The distorted mirror of history
When will we learn?
A younger me entered a hall of mirrors once. I’d seen myself in mirrors before. I knew what to expect. But wait — the image that stared back wasn’t the me I knew. It wore my pants and shirt, but its body curved like a wavy snake, and as I moved, I saw it undulate. As I turned from one mirror to another, my ankles were too thick, or where my forehead should have been, it wasn’t there. I was too wide, too skinny, or bent all wrong. I touched my waist to test my eyes, and the oddity in the mirror touched its waist too. It was me.
I’ve left out Bosnia and Hercegovina in my notes and photos home to friends — about Malta, Slovenia, and islands of the Adriatic Sea. But we also went to Bosnia and Hercegovina, which was like going to a hall of distorted mirrors.
We went to Mostar, which was the cultural capital of Hercegovina before the war in the 1990s. In this town of 120,000, we looked with eyes that had seen other towns that size, expecting buildings, streets, and shops… people passing, parks, and playing children. A predictable pattern of old and new. But as we walked through Mostar, it defied expectation. It has buildings with blank eyes. They’re empty inside. Walls are riddled and pocked. Right next door to a brand new home, we passed a blasted-out shell of one.
Coming to what should have been a plaza — an open place where people might pass from bank to shop to bus — the space was filled with gravestones, snugly fit like pieces of glass in a mosaic. Sitting on a ledge at its edge were two small boys, with no place else to play.
I can’t explain Bosnia and Hercegovina. I can only say what I saw and some of what I heard. We were traveling with a guide who was a boy of 12 when his home town of Sarajevo hosted the Olympics, when his city was vibrant, full of hope and pride, and no one could imagine what would come. He was 19 at the beginning of the war that broke up Yugoslavia, and he lived through the siege of Sarajevo. Not all of his family did. He lives there still.
He cautioned against making judgments about any group of people. He assured us war is complicated, with blame aplenty to go around. But he spoke without equivocation against leaders who cultivate hate, who elevate one nation or people over others, who denounce [insert an ethnicity, race, religion, or gender here], who want to make [insert a country name] great again.
Those leaders are dangerous. They’re the ones that brought war to his hometown. They divided neighbor against neighbor, sowing fear and sorting people, deciding which to kill. They planned the genocide. They’re still obstructing peace today.
We didn’t go to Sarajevo. We went to Mostar, another town where the ‘90s war played out. The Neretva River passes through its center, with people of three ethnic lines and three religions settled along its banks. This mix of people had been living there for centuries, joined by a bridge named Stari Most. They were neighbors. Even when bombs began to fall, many remained neighborly.
But the factions that made the war weren’t mixed. They were extremists, defined by one quality or another, fighting for supremacy, united against the humanity of all.
Extremists destroyed Mostar’s Stari Most Bridge, its symbol of community, in 1993. Twenty-some years on now, it’s been rebuilt. But amidst the new construction, there are still scarred buildings, mutilated by bombs that rained from the tops of nearby hills — holes in the walls, blown-out roofs, doors leading nowhere. Mourners buried their dead at night in the city’s parks, to save themselves from snipers. They marked the heads and feet of every plot, so they could fit more in as the tombstone cities grew. Each tombstones bears the same end year: 1993.
On the hill above the city stands a huge white cross, in the very place from which a Christian army sent destruction down. I wonder: is it an apology for what happened then, or does it mock the town below, even now?
Today most of Mostar’s citizens support a unified city. But the public schools teach division, with different classrooms and curriculums for children of ethnically different families. Jobs are scarce, for one kind of people more than another. Elections have been canceled in recent years due to conflicts based on ethnic differences between their leaders.
Next we went to the village of Stolac, another mixed community of Serbians, Croats, and Bosniaks who once called it home. When the war began, the Serbs fled. Croat extremists relocated the Bosniaks from Stolac to prison camps or to the part of Mostar that was under fire.
After the war, the Serbian families never returned. Bosniaks came home. But its buildings are broken, with only few rebuilt. The tobacco factory stands empty. The bus station waits in disrepair for buses that never come. Here too, Muslim children enter at the back and sit in separate classrooms; Croatian children walk through the front. Our guide in Stolac was a teacher until the day he brought his students to the front door. He was fired. There’s no other work in town for Bosniaks.
Stolac’s mayor has been in office for 12 years, controling what gets done in town. There’s garbage in the river, while a reelection billboard is pristine. We visited on the day before the election, when our guide held great hopes for change. But next day, when we checked the news from Dubrovnik, Stolac was there. Its election was canceled mid-day for voting irregularities — there was a fight between election officials and a candidate, and someone stole the ballot boxes.
We also went to Dubrovnik, in Croatia. It was a UNESCO World Heritage Site before the 90s, and it is again. But between then and now, bombing destroyed its Old Town. Stunned by the attack, its citizens had to build a defense from nothing — from weapons in their World War II museum. They’ve just honored the 20th year since peace returned. It’s busy, it’s rebuilt, and it’s buoyed by The Game of Thrones, but they can’t forget how peace was shattered so suddenly.
Traveling through Bosnia and Hercegovian and Croatia’s Dubrovnik, it was like looking into a not-so-funhouse mirror. Among the ruins of the 90s, I saw distorted images of the world today: news in the United States, factions around the world that want to make their nations great again, would-be leaders preaching intolerance and threatening war, news of the siege of Aleppo… and people wondering how can we let this happen?
Can we see ourselves in the mirror of history and change what will come next?
