Rebuilt Sarajevo an oasis of civilisation and mutual tolerance

Bullet-scarred walls flash by the window of the taxi during the brief night journey through winding narrow streets from the airport into Sarajevo. I feel at home here. Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus and Gaza are usual destinations.

Once I figure out how to operate the lights and the shower in my super-modern room in the 130-year old hotel at the city centre, I turn on Al Jazeera to check on the advance of Isis (or the Islamic State as it now calls itself) in its drive to create a cross-border caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

The devastation wreaked by Isis recalls the campaign of Mongol chieftain Hulagu, whose forces sacked Baghdad in 1258, killed tens of thousands, burned the city’s grand monuments and threw millions books from its magnificent libraries into the Tigris, turn- ing its waters black with ink.

The next morning I join other participants walking to a Council of Europe working meeting dealing with the management of southern European cultural heritage in conflict and post-conflict situations. We sprint past shops and office blocks restored since the 44-month Serb siege, which lasted from April 1992 until February 1996.

Besieged
As Hulagu's army once laid siege to Baghdad, Serbian forces took up positions on the hills surrounding Sarajevo. The city was besieged, blockaded, and bombarded by aircraft, artillery, mortars, tank and heavy machine gun rounds. Between 9,000 and 14,000 people were killed, including 2,229 defenders. "Every family lost members," Orjana, a siege survivor, tells me.

Installed in the Council of Europe offices on the seventh floor of a tower block, 10 "experts" brainstorm for a day and a half under the chairmanship of Bosnian deputy Ismeta Dervoz, rapporteur of the parliamentary assembly's committee on culture, science, education and media. She is due to present a comprehensive report to the assembly.

English is our common tongue although half the participants are from battered Balkan countries. While Cyprus marks the 40th anniversary of the devastating Turkish invasion of the north, Turkish Cypriot Ali Tuncay and I provide information on restoration of key sites.

At the end of the day we are taken to Sarajevo’s town hall, inaugurated in 1894 by the Austro-Hungarian empire. In August 1992, Serbian shelling destroyed the building, then the national library, with its 1½ million volumes, 155,000 rare books and 700 unique manuscripts. Restoration began in 1996 and completion was celebrated in May with a concert by the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra.

We enter the pseudo-Moorish style building through a side door and are ushered into a grand lobby to the strains of the Blue Danube waltz and taken on a tour of elegant rooms perfumed by paint, too fresh, too bright.

That evening four of us stroll through the market near our hotel and sup at a restaurant where beer- and wine-drinking local folk and foreigners sit alongside tables set with tall glasses of lemonade where Bosnian Muslim families dine, the women bareheaded. Sarajevo is a tolerant city.

After our final meeting we are driven to Mostar in Herzegovina to view the reconstruction of the Old Bridge built by the Ottomans in the 16th century and destroyed by Croats in 1993.

The small, sturdy foot bridge, a cultural icon, arches over the Naretva River, connecting the two sides of the town. Crossing means dodging tourists who have made the reconstruction project sustainable through patronage of dozens of flourishing restaurants and scores of shops selling cheap goods made in Turkey and China.

South of Mostar at the 15th- century fortified town of Pocitelj we climb a steep slope to the ruined fort and take tea in the atelier of an engraver. Here the houses are built of stones, roofed in stone slates and set in luxuriant gardens. The town suffered heavy dam- age in the conflict and has been lovingly rebuilt but resettled mainly by artists on an unsustainable seasonal basis.

Narrow doctrines 

Meanwhile, Isis is decapitating captives, expelling Christians and systematically blowing up Muslim shrines in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. It has targeted the tomb of Jonah, the Biblical figure who survived being swallowed by a whale; the tomb of Daniel, who was imprisoned with a lion; and the Shrine of Seth, said to be the third son of Adam and Eve. They have been blasted to dust not by rampaging Mongols but by radical Muslims inspired by narrow Saudi Wahhabi doctrines and the actions of the Afghan Taliban.