ELECTIONS INSTEAD OF A CENSUS

AIM Mostar, July 2, 1996

"Listen to this story: a Serb returned to the western side of Mostar. He was a long retired officer of the late JNA (Yugoslav People's Army) who had been a refugee in Serbia with his Muslim wife since the beginning of the war. He did not find his elder son at home, since he is a lieutenant-colonel of the Yugoslav army now somewhere in Boka (Montenegro), after having been very active in Benkovac (Krajina). Nor did he find at home the son who was killed as a soldier of the Croat Defence Council (HVO) defending the city from his father's compatriots. Nor did he find his daughter married to a Muslim, who was first banished by the Serbs from Buna to Mostar. Later she was banished together with her husband from the western to the eastern bank in Mostar by the Croats, and then she was banished from the eastern bank to Zenica by hunger. He found at home only the son who had fought as a soldier of the HVO against the Muslims, his mother's compatriots. But he did not recognize his youngest son by his surname. When the Serbs were attacking the city, the youngest son took his mother's, Muslim family name. When the war with the Muslims began, he took his wife's family name. And his wife had before that changed her Serb family name she had got from her father, and had taken her mother's - a Croat family name. And that is Mostar for you", says a declared citizen of Mostar, a pensioner and a Croat born in Croatia where he is living now, who, as he says, had not left the city while the war was raging in it until hunger finally banished him. He has come to vote in Mostar local elections without any illusions that anything can be changed, but with the illusion that it will be registered that he had come, so nobody would move into his apartment.

A citizen of Mostar who must remain anonymous, said before the elections that it was known who he would vote for. More than 90 per cent of people from Mostar had known for a long time who they would vote for. They did not need the elections at all - the "List for United Mostar" headed by the Croat Democratic Community (HDZ) and the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) has won power, in an incomparably more convincing victory than six years ago when the people in Mostar had believed that they were voting in the first free postwar elections which later turned out to have been the last prewar free elections.

The city decorated with flags - Bosnian&Herzegovinian on the eastern side, Herzeg-Bosnian variant of the Croatian flag on the western bank, and Spanish flags on IFOR's transporters everywhere - on the day of the elections disappointed more than a hundred journalists who had arrived from the world expecting to witness a new Balkan shuffling in a small space. On pre-election Saturday morning, a greengrocery was blown up on the King Tomislav Avenue, the main western Mostar street, but that had nothing to do with the elections in Mostar - it was just an ordinary Mostar night in which disobedient ones are deleted from the list of trading companies who failed to pay racket to the mob.

"In such an explosion, my brother's car suffered damage amounting to 2,500 German marks, for no reason whatsoever. The police refuses to find perpetrators, so I refuse to vote for such authorities", speaks a young owner of a shop on the western bank forced to pay even a "not obligatory" racket to local rascals who come to him from time to time to "borrow" fifty or a hundred German marks.

My interlocutor is obviously a rare sample of a Mostar species, since the opposition list consisting of five B&H parties remained in a sad minority of only 3.3 per cent. This has, perhaps, disillusioned even one of the last Mostar romanticists who claimed that people could not divide the city, only God could. People have, however, first by the war and then by voting, divided the city, and the former Mostar socialist god Jole Musa who headed the "unprincipled" coalition of Bosniac and Croat people's and multiethnic social democratic parties did not succeed to patch up the torn city. Musa achieved the greatest success in Oslo.

Among citizens of Mostar living over there, he won ten per cent of votes and in the city of Mostar itself, that is in one of its halves, another coalition noted the greatest success - List for United Mostar - in which the Muslim opposition joined the SDA. In the Croat-Muslim division, they had distributed "their" Serbs better and won one seat more than the HDZ and thus enabled Safet Orucevic to be, at least formally, the single mayor of the divided city.

That is how the miniority group of the remaining 3,500 Mostar Serbs for the first time since the war proved to be a factor in the (substitute of) political life in Mostar. About two hundred refugee Serbs from Mostar returned to their home town to vote. "It used to be said that we, the Serbs and the Croats, have spare homelands. It isn't true. We have only Bosnia & Herzegovina", a man called Branko says, delighted that he has returned after four years to his native city, to its left bank. Since there is a regular bus line to Nevesinje every day, and people freely cross the border line between the two entities, citizens of Mostar were not especially flustered because of the arrival of four "Nis-express" buses, apart from a small group which beat up two of their (former) fellow-citizens. "Before the war, fans of Hajduk football-team (from Split) would have fared even worse", says an old fan of Velez (Mostar football-team), whose stadium has remained on the western side, the name on the eastern, and the team dispersed around the world. Meho Kodro plays football for Barcelona, and Ricardo Peres Casado from Valencia "plays" for Mostar. On Wednesday, July 3, he opened a psychiatric clinic in the former military barracks called "Southern Camp". A real place for real citizens of Mostar. As Dr Maslov from Mostar psychiatric hospital testified, during both Mostar wars his patients freely roamed around the city because it could not "go into their heads" that people could be killed because of national or religious intolerance. They thought that military manoeuvres were going on in Mostar.

In Mostar, borders between the Croat and the Muslim municipalities are well-known. However, the line which separates normal from abnormal is still unknown.

"I am voting for the first time, and for the first time after three years I am going to my own Bijeli Breg (White Hill)", a young man on the eastern bank says, while his friend is sad that he needs four days to be eligible to vote. They are wholeheartedly in favour of united Mostar and incline towards the list bearing the same name unaware that a united city cannot be constructed if only one party wishes it. And by measure of only that party, those from the other bank would say.

"In our own faith and on our own land" - read posters of the SDA on the eastern bank which, mildly speaking, imply messages of dubious intentions. According to it, united Mostar excludes the second, and the third, party. Just as the HDZ is announcing that it has destroyed Yugoslavia and JNA. On its own, of course. Mile Puljic, president of the Mostar HDZ scared fifty odd foreign journalists with the spectre of Yugoslavia at the first post-election press conference. He too has obviously read the pre-election poster that Yugoslavia is destroyed and, surely, he does not seriously believe that anyone is in favour of its reconstruction. Since his media partisans proclaimed Musa's list to be "B&H Yugoslavs", Puljic most probably thinks that they are synonyms.

Beaten black and blue by the media, Musa's list had no chance. While posters of the winners - each one on its side of the city - stood intact on Mostar walls and chestnut trees, scarce leaflets of the United List were dragged down Mostar pavements. There was no "wind from the Neretva" river to take them from one bank to the other.

This too makes these elections, as the overture into the elections in Bosnia & Herzegovina, with all due respect for the unexpected civilized atmosphere, were nothing but a continuation of the war by democratic means.

GORAN VEZIC