Something happens as you cross the border from Croatia into Bosnia-Herzegovina. Everything until now has been Western; touristy, trouble-free on the surface. Only now can you begin to see the time-warped Europe of the east. Nothing can prepare you.

“Do we need car insurance?” I asked the guard at the Croatian checkpoint. We were in the third week of a two-month summer roadtrip in 2002. We had decided to see for ourselves the sites which so recently filled our television news screens. Our green card only covered the car as far as Croatia. 
        The guard laughed. “Insurance? In a Sköda? Not unless you’re driving a Mercedes or a BMW!” Some websites I’d looked at said car-jackings were not uncommon. “You can go. No problem.”

At the Bosnian checkpoint, “Bosnia – no!” stated the guard, eyeing our documents. Emergency travel plans began to form in my mind. Trains were non-existent in the south.  Flights were too expensive because of the military presence. We would have to drive back to Dubrovnik, abandon the car, and take the night bus into Bosnia. But after five minutes the guard got bored and let us through. It was off to Mostar for lunch.

The pot-holed, twisting route through mountains was not one easily forgotten. Road signs turned to Cyrillic. Where war-blitzed towns and villages had been desperately re-pieced, the people stood idle. This was Friday, but there was no work. Some towns and villages were not so lucky; landmines had caused their total abandonment, or their people never survived to re-build the ruins. My brother, Douglas, Harvard-graduate Dylan, and I sat in silence as we continued, passing burnt-out cars and cut phone and electricity lines. I could never imagine such chaos in my cosy corner of Europe.

Mostar grew up under the Turks in the sixteenth century. It was an example of multi-ethnic co-operation. Then in 1991, Bosnian-Serbs launched a military campaign against Muslims and Croats, with orders to cause maximum civilian casualties. 

When Serbian fighters were driven out by mid-1992, they left behind two mass graves. Bosnian-Croats tried to declare the region Croatian, and turned on their Muslim allies. Muslims were rounded up from their homes and transported to death camps. A primary school in Mostar became one such centre. Eyes were gouged out, and genitals cut off. Brothers-in-law, friends, and co-workers inflicted appalling acts on each other. Muslims were dressed in Bosnian-Croat uniforms and forced onto the battlefield with wooden guns, to be slaughtered by their own side. In retaliation, on 15 July 1993, seventeen Croatian civilians were burned alive. It is said that snipers from both sides met for coffee.

The suburbs of Mostar presented the most frightening sight I had ever encountered. At each glance I recoiled. Rocket and shell attacks had turned every building into Swiss cheese. Sneeze, and these apartment blocks might topple. A grimy film covered every surface; it could have been a scene from Nineteen Eighty-Four. The windowless, fractured, grey skeletons lay open to the elements, yet washing hung there to dry. “It hurts,” said Dylan.

Now Mostar was divided, with Muslims on the eastern bank of the turquoise Neretva, Bosnian-Croats on the western. Each side had a separate police force, separate school system, and separate football teams. People were free to cross over, but mostly they didn’t.

The cobbled Turkish quarter of Mostar was being repaired at a painfully slow pace. Occasionaly a clink from a workman’s hammer broke the peace. Some of the mosques had been re-roofed; but the ancient bridge and its towers, a UNESCO world heritage site, lay in ruins.

On one dry peak towering above Mostar, facing the Muslim side, stood a giant, white cross. Straining my eyes, the blotches spanning downward turned to thousands of gravestones. Uncounted landmines lay around them. Over one million remained embedded in the country; no one knew where.

There were no more than half a dozen souls at the Mostar market. Shrivelled, headscarved old women oversaw stalls, each offering a baskets of oddly shaped, home-grown produce. I bought two bananas from one stall, paying in Euros, receiving change in Convertible Deutschmarks. Not long before, Mostar even had separate currencies on each side of its river.
        I pointed at a melon. “How much?” I asked.
        “Five,” mumbled the man, waggling four fingers. I handed over a five-mark coin, which produced a radiant smile. Without taking his eyes off me, he added a tomato to my bag, hesitated, and then an onion. After all, my Bosnian melon had just cost more than in Tesco.

Back on the street, vendors slumped on steps outside pock-marked doorways, each with a small rug the size of a hand towel. They displayed empty shells and pens made from bullets. A thin, Muslim in jeans and a t-shirt ran up to Douglas. “Excuse me…Here is my story...” He paused and rolled back his eyes. “I am originally from Italy. My family came here when I was young. Now my parents are ill. They stay in hospital. I ask you, please, can you give me some money so I can eat?” Douglas handed over a banana. The man gave a dissatisfied look and locked the it inside his violin case. A half-naked child followed us down the street, gesturing for a gift, too.

As we turned to leave the now-tranquil wreckage, a stark message was ingrained in our thoughts. Painted in large, black lettering on a stone at the side of the street was, “DON’T FORGET”. No one could, ever.

We passed countless more roadside graves on our way to Sarajevo. The route was lined with tired-looking children, sent from the farms to sell plum brandy to the few motorists. Udder-shaped haystacks in the fields brought back images from history books of the Middle Ages. Even without the war, Bosnia-Herzegovina was stuck in a time-lock.

The engine began to jolt, and we exchanged nervous glances. With warnings about landmines off the asphalt edges, and no recovery service, a breakdown in these mountains would be the least desirable place on Earth. The Sköda laboured on in the heat, the victim of dirty fuel. The sky darkened and hailstones like car mints rained down, forcing traffic to halt for ten minutes.

Entering the concrete suburbs of Sarajevo, it looked like Ground Zero and its surroundings a day after 9/11. But in Bosnia the clean-up took longer. Five years of shelling had forced steel to buckle and skyscrapers to fold over on themselves. Trees grew through some houses. “I can’t believe people are living in there,” I said as we drove along “Sniper’s Alley”.

Mikki greeted us in our basic pension, offering us endless cups of knock-out-strength, grainy Turkish coffee. “This is a very, very, very nice place. You’ll like,” he said. 

Everywhere on the streets we saw the UN military presence, still so essential to the survival of this country. Guards in camouflage, bearing Bulgarian, Turkish, German, and US badges marched in pairs. Some looked sixteen. But Sarajevo was not as safe as people kept saying. Our Californian friend would be left with a scar like Harry Potter. As he walked down an alleyway beside a popular nightclub, a youth split from his gang and dealt Dylan an elbow to the head. The youths scurried, leaving Dylan confused, and clasping his badly bleeding wound. But that could have happened in Sunderland or Southsea.
        “What happened?” demanded a horrified bar-server as Dylan entered the pub.
        “Oh, nothing. I just got hit.”
        “Who did this?”
        “It’s fine. I just gotta go to a hospital.”
        “Please. I will give you some money to get there.” The barman produced his wallet.
        “It’s all right.”

Every building except the recently re-surfaced and colourfully repainted churches carried the scars of war. But even the churches, as peering through windows revealed, remained obliterated inside. There were some signs of recovery; a new tram system raced through town, and the cafés in the Turkish bazaar displayed Coca-Cola parasols like any European tourist destination.

Sarajevo’s blend of eastern and western architecture still held great charm. But like so much of Eastern Europe, the austere, Communist-built concrete mess remained, too. Across the murky Miljacka River, in the Muslim quarter, my guidebook gave the only indication the bridge I’d walked over was the assasination site of Archduke Ferdinand. The plaque that once marked the spot had been torn out because the assassin was a Serb.

From the paving at the head of “Sniper’s Alley”, in front of the 1945 war memorial, Sarajevo’s Eternal Flame continued to flicker, as it did throughout the Balkan conflict. Further down were several blood-like spatters. Dubbed “Sarajevo Roses”, these shell holes had been filled with red concrete as a reminder.

While having a haricut I met an elderly, English-speaking woman. “I stayed here during the four-year Serb siege,” she said. “Terrible, is that how you say?” More than 10,500 Sarajevans died and 50,000 were wounded during that time. “And it is four years since I last saw my house. I went there, once, but I found refugees living in it. What can I do?” She spread her hands. “Everywhere in Bosnia…it is the same.”
        “And what future is there for Bosnia?” I asked.
        “Future? Future depends on the peacekeepers. If they go, Bosnia will fall apart again.” 

Our restaurant dinner proved different from expectations. The waiter-cum-chef-cum-owner, dressed like a beery British darts player, wasn’t happy to see us at half-past nine.
        “You take this. It’s good,” he said, pointing at an out-of-focus photo on the menu. For five dollars each the fridge’s last contents were spread on a platter: leathery, cold meat, four ice-cream scoops of sour cheese, and a heap of grisly, deep-fried dumplings.        
        “No dessert. You pay.”

The pumping nightlife that followed dinner almost met western-city standards. Chrome cafés, bricked cellars, and popular student bars played R&B onto the dark and threatening streets. During the war, the nightlife was electric, said the young. Having risked their lives to go out, they made sure they had a good time.

On our final morning, as Douglas and I departed for Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, we stopped once more in the suburbs. “1914–1991”, read one gravestone, one of thousands filling a pre-war football pitch. The gentle, grassy slopes showed where the terraces once stood. As we silently surveyed, now, every seat was taken. A few yards from the graves, as I choked back the tears, some children were playing tennis in a new court. Their glee, my tears. In these Flanders fields of the south, the people were moving on, as they must.

© 2004-2007 All rights reserved. Angus JJ Bell.