See The Thin Veneer, p. 6, caption: "One of the characteristics of the preindustrial Bosnian city was the dominance of religious architecture. Monumental mosques provided the backdrop for the daily, weekly and monthly gatherings of villagers and their urban customers. Banja Luka marketplace in 1954 provided a settting for different groups to trade and a place where they could interact peacefully. The blowing up of this mosque and the expelling and killing by the Bosnian Serbs of the local Muslim and Croat population has permanently altered the city."
Name of Church - Date - Date of Destruction or Damage:
Click here to tour the destruction of sacred sites in Banja Luka.
Click here for a testimony regarding the ethnic cleansing of Banja Luka.
In the evening, we smoked Turkish cigarettes, brand name "Hollywood", and drank coffee from fildzans, tiny Turkish cups the size of a thimble. Raging just 80 km up the road was "the fight about the Fildzan-state", as the Muslims had come to call their lost war.
Selena and her father, Rasim Alomerovic, sat next to each other on the sofa, each with one hand on its curved back. In the photo that I took of them, it looks as if they were holding fast to the furniture. Rasim's glasses reflect the flash, as they frame the aristocratic look in his eyes. The blurry spot in the foreground must be the outline of one of Selena's Mickey-Mouse slippers.
The Alomerovic family lives in the heart of Banja Luka, a city in Bosnia that is becoming more Serbian each day, in an old house with small windows on the street side and a veranda next to a rubbish heap. It was all dark when I rang the doorbell with a street-map in my hand. The blinds were tightly drawn and it was impossible to tell if anyone was at home. There was not a crack with a strip of light visible from the outside. Only after I rang the bell a second time did I hear footsteps and the clanging of a dish.
"Who's there?"
"A friend of Selena's."
"She doesn't live here," came the hoarse reply. In a nearby garden a tomcat howled, a sound like an abandoned baby.
"But," said I, "we've spoken by phone." The yammering stopped, then began anew. I heard keys turning in locks, then a dull thud of wood on concrete.
An elderly man in shirtsleeves and suspenders opened the door. He straightened his eyeglasses and looked me over carefully. "Please don't take it amiss," he said, "but you have to understand - we must be careful. Do come inside." On the stair landing on top of a steep flight of stairs stood his daughter, Selena, in a trendy flowered smock. She was thirty years old, a Muslim by birth and conviction.
Father and daughter Alomerovic were scions of a prominent Muslim merchant family. Of the family's properties, of the houses and real estate, only the current premises remained. The rest, including a chain of shops and grocery stores, had been expropriated and collectivized in the 1950s by the workers' self-management.
"Then it was still possible to live," said Rasim, "But now we can't even go outside. We are prisoners in our own house."
Something had snapped inside the deeply pious old man. The Ferhad Pasha mosque, one of the oldest in Bosnia, no longer dominated the unimaginatively-appointed square adjoining the city hall. No matter that this monuments had withstood rather a lot over the years -- war, persecution, atheism, in the end it was blown up by the first post-Communist generation of the 20th century.
Selena gave me a picture postcard showing the Ferhad Pasha, a domed, calm-inspiring building in a small park with eucalyptus trees. The little park abutted an blacktopped street painted with flat arrows pointing left and right. On the card was written: "Welcome to Banja Luka."
During the night of 6-7 May 1993, two weeks before my arrival, an army truck stopped by the entrance to the little park. The street was blocked off with crash barriers and at four minutes past 3 a.m. -- the mufti had just looked at his alarm clock -- the Ferhad Pasha mosque flew into the air. I calculated that the mosque was just 410 years old. The trees were split and scorched, as if they had been struck by lightning, but among the heaps of stones the minaret still stood.
"No, the minaret cannot stay," said the mayor to the mufti, "there's danger of collapse."
The next day at noon, a demolition crew blew up the proud tower. It came down like a disused factory chimney. Since the beginning of the war the sixteen mosques of Banja Luka have vanished one by one.
On the square in front of the city hall now a Serbian Orthodox church is being built. From the city hall balcony, the spot from which one would review a parade or address the people, one can look right onto the newly poured foundations. Mayor Predrag Radic, a man with puffy features and a sluggish manner, pointed to the semicircular bays -- the niches for the icons. A thicket of steel reinforcing rods rose from the concrete floor; the rods were tied together in bunches of four with steel wire.
"This will be the largest church in Bosnia," said the mayor. In the little park with the eucalyptus trees adjoining the opposite side of the square a demolition crew with pneumatic drills was at work. They wore orange ear protectors and were connected by cables to a little cart that stood nearby, shaking and belching smoke. Their jackhammers were chipping away at a piece of granite that looked like it wouldn't get any smaller, while truckdrivers with yellow hard hats carted away the fragments in dumptrucks. Selena would later give me a handful of Ferhad-Pasha gravel as a souvenir.
The mayor proposed we go inside. He carefully shut the balcony doors, but the jackhammer noise forced its way in through the seams. Radic went to sit down behind his desk and from one of the drawers he produced a picture of the new church. This was a photo of a not-yet-extant gold-colored structure on the square in front of the city hall. A priest with a scraggly beard that reached halfway down his cassock stood with arms outspread in its entrance. On the back of the photo-montage were printed the months and days of 1994. It was inscribed: "A Blessed 1994!"
"God loves me," said the mayor. In the bookcase behind him stood the collected works of V.I. Lenin and a model of a Mig-29.
"He is gracious to me," he continued. "And I say that, a man who for more than twenty-five years was a firm believer in Communism." I sat next to a small desk with a plate-glass top, under which were stuck tens of calling cards left by journalists.
"Sometimes my responsibilities threaten to ovewhelm my competence. God is so far away. In heaven. And my government ... all the way off in Pale." He waved a hand in the direction where the ski resort village of Pale presumably lay, high in the mountains near Sarajevo.
"I'm an economist. But I cannot stimulate production. I cannot give the people something to eat. The embargo, you see. But ... I have preserved the city from chaos."
I thought: what's he getting at? In the area around Banja Luka, the Bosanska Krajina, before the war there lived 400,000 Muslims; now there were barely 40,000. There was nothing unusual to see in the neatly parcelled-out landscape of cornfields, vineyards and tobacco fields. Industry in Banja Luka had swallowed up a few small villages, but the city was so broadly laid out that nowhere did I see a cramped or depressing district. The river Vrbas, winding its way in a rocky crevice through the city center, itself gave the impression that nothing out of the ordinary was going on; the pebbly little beaches between the rocks and the Turkish fortress above, they were the same as ever. Everything looked normal and harmonious. But for the Muslims of Banja Luka, since (the beginning of) the war swimming in the river had been strictly forbidden.
"The three peoples," said the mayor, "Orthodox, Catholics and Muslims live here side by side. Banja Luka is the eye of the storm; all around us the war is raging, but here it is calm. Thanks be to God. That is why I, a converted atheist, am building a new church."
Radic lit a cigarette, a sign that it was now my turn to say something. I saked, "Will the Ferhad Pasha also be rebuilt?"
Radic, curtly, "That's something you will have to ask the Muslims." "The guarding of religious buildings ('religious objects' I heard myself saying) is surely an ongoing task."
"The embargo, you see." It was the economist speaking now. "The police have no gasoline for their patrol cars."
"Would you be willing to rebuild," I asked, "the sixteen mosques of Banja Luka?"
The mayor pulled up the sleeves of his suit jacket by a couple of centimeters and placed his elbows on the desk.
"Now you must tell me something," said he. "Why always the mosques, mosques and yet again the mosques?"
Because Radic slowly rose from his seat and stood up, I thought the interview had come to an end, but he took out a map from a cupboard. And what a map. Clearly he had the thing especially set aside, ready for journalists who started going on about mosques.
Now, I'd seen a lot of maps. This whole war revolved around maps. I had visited a school in a remote hamlet in Serbia and there saw hanging in a row: Tito-Yugoslavia, rump Yugoslavia, and Greater Serbia. Bookstores in Belgrade sold practically nothing but maps. They had all sorts. Maps with shadings of yellow, orange and red that showed where and how many Serbs had been killed in the Second World War. In shades of blue: in which municipalities in Croatia and Bosnia Serbs constituted a plurality of the population in the 1991 census. The TV evening newscast in Belgrade used a weather map including Serbia and all the territories that had been annexed by the Serbs, with three holes on the spots of the Muslim enclaves of Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde -- where it was never cloudy and the sun never shone.
There was no weather there. At a used bookstore in Zagreb I'd bought two discarded exemplars for 10 DM: Jugoslawien - Grosse Autokarte by Reise- und Verkehrsverlag Stuttgart and one by Freytag Berndt. I'd seen military maps on which "our" and "their" positions had been marked in red and blue ballpoint. Maps where hills had numbers (1021, 1022, 1022a). Territory dominated all thinking. "Give them 33 percent and they'll demand 49," I often heard. "They" were the Muslims, called "Turks" in street talk, or "balija" - but that was something only soldiers said. They would not put up with with the coffee-cup state. "They act like spoiled children. As soon as you agree to something, they want 51 percent or more." The Serbs had an obsession with land. Whenever their commander, Radovan Karadzic, stepped off the plane in Geneva, he was carrying long cardboard map-cases under his arm. He would go on for days on end, negotiating over boundaries. "We cannot give up Ozren," he said, "Ozren has been Serbian for ten centuries." But for a long time now this had been not just about borders. On the map of Bosnia there appeared "blue routes", "corridors" and a "Muslim-viaduct". The latter was a concrete bridge for Muslims across a road for Serbs.
Radic rolled out before me the map-of-the-destroyed-Orthodox-churches. It was a white sheet of paper marked with just the outlines of Bosnia and Croatia and with a great many little cross-markings of the sort that on the Freytag Berndt maps indicate a Kirche/church/eglise/crkva. Most of the little crosses were circled with a red pencil. "Mostar, Zenica, Osijek, Vukovar," summed up the mayor. His fountain pen was gliding over the map as a pointer. Red designated a Ruine/ruin/ruine/rusevina.
"In Croatia there are 97 of them," said he, "and in Bosnia, as far as we know, at least 150."
"Thus the blowing up of mosques," I followed up, "is an act of retaliation."
"No." Radic rolled up the map and tapped the palm of his hand against the two ends to make it a neat roll instead of a funnel. "We have indications that the Muslims did it themselves."
"The Muslims themselves?" I asked.
Radic took out the dossier-of-the-destroyed-mosques. I watched him leafing through a folder with yellowed fax sheets, and as he laid out his ludicrous proofs one by one, I asked myself what kind of man the mayor of Banja Luka was. Was he a nationalist who honestly believed in the Serbian struggle against Croatian fascism and Muslim fundamentalism, against the Western and the Islamic world? Or was he an opportunist who'd managed to make a timely switch from Communism to nationalism?
At first glance, it looked like Radic had let himself be converted to Orthodox Christianity for practical reasons. In earlier days he'd built a factory, now he built a church, because one must go with the times. He looked to me like the sort of man who would've been just as comfortable allowing himself to be baptised into the Catholic Church if he'd happened to be the mayor of Osijek in Croatia. But it was not so simple, because no matter that Radic had been a Communist for 25 years he was a Serb. Not a Croat or a Muslim. Thus he was someone who on the strength of his name and baptismal certificate had the credentials to be a demolisher of mosques and a builder of Orthodox churches, not the other way around. His identity as a Serb lay at the base of his second life as a God-fearing mayor.
Was he dissembling in his avowed fear of Croats and Muslims? Was he faking his concern for "giving the people something to eat"? Was he consciously lying when he spoke about harmony in Banja Luka? That could certainly be the case, but: his origin was not a role he was playing; that was not a matter of choice. If out of opportunism he'd wanted to become a Croat or a Muslim, he would've been squarely ridiculed. Radic was a Serb -- that was a given that even a quarter-century spent as a Communist could not rub out. And that is why, despite his shameless opportunism, the nationalist in many cases really BELIEVED in what he said and did. ...