The fight for a cosmopolitan Mostar is an ethical obligation

Amer Bahtijar
Autor 2.4.2019. u 10:25

The fight for a cosmopolitan Mostar is an ethical obligation

Writing about Mostar in 1993, historian Dragan Markovina stated that the civilization was defended on the street Bulevar.

And so it was, the first line of defense of the city towards the Croatian Army of the HVO and the unit of Juke Prazine was held by three Mostar commanders Semir Drljevic Lovac, Zoran Peric and Goran Stosic – Bosniak, Croat and Serb, although that didn’t mean anything then as today to them. The other side was also “multiethnic”, where Tuta Naletilic and Jusuf Juka Prazina were side by side.

So, the Dragan Markovina’s thesis seems unquestionable. In Mostar, on the Bulevar, were not fighting people, but values.

A bit further in the background of the military prisons of the BiH Army, some people have beaten the prisoners and have made them to work. Testimonies of surviving prisoners of these prisons are frightening. Military prisons of the BiH Army have determined the lives of most prisoners and their families.

Although I was then 14 years old and, in any way, I could not be responsible for the abuse of these people, following Jaspers’s guilty thought I feel a real shame and regret, and that’s the duty of all of us who survived the hell of the siege. In our name, nobody could destroy the life of any man.

For, as fra Ivan Sarcevic says, “The guilty of others cannot dispel the shame and the evil of their own war criminals, the perpetrators.”

Then, the military authorities, imprisoned those terrorized over the captives in the surrounded city, most of them got a deserved punishment and were convicted in the courts of BiH.

After the war, the fight for a cosmopolitan Mostar at the values of the defense attorney from the Bulevar continued with the same thrill. The struggle for a unique city and the demolition of the wall on Bulevar became the struggle of Luciano Pavarotti, Bona Voksa, Predrag Matvejevic, Bogdan Bogdanovic and all European intellectuals.

Then someone turned off the light.

To contemplate Bosniak politics, the one from Sarajevo, which was transferred to Mostar at the beginning of the new century, is to think of Nothing in Plato’s dialogue, Parmaneides.

The answer to the serious and systematic politics of Croatian nationalists led by HDZ, whose aim is public – Mostar as Croatian centerfold was a historical NOTHING.

Countersigns, destroyed factories, collapse of demolished buildings, closing of the Bosnian language section, giving the HDZ all important positions in the judiciary and the police and the biggest flag of  Bosnia and Herzegovina – these are the results of a policy that has been in Mostar for the past seventeen years.

Consequences are generations of politically illiterate people who can put up any kind of totalitarian ideology, not only Bosniak nationalism and fascism but also Croatian, Serbian or any other.

The ruling ideology has made East Mostar a non-perspective ghetto from which people go if they have less luck in Sarajevo and if they have more luck in Germany.

It was recently the anniversary of the death of Goran Stosic, the hero who rescued Mostar, Santic and the street Santic. In memory of him and all those who rescued western civilization in the street Santic and Bulavar in 1993, we have to preserve the values they believed.







Amer Bahtijar
Autor 2.4.2019. u 10:25 Aplikacija