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So This Is Peace By Janine di Giovanni May 30, 1993 (The Sunday Times) Before he was driven across the Neretva river, away from the left bank of Mostar where he had always lived, Nerez Mackiz snatched a glance for the last time at Starimost, the ancient Turkish bridge that has been the symbol of Muslim ethnicity in Bosnia for centuries. The bridge has been directly shelled six times, twice by the Serbs and four times by the Croats, but the arches have still not collapsed. Above it flies a burned blue-and-white Bosnian flag. Below it stretch the remains of the gutted old town, the shattered mosque, the crumbled facades of ancient stone houses, where the Muslim population of Mostar now cowers under fire in dirt and rubble, waiting for death. Mackiz, 53, a Muslim civil engineer who has survived two "ethnic cleansings" in the past year, once by Serbs and now by Croats, sat quietly weeping in a corner with his two small bags, waiting for a bus to cross through the destroyed city. He did not know where he was going, only that he could not return. "Why target that bridge, the mosque?" he asked. "The mosque has been there for 500 years. It survived two world wars, but now it is a pile of bricks. It took this kind of hatred to bring it to the ground." His wife Muliya, a judge in her former life, scribbled a telephone number on a scrap of paper: "Please call my son in Croatia. He's only 15 and he's alone. Tell him we're alive, that we have survived; but please don't tell him what it's really like here and what has become of his city." They were the lucky ones. They were among the few escaping from this killing ground only a mile and a half long by 300 yards wide in the rubble of the old heart of the city, where up to 30,000 Muslims are trapped between their blood enemies, the Serbs and the Croats. Flinching to the sound of heavy machineguns, rockets, mortars, and anti-aircraft fire and ignored by the outside world the Muslims of Mostar are waiting to die. PEACE is coming to Bosnia - Herzegovina, according to an agreement reached last weekend by America, Britain, France, Russia and Spain. But in the ruins of Mostar's old town, the inadequacy of this new Western formula is self-evident. Behind the trapped Muslims, on Podvelezje mountain, are the Serb positions. In front of them, on the west bank of the river, are their former allies, the Croats, now the new enemy. According to the Red Cross, their situation "is potentially worse than Srebrenica", the east Bosnian town that has become a symbol of Muslim martyrdom. The United Nations estimates that there are already 15,000 Muslims in this hell-hole. The Red Cross says 30,000; and the Muslims reckon 35,000. Hundreds more are thrust across the river each day after being "ethnically cleansed" from their homes by Croatian forces determined to turn Mostar into the capital of "Herzeg-Bosna", the Croat Bosnian republic. "The population is terrified," said one UN official. "The status of the situation is, without doubt, an emergency. It's a mess." On every corner and in every destroyed home there are piles of rubbish. The windows of what once were cafes and shops are smashed, the streets full of broken glass. By night the ground is littered with sleeping bodies; by day children play among the ruins, waving wooden toy Kalashnikov rifles, oblivious to the horror. There is no water on the left bank, only three water trucks where people wait for hours. The water, a doctor says, is not entirely safe to drink. Only two UN convoys have arrived and people fear what will happen when their food stocks run out. They fear the Croats will blow up the Tito bridge the only one still passable and cut off supplies completely. The constant sniper activity is even more dangerous than in Sarajevo. "There is nowhere to run," said Yasmin Gostevic, 23, a fighter who was a tour guide before the war. "Everywhere you turn someone is watching you." Every morning in the makeshift hospital there are sniper casualties always civilians shot through the head. Doctors estimate that 400 people have been wounded on the left bank in the three weeks since the battle for Mostar began. "Croats are good shots," said Stepan "Shock" Andrasic, the head of the Bosnian anti-sniper team. "They don't fool around." Snipers rake the Tito bridge, but on every street corner Muslim civilians beg anyone with a car to take them across it, to hunt for lost members of their families in the cellars of a tiny strip of buildings still held by a few Muslim fighters on the right bank of the river. On the streets, there is chaos. Soldiers average age 19 sit nervously on the street without guns, without proper boots, with genuine fear in their eyes. They are outnumbered six to one by the Croats and they have little ammunition. "We can't stop it, it's just a matter of how long," said a Bosnian brigade commander. "We're going to die anyway, either by ethnic cleansing or fighting. The Serbs have Serbia as a base, the Croats have Croatia, we have nobody and nothing, not even arms. We won't stop fighting until the end. When we run out of ammunition we will use stones." "Colonel Norrie" Phillips, a former British soldier who left the Croatian side to train Muslims in anti-sniper techniques, said: "Estimates are that the fall of the left bank is imminent. It's not a matter of whether or not the Croats will take the strip, it is a matter of when. They will take the land and then send in the death squads. The soldiers know it they sense it and they know there is nothing they can do about it. It's not fear; it's reality." The cemetery is full of the fresh graves of young men born in the late 1970s who took up arms when the battle began. "People keep comparing us to Sarajevo," said one of the seven doctors tending the wounded with limited supplies at the hospital. "But we are not a little Sarajavo. They only have one enemy, we have two." THE Croatian forces doggedly maintain that they have not started this new war but are sticking to the Vance-Owen plan in which Mostar, a city that before the war was primarily Muslim, becomes Croatian. "We take people from their homes only to protect them," said one commander. "And we do not target civilians, only soldiers." At the edge of the town near the river is a damp, abandoned cinema where refugees, many of them "cleansed" two or three times from their homes, lie huddled in the dark listening to the fighting. Mustafa Culesca, 73, clutched a transistor radio, the only item he managed to take with him, and begged someone to telephone his daughter in Germany. "How long?" wept Zurijeta Torevegak, 35, whose injured daughter, 16, was in a hospital "on the other side". "We cannot stand this any more. The killing, the mortars, the war." Muliya Mackiz and her husband were boarding a bus in a civilian exchange organised by the Croats. "We don't know where we are going, we only know that we have nothing left here," he said. "We were always lucky people our lives were rich, we travelled, our children went to the best schools, but in the past year we have become refugees. For the past 17 days we have slept on the floor and last night I was so happy because I found an old door and we slept on that. I must stop the kind of anger I feel, anger because my family has lived here for hundreds of years. Muslims alongside Croats, Croats alongside Serbs and gypsies. Like that bridge, we survived generations and now all of us are the losers." |
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