The Bosnian Muslim population of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina continues to live in a war-shattered country that is fragmented politically and socially. The Dayton Agreement has forced the Muslim-dominated Bosnian government to share power with the former HVO Croatian political group that shelled the Bosnian Muslim population in the eastern Herzegovinan capital of Mostar. The Bosnian and Herzegovinian residents of Muslim east Mostar are today still living in a divided city where anger and distrust are common and where war memories are not always distant.

At the outset of the terrible genocidal war in the former Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav People’s Army, comprised of 8000 Montenegrin paramilitary soldiers, converged on Mostar and fought the newly created Muslim-dominated Bosnian army, as well as the Croatian forces of Croatian warlord Mate Boban, a despicablly violent Herzegovinian Croat who would become one of the most grusome killers in the Balkans. After the joint Muslim and Croatian fight against the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav Federal Army, the Croatian forces of Boban would turn against their one-time nominal allies and Herzegovinian Muslim neighbours.

This change in sides of sorts was due to a meeting in Graz, Austria, between Boban and Serb terror leader and president of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia Radovan Karadic, himself a former psychiatrist turned politician who made world headlines when he threatened Bosnia’s Muslim population during a pre-war political argument and presentation to the Bosnian congress during which Karadic told his Bosnian neighbours that “you Muslims can’t defend yourself, if there is a fight we Serbs will destroy you, We will make you cease to exist”.

Boban’s brutal HVO forces would lay siege to the Bosnian Muslim population whereby 60 000 Bosniak people would be shelled, robbed, raped, tortured and treated with horrible human rights violations and violence for several years. The fighting between the Croatian HVO and the Herzegovinian members of the Bosnian Army would see some of the most brutal hand-to-hand and close quarters combat of the war in the former Yugoslavia.

The ethnic scars and division of Herzegovina and Mostar itself are still present and will likely remain so for many decades in the future.

After such horrible treatment, the Bosniak population is not eager to live with, or be in union with, those who tortured their families and raped their family members while shooting artillery rounds at Bosnain hospitals and while starving Bosnian people to death in their own homes while the world watched. The pain and suffering inflicted upon the residents of Mostar are largely forgotten by a world that is caught up in watching wars in Iraq and a violent trauma in Sudan.

Wars do not end when the shooting ceases, the injured still have pain and the phychological scars remain just as long or longer. The criminals of the Croatian HVO have seen their leader Boban die shortly after the war, as well as a re-arming of the HVO forces with 16 500 assalut rifles courtesy of the United States in its “peace making” mission for Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Mostar is far from peace until the former HVO terrorists and their Croatian government sponsors are given justice and punished for their genocidal crimes against the Bosnian population that continues to suffer from the violent effects of the HVO assault upon humanity in Mostar and elsewhere.


Kevin Beck
Germantown, Maryland