992, vote for independence have seized 70% of the republic’s territory and have staunchly resisted Western pressures to rejoin Muslims and Croats in a new federation or give up some of the occupied land.

If Muslims and Croats fail to wrest the areas they have been told by mediators are rightfully theirs, the frictions that drove them to fight each other for what was left of Bosnia could again break the alliance.

But both sides, for now, are putting out a message that there is reason to hope for a common future.

The Bosnian Croat rebel leader, Mate Boban, was replaced on the advice of Zagreb with a more moderate figure, and Bosnia’s Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, has been relegated to a figurehead position by the republic’s dynamic prime minister, Haris Silajdzic, who enjoys more domestic and international support.

A U.S. diplomat helping to broker the confederation between Bosnia and Croatia said Boban and Izetbegovic carried too much responsibility for the past year’s fighting in the eyes of the other people and that their retreat to the background made it possible for both sides to save face and push a more rational policy of reconciliation.

Williams was recently on assignment in Bosnia-Herzegovina.