with Shtar Luludja | Šaban Bajramović & Mostar Sevdah Reunion <
I was in Mostar for some time - I arrived just after the war stopped but the bullets were still warm.
Just about the first thing I saw was a spectacular riot and a young man trying to assassinate Hans Koschnick, the EU Administrator of Mostar. The car was bulletproof, but the rioters did a good job of kicking the shit out of it. Koschnick left not long after.
Not long after that that young man gave me a lift from town to Ilići where I was living. Perhaps he had seen that I saw him.
There were good times, and some were pretty damn awful.
A good one was when an old man took me through the minefields near Ilići up to the ridge which was the boundary between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. The boundary stones were still there. We had a game of football up there.
The bad times stay inside my head. Sometimes I knew too much.