Mostar 1993–1994

The HVO drove Bosniaks from West Mostar into the besieged east, where the trapped population endured shelling, sniping, hunger, and the loss of water and power — conditions echoing the Serb siege of Sarajevo, here imposed by Croat forces. Thousands of Bosniak men and boys were detained at the Heliodrom, a former aviation base at Rodoč, and at other sites, where they were held in harsh conditions and used for forced labour, often on the front lines.

The destruction of the Stari Most on 9 November 1993 — an HVO tank firing on the graceful single arch until it collapsed into the Neretva — became the war's most resonant image of cultural destruction. The bridge had stood for 427 years and joined the city's two banks and its communities. The ICTY, in the Prlić case, reached a carefully qualified conclusion: it accepted that the bridge had been used by the Bosnian army and so could be considered a military target, but found that its destruction nonetheless inflicted disproportionate harm on the Bosniak civilian population of Mostar — for whom it was a lifeline and a symbol.

The murder of a bridge

The destruction of the Stari Most is the textbook case for the concept of cultural destruction as a dimension of ethnic cleansing. The bridge had no lasting military value commensurate with its annihilation; what it had was meaning. It was the physical embodiment of Mostar as a shared, plural city — the very thing the project of ethnic separation needed to destroy. To topple it was to declare that the old, mixed Mostar was finished. The bridge's reconstruction and 2004 reopening, using original techniques and stone from the same quarries, made it equally a symbol of the refusal to accept that verdict.

Two sieges, one method

Mostar deserves to be read alongside Sarajevo. The methods were strikingly parallel — encirclement, bombardment of a trapped civilian population, severance of utilities and aid — but the perpetrator here was the HVO, not the VRS. This parallel is analytically important: it shows that the siege-as-instrument-of-cleansing was not the property of any one nationalism but a shared technique of the war. It also complicates the politics of memory, since the besiegers of Mostar were backed by a state, Croatia, that was simultaneously a victim of Serb aggression elsewhere.

Joint criminal enterprise and the role of Croatia

The Prlić judgment's finding of a joint criminal enterprise to carve out an ethnically Croat Herzeg-Bosnia — with the involvement of figures in the Croatian state — mirrors, on a smaller scale, the structures of responsibility identified in the Serb campaign. It establishes that the central tool of accountability in this war, the concept of organized collective criminality reaching to the political summit, applies to the Croat–Bosniak conflict no less than to the assault on the Bosniaks by Serb forces.