ayor
of Mostar Neven Tomic surveys
the ruined buildings and, despite his anguish that his home city was
badly damaged by war, declares himself content. “I am happy to
say that we have a city administration that functions and we have Serbs,
Bosniaks and Croats working together.
“The war totally destroyed and divided the city. The economy totally
collapsed. A lot of companies were destroyed and plundered,” he
says.
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The
southern city of Mostar, the third-largest in the country, was widely
publicised when the destruction of its famous 16th-century bridge was
shown on TV. Eight years on, the citizens are piecing their lives back
together.
Rebuilding the entire city is expected to take at least a decade, but
Mostar is already seeing signs of interest from would-be investors.
Bank Austria is due to open a branch in the city, as is Slovenia’s
NLB Group.
Under the Dayton peace accords, Mostar became six municipalities –
three dominated by Croats and three Bosniak-populated. Mr Tomic, who
gained a 75 per cent popularity vote in a recent opinion poll, says:
“We have a lot of new faces here, mainly Bosniaks from the Serb
Republic who arrived during the war, and in the Croat part of the city
we have a lot of Croat refugees from middle Bosnia.”
Mr
Tomic, a former minister of finance and foreign trade, says he decided
to return home after five years in Sarajevo. “There was a challenge
for me to do something. I didn’t find a working city administration
because divisions were so deep, people didn’t work together.”
He says reconstruction would not be possible without donor aid, especially
from the EU, US and Japan. The World Bank is helping to fund a new,
modern water and sewerage system, while the Japanese government is funding
the provision of buses for the city’s public transport network.
Restoration of the 17th-century Koski Mehmet Pasha mosque has been completed
and reopened last year. And the famous bridge over the River Neretva
gorge is being restored.
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