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Presentation of Amir Pasic, Aga Kahn Program Visiting Scholar and Restoration Architect at the Research Centre For Islamic History, Art and Culture in Istanbul
MS. FLEMING: Amir Pasic, our next speaker, is an architect and an urban planner. Since 1993, he has been an associate professor at the Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul and a restoration expert at the Research Center for Islamic History, Art and Culture, also in Istanbul.
Born in Mostar, Dr. Pasic studied architecture at the University of Sarajevo and earned his Master's and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Zagreb.
As associate professor of architecture and urban planning at the University of Mostar, he taught courses in the elements of architecture, urban planning, fusion of Islam and Christianity in architecture, and urban conservation.
Dr. Pasic served four years as director of Bosnia- Herzegovina's Institute of Urban Planning and Preservation of Cultural Heritage.
During the current academic year, he is a visiting scholar at the Aga Kahn Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous books and articles. His most recent book is entitled, Islamic Architecture in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Amir Pasic has received five national awards for architecture as well as the International Aga Kahn award, won in 1986 for restoration of the old city of Mostar. He will speak to us about the significance of that city, its destruction and his plans for rebuilding.
DR. PASIC: Thank you for your interest. I first give a few notes related to Bosnian history, but my story is based on Mostar because Mostar is a real microcosm of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
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DR. PASIC: The main artery of Bosnia is the Neretva River. It is in the heart of Europe. In this area, early tribes were replaced by the Romans in the third century B.C. Finally this process of symbiosis was finished by Roman or Slavic entities in the seventh century, A.D.
There along on the Neretva River, the Roman Empire was split into two, eastern and western parts. Five centuries later, Christianity was divided between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. And from 1699 on, Neretva is the west border of Islam in the world.
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DR. PASIC: From that time we had a very rich heritage. And here you can see one Roman villa from the fourth century A.D., Mogorjelo, close to Mostar, 30 kilometers south. And right, you can see wooden water mills typical for all Bosnia in that time. And we can find similar mills today.
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DR. PASIC: From medieval Bosnia before the current war there were preserved close to 300 fortresses or medieval towns. Here is one related to the name of Herzeg Stjepan Vukcic, Duke of the southern part of Bosnia. And this area is mentioned in first Turkish document as the Land of Herzeg, meaning today's Herzegovina. At the right you can see one of the best examples of tombstones called stecci, now in the State University in Sarajevo, from central Bosnia, and from this stone document we can read Bosnian medieval history.
But what is very important, Bosnia was already an independent state in the twelfth century as is shown on documents this document is now preserved in the St. Petersburg archive, related to the name of Kulin Ban and written in the Bosnian language. It's from 1189.
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DR. PASIC: And from the fifteenth century until 1878, Bosnia was a part of Ottoman Empire. And similar to Sarajevo, in the Bosnian towns like Mostar here on this slide, four religions lived together and shared same life and worked together, living together without any border between different neighbors.
Here you can see the biggest Orthodox church in Bosnia- Herzegovina built in Ottoman times, close to minarets. And one of the best examples a mosque in Bosnia designed by Mimar Sinan, who built this very mosque in Mostar from 1557. Or a Jewish synagogue 500 meters from an Orthodox church.
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DR. PASIC: Or a Franciscan monastery established in 1848 in Ottoman times.
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DR. PASIC: This is the best example of this architecture in Ottoman times, but a very small group of architectural creations with monumental characteristics were built following the development of standard design in Istanbul and several other cities. This is one of Mimar Sinan's mosques.
But much larger units, consisting of shops and bazaars, mosques and mahalle (residential quarters) and private houses, while sharing the basic features of Islamic architecture, manifested marked regional characteristics produced by specific and environmental-cultural factors. And the best examples of Bosnian regional architecture produced by an intermingling between different Islamic and Christian elements are the housing. Here you can see several housing complexes in Mostar first, a chart of systematic development of complexes through history and several examples of Bosnian houses.
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DR. PASIC: On the right is a small dome above the baths in this house, musafir hana (guest house) in the tekke at Blagaj, 12 kilometers south of Mostar.
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DR. PASIC: The largest numbers of houses contain the same central elements of composition, structure and volume reflecting the social and economic level of the house owner.
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DR. PASIC: And of the builder or builders, the creativity the ultimate builders and other artists brought to Bosnia building influences from the Islamic east. But the largest part of structures were built by the local craftsmen of the old trade called dunjas. And here you can see one dunja's work with stone slates, light roof coloring in a typical settlement, proportions that must have been from local builders.
Other important groups were builders from Dalmatia, especially from Dubrovnik, and we can see elements of these influences in all monumental structures in the sixteenth century.
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DR. PASIC: And here are two examples in housing structures in Mostar. First decade of the nineteenth century.
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DR. PASIC: Over here, a Roman campanile as a clock tower together with minarets, or an old Orthodox church but with one of those small bell towers typical for Dalmatia. And on this building, this Orthodox church from Mostar built in 1833, we can see real intermixing between Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Muslim structural elements.
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DR. PASIC: From 1878, Bosnia was part of Austro- Hungarian empire. And from that time, the Austrians came in with new architecture and architectural constructions. But they tried to connect new construction with existing design elements, especially in architecture. And they used they designed or improvised a new architectural style called neo-Egyptian-Moorish, because they combined elements from the Cordoba mosque in Spain with elements from Al Azhar mosque in Cairo, but only on the facade. You can see here the high school in Mostar, the gymnasium, built at the end of the nineteenth century.
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DR. PASIC: Or new public baths with similar elements in decoration, but the typically Ottoman hammam (Turkish bath) was replaced with new baths with swimming pools in the interior, like similar baths we can find in Budapest built at the same time.
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DR. PASIC: From the past few decades we had similar influences in architecture in all of southern Europe and what is very important, architecture was developing in the last 10 years. A really good example of modern architecture, what I'm presenting here, the building on the left, was like the best architectural achievement in Bosnia in 1992 built in the first year of the war. And this is a housing complex in Mostar, designed by one architect from Mostar, now president of the society of architects in Sarajevo. And on the right you can see one of the best examples of memorial architecture in Europe.
This is the Partisan cemetery in Mostar, designed by Bogdan Bogdanovich, a professor from Belgrade, in 1965. A memorial architecture with elements of universality and one of the monuments preserving contemporary history.
What is very important for multicultural Bosnia: on the Yugoslav national list of monuments we had 137 monuments that were structures of Bosnia's cultural heritage. On this list are: 76 mosques, 43 Christian Orthodox churches and monasteries, 16 Catholic churches and monasteries, two synagogues, two bridges, three house complexes, one hammam and one caravansary.
And of all the preservation and restoration activities undertaken in the period between the Second World War and the current war, the most important are the large-scale projects for the central part of Sarajevo and for the old town in Mostar.
I was working on this Mostar project from 1977 and this project was rewarded by the Aga Khan Award in 1986 after seven years we spent on this project. This idea was developed over 20 years and the Institute for Preservation was established in 1976.
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DR. PASIC: At first we started to see what people in other places were working on. A large part of our experience we collected in Split. It's very close, 140 kilometers from Mostar. But they developed a similar project on Diocletian's Palace beginning in 1956 and first we used methodology from Split but later developed specific methodology to apply to Mostar and its multicultural society.
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DR. PASIC: And through this period we restored over 200 structures around the Old Town. This is a bazaar or commercial part of the old town, and what is very important, we developed a specific self-financing system because all income collected in the area under conservation process was reinvested in new restoration projects and in this way the reinvestment in 1989 was $2 million.
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DR. PASIC: And this is Mostar, a view from the west, together with the commercial part of Mostar. Through the last six years we have been developing restoration projects in other neighborhoods. And here you can see several neighborhoods more or less close to the old town because idea was then to spread this methodology to all of the city of Mostar with 130,000 citizens.
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DR. PASIC: And through the master plans and design for architectural complexes, we start with restoration and first we made 40 kilometers of facade in scale: 100 to collect all elements of architecture and other plans and programs; we collected all relevant information that is very useful today for newer rebuilding projects.
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DR. PASIC: And here you can see a few examples. One shot of a building from the eighteenth century and one of restoration done in 1979 or 1981.
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DR. PASIC: The reconstruction of a minaret a few years before the war when we reconstructed seven minarets because we changed some elements in construction and stabilized them.
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DR. PASIC: Or one complex close to the bridge before restoration and after restoration.
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DR. PASIC: Or restoration of a wall painting on the mosque all reconstruction or restoration of medrese (theological school) close to the same mosque. And what is very important, we invested money on this restoration together with the religious community, just to mention one.
But for the commercial part, we invested 100 percent and we rented these spaces to collect money for new restoration. And cooperation with all the religious communities has been at a very high level through the last 15 years.
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DR. PASIC: And a most important item for us has been to move people from the new city to the old part of town and interest them in working there the shops in the old part of town increased. And for example one square meter was renting at $5 maybe 10 years when we started, and later for the same square meter you can ask $100 without any problem.
And together with the citizens in the old part of town, we had in the last two years before the war, one million tourists coming to Mostar from all over the world.
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DR. PASIC: And what is very important really was keeping connection with the citizens. We organized every four years exhibitions presenting our work and we had one place, the interior of one mosque, where we presented the old town in concert, like an audio-visual performance with a model: you can see it right here.
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DR. PASIC: This is a few meters from the center of Mostar, a view from the minaret and the bridge and one store on the south, close to the bridge.
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DR. PASIC: And in 1992, the war started in Bosnia and the last 24 months in Bosnia is time of killing, ethnic cleansing and destruction, genocide against conventional people in Bosnia, mostly by religious rhetoric to reach the strength of one great nation driven by psychopathic creators of big rage. And we have, as a result, more than 200,000 people, more than half million wounded, more than one million refugees.
Masters of destruction take pleasure in expounding their motives. Their task made them proud: city haters and city destroyers hound our lives.
From whatever depths of misguided national spirit or on whatever morbid principles they base their approaches, their idea is to destroy anything that could have existed before them.
One of the moving forces behind the rise and fall of civilization is the battle between city lovers and city haters, a battle waged in every nation and every culture. For the city destroyers, urban is synonymous with dignity, sophistication and the unity of thought and word, word and feeling, feeling and action. Those must be done away with altogether. Sarajevo, Mostar, Foca, Banja Luka and many other cities in Bosnia-Herzegovina have consequently been flattened.
The latest crime is the order for the Serbian assault on Gorazde. In three weeks hundreds of Serbian mortars and heavy guns and 60 tanks fired at point-blank range on this city of 60,000 civilians, mostly refugees. More than 1,000 people have died, mostly children. The children are the main victims of this war. And for each soldier killed 15 civilians have died in this war.
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DR. PASIC: Every city park now is a cemetery and regular cemeteries have been was destroyed. The history that has been destroyed, both the buildings and the documents: it is evidence of the shared past that the nationalists are seeking to erase.
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DR. PASIC: A few motifs from the Mostar old city commercial area.
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DR. PASIC: A mosque I was presenting the exterior of this mosque. I show two mosques together; one interior shot, then the outside of the other mosque: shell holes in the roof, through the roof.
The first reinforced concrete bridge in Mostar, named reTito's Bridge in the period since the Second World War. It was built in 1936; this bridge was called King Peter Karadjordje Bridge before the war and the city's destruction. Because when they started to divide Bosnia this was important: You must divide the land and the best division is the river, so you must destroy the bridges.
And in the first months of the war, not by Serbian or Yugoslav or but terrorist army, you can use everything. It's not Serb people. It's the only group who control the arms. They destroyed 16 bridges on the Neretva River.
[Slide.]
DR. PASIC: The list could go on and on. To date, more than 1,000 structures with monumental Islamic characteristics have been destroyed. Also close to 1000 other monuments.
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DR. PASIC: This is an old bridge in Mostar, Mostar means "bridge keeper." A Nobel Prize winner wrote, "In any case one thing is certain. Between the lives of the people and the city and this bridge, there is an intimate, age-old link. Their destinies are so intermingled that they cannot be imagined or recounted separately."
[Slide.]
DR. PASIC: This is a view of "Stari Most," the old bridge of Mostar, before the war, in 1989. And the other, the left, is from 1992. In the summer, the end of June 1992.
On November 9, 1993, the old bridge of Mostar was finally brought down. The bridge that had seen so many wars, survived so many years, no longer existed. After thousands of shells from Serbian artillery beginning in April 1992, and then from the Croats beginning in May 1993, the crime was completed. One of the building miracles of sixteenth century Europe, the crowning achievement of the extraordinarily creative era of Islamic culture, was gone. It had contained the meaning and spirit of all Bosnia-Herzegovina. The essence of the bridge was meeting and joining together. The country, like the bridge, could be divided only by destroying it.
A Croatian journalist wrote:
Why do we feel more pain looking at the image of the destroyed bridge than the image of the unsettled people? Perhaps because we see our own mortality in the columns of the bridge, not in the death of the people. We expect people to die. We count on our own lives to end. The destruction of the monuments of civilization is something else.The bridge in all its beauty and grace was built to outlive us. It was an attempt to have identity because it was the product of both the individual's creativity and collected experience. It transcended our individual destiny. The death of a man is one of us; the bridge is all of us forever.
You can see here the destruction done in the morning of November 9th between 10:00 and 10:15.
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DR. PASIC: The bridge today.
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DR. PASIC: This is most of the bridge today.
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DR. PASIC: It is a very sad feeling with this information, but with the idea that we share the same hope of a better life.
We start with the project, Mostar 2004. It is a pilot project for the rebuilding of a multicultural Bosnia-Herzegovina. Because we have different war aims: one is to defend our lives; the other is the battle for people under siege; and third is the battle for culture.
Keeping the memory alive needs to be supported even before the construction begins. The city-destroyers must know that every monument will be rebuilt. This is important at this moment.
And all international institutions should have the obligation to support the rebuilding. There should be a clause in the peace treaty that says every site in Bosnia-Herzegovina must be rebuilt to preserve the cultural heritage in the territory under control, and be open to international initiatives on the subject.
To prepare for the process of rebuilding Bosnia's multicultural heritage, members of an international architectural establishment are coming together to lend resources and moral support to an evolving plan of action beginning with the city of Mostar.
Our goals and objections are the following: the preservation of the 1,000-year-old building heritage of the multicultural Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Second, the development of an integrated process of preservation of Bosnia for the formation of practical systems of education over the next decade.
Third, the establishment of an international network of permanent schools and cultural organizations for preservation to assist the rebuilding process.
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DR. PASIC: This is a design for the project Mostar 2004 for the planned area around the bridge.
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DR. PASIC: Koski Mehmed Pasha Mosque. This is my first restoration work in 1979.
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DR. PASIC: Here you can see one complex proposed for a hotel. On the left you can see, on the top, the old Orthodox church. In the middle, on the left border, a synagogue. Or here, Franciscan monastery with a church on the right side.
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DR. PASIC: This is a panel for our exhibition. We organized in the last 12 months, 23 exhibitions all over the world.
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DR. PASIC: And here is view of the Mostar 2004 area for the first pilot project, and we start on the 25th of July this year with the pilot shown.
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DR. PASIC: This is a view of Mostar before the war, from the hill. We want to rebuild Mostar on a human scale.
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DR. PASIC: And here, people are diving from the bridge into the river, a custo 428 years old from the birthday of the bridge. Every day people diving, but one time per year we had championship, international championship, and we prepare a celebration like that for the last day of the long-term 10 years building process in Bosnia and Mostar for the 15th of September 2004 at 5:00 p.m., and we start with a diving championship like here.
This is all. Now we can have questions.
QUESTION: I read somewhere that the government of Turkey, for one, had pledged to fund part or all of the restoration. Is that true, and if so, is it a plausible promise?
DR. PASIC: This is good true and good. We need international support. This project will be under UNESCO patronage, and this means that every country can help to cover one complex of buildings, and after we prepare documents they will be offered different complexes.
For example, in this part of Mostar we are working on 20 complexes, different complexes, and next year we offer to different governments or different companies and different governments the opportunity to help.
For example, companies have various useful names, for example, Bridgestone. They can find a solution because this company is from Texas.
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Can you tell us about the team that you have put together for this project?
DR. PASIC: It is very simple. We start first with 19 people from Mostar. It is a multicultural team, Muslims, Croats, Serbs, Czechs, and what is very important regarding your question is that we had many mixed marriages in Mostar. This is very important. You can find it in every family. In my family I have six nations. Croats, Serbs, everyone. This is normal. People, refugees, come out of Yugoslavia former Yugoslavia they're living together, Serbs, Croats and Muslims, but there it's not possible because people are under control.
You have first a leader that spreads paranoia. They are a very small group. This group controls, and they control other people with food. They control food, infrastructure.
A similar case in all history. First, I want to put together all people of my team, and now these people are all over the world from Canada to Australia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Spain, England, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Turkey, more than ten countries.
Second, what is very important, this product is based on education we want to spread education. We need a higher educational level for the population, because when you have uneducated people, it is very easy to sell mythology, and all this war is based on: mythology.
But the myths are the simplest things. The first step in the development of human beings is myth and language, and education is opposite of mythology.
An idea with this program is to establish new educational systems starting I want to say on the expert level, and we want to put together now learning leading schools, graduate students from leading schools. We will start in Istanbul on July 25th.
The first group of 19; the second, graduates from 25 universities all over the world, from Columbia, MIT, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, City College of New York, McGill from Montreal, University of Oslo, Technical Institute from Stockholm, Boston University, Turkish University, American University at Beirut, Jordan University in Amman: 25 schools.
And we want to start with the pilot workshop, and finally establish methodology for rebuilding of multicultural Bosnia. As of last week, we have a list of 20 persons from different international organizations and faculty and staff for this program and the students, and we want to publish an approach to methodology for the rebuilding of multicultural Bosnia.
And from September, the idea is open all over the world for a studio of rebuilding of Bosnia, and then open other different programs. For example, for stone masons, for woodcarvers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and then open other programs based on this cultural heritage because we must rebuild.
If you want to have a future you must rebuild the cultural heritage, but if you want to rebuild, you need some of the other things. Public health is very important in developing. The idea is to work and to network. And with the modern computer systems we can work on the same project at 100 places all over the world.
But to keep the international level, we want to use UNESCO and fund it from different international institutions. In this way, if it's some local or one nation's idea, it is not possible to go up. The Turkish government made the decision before UNESCO, but the Turkish influence is only one part of the whole project.
And we need a minimum of 50 governments. Many governments want to help, and ten days ago we established one project in Oslo called Sarajevo Now. This project has been supported by the Swedish government. The Swedish government has spent the last two years and several hundred millions for helping Bosnia, but they need ideas to spend money.
If you send money without ideas it is very hard to explain to citizens what they are working at. Now they establish a project for Sarajevo Now. It is a good opportunity because several Swedish architects opened the project, but they put in five Bosnian architects too.
They have social security like refugees and they have some money for a normal life, but they need a job to be normal. The same has happened in Norway. They collect six architects from different refugee complexes, and after a pilot workshop they start with the project.
They chose one project from Bosnia and developed the project through next year. And in the next year we will meet to see what has happened in the last few months.
MR. KENNEY: Andras can join you, and we will open up the discussion for about 20 minutes. Then we will take a break and go on with our program.
QUESTION: I have a question about words being a self- fulfilling prophecy. Is the word "transcultural" more appropriate for the future I mean for the present than "multicultural" being that cohabitation and coexistence is not the same as of being of one mind, and that the Mostar Bridge represented the transcultural potential in a multicultural society that really was not of one mind, and that is what the international community as a transnational movement should be trying to infuse into the rebuilding projects and to the promoting, bridging between cultures. Not coexistence so much.
DR. PASIC: The bridge is the first structure. It has symbolic meaning and it really connects different worlds. This river is really a catalyst for the Orthodox, for the Roman Catholics, and, really, this bridge has meaning to connect people.
QUESTION: The division that you say between the urban and the rural. That also is a problem with education. There is a difference between the literary side and the oral literary side, the folk culture being equally valid in my mind, but not having equal rate.
DR. PASIC: It is most important. We need to start with higher education, but the idea is to reach at the same time the kindergarten and go to the middle together.
MR. RIEDLMAYER: I would like to add to that. Part of the problem in interpreting what is going on there is this constant tendency for us to try and distance ourselves. These people are doing horrible things, therefore, what moves them must be something different than what moves us.
We tend to forget that Bosnia, indeed, was a very European, very late-twentieth-century kind of country. You did not have a totally backward countryside, contrasted with and hating a totally modern urban sphere. You had a country relatively small, about the size of West Virginia or Switzerland, where as in most of the developed world, the countryside had, in very large percentage, migrated already to the cities.
Sarajevo, which had only about 70,000 people on the eve of World War II, had 526,000 people at the outbreak of the war in 1992, and most of those people had come from the small towns and villages of Bosnia, so almost everybody in Bosnia knew somebody somewhere else in Bosnia, so it was not that people in the cities were confronting these total strangers from the countryside.
What you had instead was ideologies which brainwashed people. To bring it closer to home, those of you old enough may remember MyLai and Lieutenant Calley. Lieutenant Calley and his squad were not some atavistic hillbillies acting out; they were people from small towns and suburban areas who had been sent to a place where they were told the local people were "gooks;" they were not human beings. It was not only okay to kill them, it was their duty.
And the people who are doing the killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina are not people carrying embittered personal grudges from World War II. They are 18- and 19- year-olds who have been brainwashed in the very same fashion.
QUESTION: Your plan for Mostar, how is it being coordinated with the Germans planning for reconstruction in Mostar? You are dealing more with the cultural heritage part of it? I presume the German plans have more of the general reconstruction type. There must be some coordination. Has that begun yet?
DR. PASIC: I have heard about the German plan, but I don't know exactly what it is. It is a plan because the new mayor of Mostar for the next two years because Mostar will be under European Community control. The control will be the former mayor of Bremen, but I am not sure that they have any plans. They have only ideas. This is different; I have a plan.
[Laughter.]
QUESTION: You mentioned a Versailles peace treaty and how the rebuilding of the Louvain Library was written into that. Is there any likelihood or request that you have that done in this case?
MR. RIEDLMAYER: A certain precondition is lacking, mainly that Germany was defeated in World War I because of the will of the international community. The idea of reparations predisposes one to think that first you have to have the establishment of responsibility, and the compulsion of the responsible party to make amends.
There is a UNESCO project just coming off the drawing boards of garnering international assistance for their building of the National Library. At the moment, it is simply on the level of coordination, but I would image that this would be a very attractive project for various funding agencies.
QUESTION: There is not a legal framework?
MR. RIEDLMAYER: So far there is not a legal framework. I imagine that in the second part of this program today, we will hear a little more about the inclusion of the topic of culture and cultural genocide in the war crimes investigations.
QUESTION: Can you speak a little about the destruction of Vukovar and Dubrovnik. I am curious to know if there is any difference at all in the destruction of those cities between the destruction of those cities and the Bosnia cities.
MR. RIEDLMAYER: I think you see in Vukovar and Dubrovnik the roots of what happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I think the fact that the erasure of the city of Vukovar from the face of the earth, and that the assault on Dubrovnik was allowed to go unchallenged, set the precedent which then led to the much larger scale destruction of culture in Bosnia.
I think for all of us, and for the international community, this is the lesson of Bosnia: if Bosnia itself is allowed to be a precedent for this kind of thing, you will see it on an even larger scale.
QUESTION: What is the attitude of the Croatian government toward the rebuilding of the Mostar Bridge?
DR. PASIC: They want to help reconstruction, and they sent an official letter to UNESCO. They want to collaborate.
QUESTION: Do they have a guilty conscience?
DR. PASIC: I am not sure, because it is the same people. If the new government starts to think, maybe it is possible, but it is not possible. They're only playing.
QUESTION: Is there a similar effort underway with regard to Dubrovnik?
MR. RIEDLMAYER: There is an internationally financed effort that is going forward to reconstruct Dubrovnik, yes. For all of the obvious reasons, namely, that the fighting there has been over for some time, much further advanced than the Mostar project.
QUESTION: All of this assumes we are going to have peace in Bosnia.
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Obviously, that is a precondition. As Mr. Pasic was telling you, we cannot wait until the last shot has been fired. The garnering of documentation, the preparation of projects, the very act of doing something about it is already the first step toward creating a post-war future.
DR. PASIC: In every construction 80 percent is the preparation phase, and you must be ready. Documents, money, feasibility studies.
QUESTION: One of the effects of war is destruction. Rotterdam could never be rebuilt, and these are constant reminders to us, much later, that destruction did occur, and it makes us ponder. When you talk about reconstructing all of Mostar, for example, isn't it rewriting history in a way and negating the fact that this existed and you are erasing through plastic surgery the scars of war? That would be a constant reminder for all future generations that this happened, and in a way it would be a deterrent for that to happen.
You are rewriting history by attempting to reconstruct and erase the fact that this war occurred.
How do you explain this?
DR. PASIC: You can find many different approaches in the world to rebuilding of cultural heritage. The idea that we can find the balance between old ideas of total reconstruction, and for example, as I mentioned, only some structures have monumental characteristics.
What is very important, this war is a very small gap in the history of civilization because all of these people will keep the memory of life before the war, and second, what is very important, we have all the documents for the reconstruction. I think we have a good opportunity to correct infrastructure, to correct many things in Mostar, to correct mistakes.
But what is very important, we must keep the general a scope or layout of the city. But it is not important to go so deep and do everything, but the reason that we want to start an international jury is to establish methodology for the future because every person has different approaches, but through 100 years, in Italy especially, restoration process with UNESCO in different institutions all over the world, they established standards for this process.
QUESTION: Have cultural reconstruction people, and particularly people working on the post-war efforts like this learned a lot from the German experience, either positively or negatively? I know anywhere in Germany you see reconstructed buildings and they will always say, "reconstructed," "rebuilt from scratch, 1947," or something like that. Is that the model, basically?
DR. PASIC: You have several models. This is an integrated method. You must cultivate every input you have in Russia, and in Poland, and in Germany after the Second World War.
For examples, we have in Italy all the main bridges from medieval time, rebuilt in total, like a replica. This war is like a catastrophe, like an earthquake, where everything is destroyed.
It is different than some structure dying through history.
MR. RIEDLMAYER: I think it is important to emphasize that when people are talking about the reconstruction of Sarajevo or Mostar, they are not thinking of creating a facsimile of what it once was.
What once was, was already a mixed bag. It contained the positive and the negative of the 20th Century, as well as the various layers of previous centuries. And above all, architecture serves people. So, you have to think of things like infrastructure and simple shelter, as well as monuments.
What is very important, is that what is rebuilt does not violate the spirit of the place. And so it has to have a certain scale. All of these considerations, aesthetic and cultural, must enter into it.
The one place where you really do talk about reconstruction of what once was, is in the case of structures like the bridge which serve as cultural anchors. You do not force people to live in museums. But you also do not build, you know, a sterile barren camp to house them without some reference to what preceded it.
QUESTION: What is the population of Mostar now? And what on the grassroots level, is there
DR. PASIC: It is the same, like before the war. No, only is it charged, you have many refugees who came into the city. And you have many refugees out of the city because on the Croatian side, the Croatian so-called actually, Bosnia controlled one side of the town and they moved all the Muslim people from this part of the town.
But at the same time, from the Serbian area, refugees came into Mostar and the population is maybe 5,000 up and down, the same like before the War, but a different structure.
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Well, the other problem is that although the overall population is roughly the same level, these people are now in a city where over 70 percent of all structures have been destroyed or damaged.
QUESTION: What do you see on the grassroots level? Is there support for rebuilding, and if the cultural makeup is different, whether 5,000 or 10,000 each, you know, different ways, what is the support on the grassroots level for rebuilding? Is there someone there on the ground, you know, promoting that?
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Well, at the moment things are very much in flux. Mostar is still administratively divided into two halves, although there is now communication between the two parts of town.
Also, when we talk about ethnic makeup, you have to emphasize that Mostar had the highest rate of inter-marriages between all groups over 35 percent on the eve of the war.
And you cannot force these people to say, "I am a Croat. I am a Serb. I am a Moslem." because by doing so they would deny their mother's ancestry, their father's ancestry. These people, by and large, consider themselves people of Mostar.
Now all of the people who are refugees from their various villages, if there were some sort of sense of security and safety, many of them, I am sure, would want to go back to their homes.
But you are right, that any actual move towards reconstruction and restoration would have to await some sort of political settlement that would create the conditions on the ground.
QUESTION: You mentioned that the city more or less has segregated itself into Croatian and Muslim parts. And if there is a large portion of the population who are of mixed origin, where do they live, or do they choose to live in Mostar?
MR. RIEDLMAYER: There are political choices that people make. I have been following the news very closely, and I have listened to interviews with people who are not of Muslim background, who for one reason or other, have chosen to stay on the Bosnian Government- controlled side of Neretva River in Mostar.
Similarly in Sarajevo, the commander of the Bosnian Government's, Sarajevo Garrison, and Deputy Commander of the Bosnian Government's Army is Jovan Divjak, who is a Serb, and very proud to be one.
QUESTION: There are assumed to be 6,000 Serbs living now in
MR. RIEDLMAYER: In the Government-controlled region. And it is precisely the people of mixed background who feel most threatened by any proposal to ethnically partition Bosnia, because in such a partition of Bosnia they would have no future.
Radovan Karadzic has declared that in his part of Bosnia all sexual relations and marriages between Serbs and non-Serbs are prohibited by law, as a defilement of Serbian blood. And he has declared that the offspring of such a union are bastards who ought to be wiped out. Obviously, under such a regime, people of such backgrounds would have no chance.
QUESTION: On, I think, National Public Radio, a month or a month and a half ago, there was a long piece on Sarajevo and how the Moslem population endured the siege.
Do people know, do they differentiate between Serbs in general and the Serbs who are destroying their city?
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Well, first of all, they still live with Serbs among them. And so they have no chance of turning a whole nationality into the "other." And it is also not part of the public discourse. The Government, of course, like any political body, has its propaganda units. They never refer to the people who are doing this as Serbs. They will talk about the Fascists or the aggressors or whatever.
But it is always put in political terms. The discourse that either turns this into religious warfare where, for example, Karadzic routinely talks about the Government forces as the "mujahedin," is entirely from the nationalist side. This is one thing that you really have to give the Bosnians credit for, that they refuse to adopt this discourse, even under the violence and pressure.
And I might add, unfortunately our own media have fallen for this, for the nationalists' discourse. Everywhere you see, at the very least, references to the "Muslim-dominated" Bosnian Government. No one talks about the "Baptist dominated" U.S. Government, or the "Christian-led" U.S. Air Force.
[Laughter.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: But in Bosnia itself there is a very distinct difference in approach. The Government side, by and large, has tried to control elements within it. But obviously there are individuals who seek revenge. There are also unscrupulous individuals who take advantage of this sort of situation.
There were some spectacular incidents of highway robberies and the like. And obviously, when you have people living in crowded conditions under gunfire, there are social tensions. But by and large, there has been social peace within the Government-controlled areas.
QUESTION: I was wondering if you could talk some more about the communication efforts that have been established to talk about the destruction, such as the Oriental Institute project to collect copies of the manuscripts and materials that were destroyed.
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Well, part of our problem in dealing with this is that Sarajevo is still largely cut off from the outside world. There are fewer than 100 phone lines in and out of Sarajevo and there is now an effort to get in satellite dishes so you can have more direct contacts.
We have been able to use the good offices of the Bosnian U.N. delegation which has communicated our messages to our colleagues in Sarajevo. Within this country and throughout the Western world, we have been using various means, ranging from the Internet to professional association meetings, through publications, to try and publicize this effort.
The first job is to build a database of exactly where these copies are currently held. The second job is to make sure that this database gets into the hands of our Bosnian colleagues.
And then with their collection at least potentially in place, they will be in a much better position to approach international funding agencies to help rebuild their institution which then leads to the last step of calling upon the people who now hold the copies of the lost documents to make available copies to the rebuilt Institute.
MR. KENNEY: Thank you very much.
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