In war-torn Bosnia, a town struggles to bridge rifts

This cosmopolitan city, known for its graceful 16th-century Turkish bridge, was once a symbol of Balkan unity, but the 1992-1995 Bosnian civil war put an end to that. Today, with the Old Bridge in ruins, Mostar is uneasily severed between Muslims on the east side and Croats on the west bank of the Neretva River.

Iris doesn't know which side she is supposed to be on. Her father, a Croat, won't let her give her family name because he fears being labeled a traitor by fellow Croats. His misdeed? Marrying her mother, a Muslim woman from the other side of the bridge.

"Now, everyone thinks I have the wrong parents," Iris says. "A lot of people want this city, this whole country, to be separated. But we're so intermingled they can't do it. That's why the war was so bloody."

In the past two years, some war refugees have trickled home to Mostar, though few Serbs have returned. Reconstruction has begun in the city center, 75 percent of which was destroyed. But the most crucial recovery - bridging differences between Croats and Muslims - is dangerously slow, observers say.

Mostar is like Berlin before the wall came down, says Mark Wheeler, director of the Bosnia project of International Crisis Group, an independent think tank. "By and large things are getting better in Mostar, as in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole," he says, "but it is a race against time."

The local government and infrastructure is still split in two, with separate schools, police and bus stations, non-cooperating telecom services, and parallel representatives in every important post. The same divisions are mirrored in Bosnia at the state level between the tenuously joined entities of Republika Srpska and the Bosnian-Croat Federation.

Many analysts fear that, if political structures are not unified by the time the UN mission pulls out of Bosnia in 2002, the country could see renewed conflict.

The stakes are particularly high in Mostar, which the nationalist Croat Democratic Union (HDZ) this spring defiantly declared the political capital of Croat "self-rule" in Herzegovina.

Before the war, Mostar was the most ethnically mingled city in the country: a third Muslims, a third Catholic Croats and a third Orthodox Serbs and other Yugoslavs. Intermarriage was not only common, it prevailed.

But not everyone liked it that way. "Mostar had too many mixed marriages." says Friar Tomislav Pervan of the Peter and Paul Monastery in Mostar, which strongly supports the HDZ. "It was a mistake to mix with the Muslims. It was a betrayal of our Catholic faith."

The city was a hard nut for Croatian nationalists to crack. In 1992, Serb forces bombarded the city from the hills above, destroying much of the center and all of Mostar's bridges except the limestone Old Bridge which withstood several direct hits.

"We worked together then, Muslims and Croats, to protect the Old Bridge," says Mostar's mayor Neven Tomic, a moderate Croat who has been threatened with expulsion from the HDZ for supporting reunification of the city. "We built a wire construction over it to shield it. I don't know what happened to that cooperation."

Iris's father, Oliver, has mixed feelings about the bridge. He was a soldier in the Croat Army in 1993 when Muslim and Croat forces turned on each other to fight a bloody house-to-house battle in Mostar.

The Croat Army tried repeatedly to destroy the bridge and eventually brought in architects to calculate which stones to hit. Even then, it took three blasts from a tank at point-blank range. When the bridge finally fell, many Croat soldiers cheered and fired their machine guns in the air, but Oliver says he cried.

"It was a military target because Muslims used it as a supply line, but it was still a tragedy," he says, his arms folded on his chest, his voice shaking. "The guys who shot at the bridge weren't locals. They had never walked across it barefoot or watched divers leap off into the Neretva. I swore publicly that if I ever catch the guy who brought it down, I will cut off his hands."

Ilda, Iris's mother, shakes her head in disagreement. "I am bitter about the war, but not for the bridge. I'm angry about all the people who were killed."

While it remains unclear how many people died in Mostar during the war, it is known that in May 1993, the Croat Army expelled about 25,000 Muslims from the west side of town. Some were sent to concentration camps. Thousands disappeared.

While Oliver was fighting with the Croat Army, his Muslim wife and daughter ended up in a squalid refugee camp in Slovenia. "When the Croat Army did things I didn't agree with, I just turned my head away," he says.

The Army pressured Oliver to divorce his wife, but he refused. "Many mixed families were split by the war," Ilda says. "Only very strong people stayed together. Even now, people have barriers in their heads and can't accept us."

Turkish engineers have been called in to help reconstruct the bridge, a project, expected to take several years and cost $16 million, funded in part by the European Union. Meanwhile, the local economy is in tatters, with unemployment above 40 percent.

On a street leading to the Old Bridge, where tourists used to provide a livelihood for dozens of shops, metalsmith Safet Begovic sits making pens out of spent bullets and waiting for customers who almost never come. "Every spring politicians come down here and make speeches, saying they are going to rebuild the bridge, reunite Mostar and bring back the economy," he says. "Then, they disappear and nothing happens. I don't think Mostar will ever be the same again."

Iris, for her part, isn't waiting around to find out.

"They won't let my family live in peace," she says. "So, I'm leaving. I'll go live with my brother in Norway. I have no future here."