Kirsten Young was a UNHCR protection officer during the worst days of the siege of the Bosnian town of Mostar. She recently revisited the area to see how it has adapted to peace. Her report:

Mostar, August, 1993: the stench of rotting corpses, the smell of excrement and garbage pervade the eastern part of town.

Ethnic cleansing is in full swing. Masked Croatian paramilitaries drag Muslims and Serbs from their beds in the dead of night. Men are taken to detention camps at Dretelj and Gabela, some never to be seen again.

Women are expelled from the Croat-held western bank across the river Neretva to the Muslim-held eastern quarter, often after being gang raped.

Some are killed, but the survivors cower in candle-lit basements from day and night mortar bombardments, wishing only to escape to safety; Germany, France, anywhere.

Memories are like a blurred fast moving film featuring columns of refugees, detention camps, wrecked hospitals, razed churches, toppled minarets and public parks converted into cemeteries.

Mostar, it seemed to us foreign workers at the time, was the center of the universe, our only purpose being to help the civilian victims of a brutal and senseless war but failing to come to terms with the fact that genocide was again on the loose in Europe.

Returning to Mostar rekindled the spine-chilling fear of that time under siege when the airport was in no-man’s land and the only way ‘in’ was through a hail of rocket and sniper fire across the frontline.

A different scene

Today, the mines, the trip-wires, the checkpoints, the raggedly-dressed kids begging for food have all gone. Sniper warnings along the main street have been covered by election billboards, bomb craters have been filled in, shattered buildings rebuilt. There is a Benetton store, dog walkers, water and electricity.

Bridges have been repaired and freedom of movement restored, but this ‘normalcy’ is deceptive.

People who were forcibly evicted in those dark days still cannot go back home - despite Dayton, despite local pledges of reconciliation and despite the presence of NATO troops.

Why, I wondered in a city seemingly so ‘normal’ did people not simply insist on their right to return to old homes only five minutes walk away on the other side of the river?

But the Mostar dilemma is the same as that facing communities throughout Bosnia. The old-style politicians and the gangs of thugs are still there. New hardliners, themselves displaced, are in town occupying the empty homes of the ethnically cleansed. They will not move from Mostar unless they can return to their own homes elsewhere in Bosnia.

In such circumstances, going home may be hazardous to your health.

One group of Muslims I talked with returned to their village south of Mostar a month earlier. They were greeted on their first night back by a grenade tossed through a window which killed one man and wounded a second.

For the moment the villagers are shrugging off physical attacks and other forms of intimidation. There is no electricity or water and their homes have been looted to empty shells. It is peacetime but the windows of their homes are newly covered with UNHCR plastic sheeting - for me the symbol of war from those earlier days and not the sign of a hopeful future.

Begging for their lives

In the final scene from the movie Schindler’s List, the hero says, “I should have taken more” referring to the number of Jews he tried to save. I felt enormous guilt in leaving Mostar that I had not been able to help in getting more people out of there too.

Every day people begged us, often on their knees, to help them leave before they were ‘next.’ We did what we could, but it was never enough. We would return a few days later to find some of the people we had talked to just a few days ago gone - disappeared, ethnically cleansed, massacred.

I hoped a return to Mostar might help me confront the demons of guilt which have haunted me for five years.

And then I met one man we did save - a detainee from the Gabela detention camp who was resettled in Europe.

He had returned to Bosnia several months earlier but the reality is that he is now a ‘minority’ returnee in his own town. His house is still half-destroyed, his neighbors are hostile but he says he is happier than at any time during those ‘safe’ years in Europe.

Why? Because he is home. My hope is that all of the people of Mostar will eventually be able to go home too.

Source: Refugees Magazine issue 114 (1999)