As we drove into Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the first things that stood out to me among the rolling hills and jagged mountains was the beautiful bridges that stretched over the perfectly emerald blue water of the Drina. My mind, wandering and incoherent after the frankly excruciatingly long bus ride, considered the symbolic representation of that bridge. Connecting the two sides of the river, connecting two peoples perhaps. Something like that could be the plot of a fairytale, surely. As if my wandering mind had predicted it, the first city that we arrived at was Mostar. Guardian of the bridge. The centerpiece of the small city was the old bridge, a beautiful work of stone that was once said to be the tallest bridge in the world. It connected the two parts of the city, a city which was divided into three main ethnic groups: the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniacs.
The bridge was destroyed during 1993 in the Croat-Bosniak war. It was being used to transport military equipment, and so it was shelled. During this brutal war and genocide, thousands of people were killed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This all occurred after years of increasing interethnic marriages and socializing under the Yugoslav communist government, but one declaration of independence broke all camaraderie. The bridge has been rebuilt since, but the relationships have not. According to our tour guide, some older people still will not go into the other sectors of the city, the ones that do not belong to their ethnic group.
This isn’t surprising. The war was brutal. As we walked the streets of Sarajevo, we were bombarded with symbols and memorials from the war, from museum ads to bullet holes in buildings to shell impact sites on the concrete painted red to show at least 3 people had died there. The history here is less than 30 years old. We learned slowly from people drinking at the local bar, to tour guides, lecturers, even our taxi driver, that no one was actually happy with the Dayton Peace Agreement. Most people in Bosnia and Herzegovina are still nationalists. They want their own nation-state for their ethnic group. However, each person we talked to made the same concession, beyond their nationalist ideals, they all wanted peace. Most men in Sarajevo of age had to fight, and that trauma shifted an entire population’s priorities. If this imperfect, unfair peace is what they have between them and another war, it would be protected.
But under this unfair peace, things have started to happen. Our tour guide talked about his friendships with people of different ethnic groups. You just don’t talk about politics he laughed. Young people in Mostar walk between the neighborhoods frequently. The country of Serbia has been included in the free Balkans trade agreement. Even the identity of Yugoslav has started making a small comeback. The old bridge has been rebuilt, and little by little, I like to think, we are seeing social bridges being rebuilt as well.