6/14: Mostar and what is a Muslim?

VBTers: please leave comments!

Today we took a trip to Mostar that we had booked ahead of time. The tour agency was recommended by VBT but was not part of the tour so it cost 2500 kuna, about $100 per person. This covered our transportation to and from Mostar plus a running narrative by our driver. Since it was a private tour, he was agreeable to do pretty much whatever we wanted. For example, we skipped a stop at Medugorje, a site where there had been a sighting of the Virgin Mary. Since we only had one Catholic in the group and he is recovering, we skipped this stop although when we were in Mostar, we did see a group of pilgrims whose itinerary probably included this site.

Zoran was our driver and tourguide. He worked for a property management company that rented apartments and did airport runs and occasionally private tours. This was the company that VBT recommended and we thought it was a good referral. He was a 30-something, knowledgeable and hip. We drove for about three hours along the coast, crossing into Bosnia-Herzegovina, back into Croatia, and finally into Bosnia-Herzegovina. Each border crossing required a stop and examination of passports.

We had no trouble at each border crossing. We did see a car that had been pulled over and the guards were going through everything. Zoran told us that the car had Albanian plates and that the crossing guards typically pull over anyone with Albanian plates. They were looking for drug runners. Racial profiling, Croatian-style.

We broke the trip with a stop at a small restaurant. If it followed the published itinerary, it was in the village of Neum. We tried Kokta, the local version of Coke and it was reminiscent of RC Cola with a splash of cough syrup.

At Mostar we were met a local tour guide, Anisa. Like Mario in Dubrovnik, Anisa was trained and licensed to give tours. She worked for the Fortuna tour company. She had recently been hired as a Rick Steves guide. She was not only knowledgeable but we found that she was personable and happy to talk about her personal life and perspective on the social and political state of all the Balkan countries.

Here we are at the very start. It was pretty warm all day. She said it could get to 45 C (that's 113 F) during the summer. It wasn't that hot today but we got into the shade whenever possible.

The touristy thing to do in Mostar is to visit the bridge. This is a better picture of the bridge than of us.

Notice  the guy in the yellow trunks standing at the top of the bridge? These guys take the 70' jump into the water. A few dive. A few die.

Since it is not good for the tourist industry to have bodies in the river, the jumpers are trained. They belong to a club and they practice on this 10 meter platform before they are allowed to jump off the bridge. Anisa said they must pass a physical exam and they usually wear a wetsuit because the water is really cold. The current is also pretty strong and recently a novice got caught in a cave underwater and could not swim out. But the site has been used by Red Bull for their international competitions.

The history of the bridge is actually pretty interesting. The bridge is pretty old but it was destroyed by the Croatians in round two (or three, or four) of the 1990s conflicts. We are not sure why it was destroyed. It was rebuilt a few years later under the stipulation that it be restored to its original appearance and using the same techniques.

They were able to use a few pieces from the original bridge during the rebuild. A few that were not used were put down river on the bank. We decided to take a picture of one of them with us siting on it to give a sense of perspective. I'm not sure how you lift one of these things without heavy machinery?

We visited a Turkish home. There was a courtyard with a 10-15 foot wall. She said that the purpose of the wall was to provide privacy for the women of the home. A home with a low wall indicated that the family did not have much to hide.

Notice the detail with which the stones are laid out. Amazing.

We took off our shoes and went upstairs to a sitting area. Check out the carvings on the door.

She pulled a traditional costume out of a trunk (one trunk per woman in the house).

The skirt has something like bloomers underneath.

During the time we were upstairs, we heard the call to prayer. It was around 1:00pm. She said that there were five calls, equally spaced throughout the day beginning at sunrise and ending at sunset. Since these times change, the calls to prayer are different every day. I asked her later about prayer for women, wondering if the fact that she was conducting a tour during one of the calls to prayer interrupted her participation and she said that she did not practice but she tried to instill the values of her Muslim upbringing in her daughter. She said there were five: one of those was to do good (talking to you, Isis).

We went downstairs and the museum staff brought us turkish coffee prepared in the traditional way. It was a cool experience: the coffee was very hot and bordered on rocket fuel.

She took us to a mosque. It was too dark for good pictures.

And she took us to one more view of the bridge and took one more picture of us.

We had lunch at a restaurant overlooking the river and during that time, one of the divers went off the bridge. Of course I was in the bathroom when he jumped.

Warning: two long somewhat sociological rambles. 

This first one is about prejudice, stereotypes and war. 

One of the things we took away from our visit to Mostar was how traveling can be such a good educational experience. Anisa is a Bosniak, Muslim, blonde and light-skinned. She told a story of a British woman who told her she must be Serbian because she didn’t fit the image of Muslim. This generated a nice conversation about radical Islam and how the basic tenets of Islam are inconsistent with radical Islam. While this was really nothing new to most of us, this was yet another example of how traveling can expand one's world view and something most Americans need to do more of in order to fight the misconceptions created by knee-jerk nationalism and the fear of international terrorism (forgetting that a lot of terrorists are home-grown - think Oklahoma City, Charleston, Sandy Hook, Orlando, Portland, etc. etc. etc.).

After two and a half days we came to this conclusion about history of the area: “it’s complicated”.  And I have a new appreciation for how history requires a sensitivity towards interpretation of what can be documented. So what you are about to hear is my interpretation of the history of the area based on what was told to us by our guides and supplemented by a Rick Steves podcast. Hopefully it is not horribly revisionist.

The problems on the Balkan peninsula were created because of refugee resettlement. The Serbians had been conquered by the Turkish Ottoman empire and the rulers of the Austrian empire decided to move the Serbs to this area as a way to provide a buffer zone against further attacks. The Rick Steves podcast didn't say how the other ethnic groups got there.

There were originally four distinct Slavic languages: Slovenian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Croatian. In 1850 there was a decision made in Vienna to provide unity between Serbs and Croatians by merging the languages into Serbo-Croatian or if you were Croatian, Croatio-Serbian. Around the time of world war II, there were attempts to separate them and Tito later tried to put them together again. One more round of separation resulted in artificially changing two-thirds of the Croatian language. The new Croatian language resulted in the creation of Croatian-Croatian dictionaries.

The “homeland war” describes a conflict between at least three different factions although it is not entirely clear what the factions are. What history tells us is that there are religious factions: Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox Christians. They are somewhat aligned with the nationalities of Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. But not exactly.

Yugoslavia, the country that gave us the Yugo, was run by Tito with an iron hand and this enabled him to keep what was otherwise an unsustainable union together. Without Tito, the various factions began fighting. We still don’t know exactly what they were fighting about.

We think the conflict was first motivated by aspirations for Serbian expansion. This pitted the Christian Orthodox Serbs against both the Croatian Catholics and the Bosnian Muslims. The siege of Dubrovnik would have been a part of this conflict. The practice of ethnic cleansing that we heard about in the west began with Serbian military indiscriminately killing Bosnians. We heard a story from our tour guide Anisa (a Bosnian Muslim) of the Serbian military maintaining a roster of Bosnian Muslims living in Mostar and returning every few days to make sure there were no young males living there because they would be taken away to concentration camps. I assume they would probably not leave these camps on their own. She tells us that it was only the luck of a few hours that her brother escaped this outcome.

With the end of this round of conflict, the Croatians and the Bosnians decided that they needed another round to stay busy. The iconic bridge (above) was destroyed by the Croatians. We are not sure what the Croatians wanted, but we didn’t hear this part of the story until we arrived in Mostar.

We also heard that there is a mutual dislike between Croatians in Croatia and Croatians in Bosnia. We have no idea what this is about.

One thing is clear: on our travel between Dubrovnik and Mostar, there are no natural resources that could possibly be worth fighting over. The landscape is rugged and rocky. With the exception of terrace-farming, there are few agricultural opportunities and no access to navigable waterways. Unless it has yet to be discovered, there is no evidence of resources underground like oil, shale, natural gas, gold?

Our tour guides universally gave us the line that we should all get along. They were children during the conflict and neither told us of losing a close family member because that would certainly change everything. At least one roof had painted on it: “forgive but never forget”.

But after hearing about all the history, much of it involving war atrocities, it’s pretty clear that it would be reductionist to identify “good guys” and “bad guys.” And we still don’t really know what the conflicts were about. Certainly the idea that this land is my land, this land is your land has no foundation because everything, including who can be considered indigenous, is completely arbitrary.

More sociological musings...

The sociologist in me is intrigued by the social organization of Croatia in general and Dubrovnik in specific. As a tourist town with a Mediterranean climate you would think social problems would be out in the open. My interest in poverty and homelessness makes me alert to people living on the street. During our two and half days, we saw one guy sleeping on a bench and in Mostar, we saw two young women holding children begging. The first one approached me in the old town and as soon as one of the shopkeepers saw her with her hand out, she said something that I assume was telling her to stop. I was approached by a second one near the parking area.

This prompted me to ask Zoren about social services. He said that the homeless are well taken-care of in Dubrovnik. He said there is a shelter in or around Dubrovnik that provides the homeless with shelter and three meals per day. I did not get a chance to ask about job search training or other services that would help them get on their feet.

Given that tourism depends on keeping the streets clear of people who would be an eyesore and possibly an annoyance or at worst contribute to petty crime, it is forward-thinking to provide support to individuals who need it. While the motive may be self-serving, it is certainly more humane than the American approach of providing support services where these people are set up to fail. (I have acquired this insight only recently in my work with some of the homeless in Syracuse at the Rescue Mission and some of my former students who work there at a mid-management level.)

I also found it interesting that the streets were spotlessly clean. I never saw street cleaners or sanitation workers emptying trash cans. You would expect stains on the pavement from dropped ice cream and spilled drinks and since it doesn’t rain much, someone must be cleaning the streets.

Given that Anisa, our Mostar tour guide, said that the governments of these countries are totally ineffective, it is impressive that these countries are able to agree on anything let alone get anything done in a collective fashion. Self-interest is a great motivator but it still requires a centralized government to make it work. In that respect, Dubrovnik is a model of efficiency for tourists.

Walter, Mike and Stu: please let me know if I got any of this wrong.