Street festival

Mark Colvin:  For Mostar, this summer has seen a return to the good times. A respite, however fragile and temporary, from a tragic and complicated war that's torn apart the young lives of the country's children.

01.00.00.00

A festival called Happy Street, designed to bring a little normality back to the lives of the children of Mostar.

Camera follow Alem at festival

Alem Prguda lived through that war.

00.31

Alem:  During the war, for four that years I think, the people were like going crazy. They didn't care about if they are going to live or die. It was like...I don't know, it was like everybody was going crazy, even the little children.

Colvin:  Now at the age of 14, he's a reporter, working for children's radio and TV programs sponsored by UNICEF, which wants to help children rebuild their lives.

At Happy Street, Alem meets the Festival's organiser, Nigel Osborne, a Scottish professor of Music and professional optimist.

Alem interviews Osborne

Osborne is in Mostar for the charity War Child - and his plans, including the building of an international music centre, depend on continuing political harmony. Without it, the future's uncertain.

01.22

Osborne

Osborne:  It's just beginning. It's nascent, we're beginning to develop the methods, and the idea is that in the new music centre in Mostar, we will get an international centre to develop that. Not to patronisingly attempt to be ‘curing Bosnians' - it's not that - it's to use perhaps some of the negative experiences here for something positive for the future.

01.35

Puppet show

Puppet: Good day, children!

Children:  Good day!

Colvin:  At the centre of Osborne's work are Bosnia's schools, like this one in Drezinca.

01.58

None of these kids had ever seen a puppet show before.

Drezinca, where they live, is isolated in the hills further up the Neretva valley from Mostar.

War child music classes

War Child music teachers come up here weekly as part of the new post war school curriculum. The puppets are a bit of a bonus.

02.21

Colvin and Osborne

Nigel Osborne sees the program as part of reconstructing young minds that war has scarred.

02.35

Osborne:  I think an enormous amount of pain and suffering. Drezinca had suffered from the Yugoslav army at the beginning of war coming through. And then when the incredibly unfortunate Croat-Muslim war - or Croat-Bosnian war began, this place got hammered from the Croatian side very, very heavily.

Music classes

Colvin:  Though he's a distinguished composer and professor of music now, it's not hard to see that at one stage of his life, Nigel Osborne was a primary school teacher.

03.05

Osborne:  We get the children to make up some words, and then we generate from that a rhythm and some prosody, and then from that a melody.

03.23

What was funny today was that they immediately made up their own melody spontaneously.

It's the sort of activity that at this age you do in a group, in preparation for later on. Children sitting down individually with an instrument, and picking out notes to be able to construct a melody. But by doing it in a group you can show them how easy it is and how it's just a case of trying things out until you're satisfied.

Colvin:  It's all part of a network of projects threatened by the political breakdown in Mostar, a breakdown in which the certainties of the old are threatening the future of the young.

04.06

Osborne

Osborne:  The kids are extraordinary. The maturity of the children, the depth of their thinking. And it seems to me to be up to us to find some way of helping them to direct that knowledge, energy and thought. I mean it is something extraordinary about them.

04.18

And of cause it could go totally wrong ... it's like one of the situations in life where one has something extraordinary.  And either it can be turned to something strong and good, but if it's not, of cause that energy will go to hell and shoot up in all kinds of directions that will be quite damaging. So, it's our job.

Shot of Mostar from car

Music

Colvin:  The drama of the children of Mostar and the outsiders like Nigel Osborne, who want to help them, is being played out against a ravaged backdrop.

05.00

At different stages of the war, Serbs from the heights on one side, and Croats from the hills on the other, poured artillery fire down into this valley town.

There was hand to hand fighting, too, for months, the hardest being in the Muslim enclave in what's largely the Croat west of the city.

International Peacekeeping Force

Colvin:  Now, with the International Peacekeeping Force, IFOR, in charge, Mostar should be one unified city again - part of the supposedly unified new Bosnia. It should be but it's not.

05.42

Affluent town on west side

Colvin:  On the Croatian west side, little touched by the fighting, the main shopping centre is glitzy and pulsing with black market cash.

East side town

On the Muslim east, the economy is barely staggering to its feet. Aid dollars are still the mainstay here.

The key issue now - Croat politicians want segregation to remain, for kids as well as adults.

Super:  MILE PULJIC

Croat Party Leader

Puljic:  We have to state that these are two different civilisations. There is no sin in having schools and churches which will retain the national and religious character on one side - and the Muslims can have the same on the other side.

06.24

Kid's TV program

Colvin:  So it's only the east side radio and TV stations that carry programs made by Alem Prguda and his colleagues.

06.47

It's not the fault of UNICEF, which trains and supports them, they've tried their hardest to make it a multi-ethnic project.

Kids sitting on steps

For children on both sides, what divides them couldn't possibly outweigh the fund of shared suffering they have in common.

Girl 1:  It was horrible. You couldn't describe what it was like. A person has to live through it to experience that horror.

07.13

Boy:  When school's over, then the teachers couldn't send all the children at once. They send maybe two or three children, then for ten minutes, the other two or three, because if the grenades fall, we don't die all.

07.24

Colvin:  When you were going, you were running?

Boy:  Yes, I was - I had so much condition that even war was over, I was always running.

Colvin:  And you were running because of snipers?

Boy:  Yes, snipers. Lots of people died from snipers. Almost every day 2 or 3 people die from snipers.

Girl 2:  It was scary on the first place. It was worst when somebody got killed that you know - or your father or mother got wounded - or something like that. And then the grenades all the time. That was the really worst. And then, when the father went to the frontier, to fight, and when you don't know of him for some months or so. That was the worst.

Girl 3:  If it was up to children, there would have been no war. Now, after all they have suffered children want to be together - because they have lost all their childhood in the war.

08.35

Concert

Music/Singing

Colvin:  Part of the job has been bringing back a measure of culture to the war zone. Few areas saw more damage than Blagaj, a few kilometres outside Mostar, where the shelling only stopped a few months ago.

09.21

Hamo

You should be here to feel that and see like everything was smell like fire burning - everything was just foggy, you know like there's no sun - even in the sunshine like this there's no clear sun. It was all fog, you know, like smoky.

09.34

Blagaj

Blagaj took a massive pounding from two sides - a victim of its geographical position in a narrow valley.

What's claimed to be the biggest natural spring in Europe, pumps a constant stream of freezing water into the river.

A place of worship since prehistoric times, the spring's now the site of an ancient centre for the Dervish sect. Its caretaker, Mujo Krhan, says the war hit Blagaj harder than anywhere in Bosnia.

Mujo Krhan

Mujo:  This is like a bowl, surrounded on all side. The hardest thing was that there was an epidemic, and starvation. Dysentery was widespread among adults and children. There weren't many soldiers - a handful of weapons. Well, even less than a handful compared to the force we were facing.

10.27

Blagaj

Colvin:  After years of shelling by Serbs on one side and Croats on the other, the kids of Blagaj show surprisingly little superficial damage.

11.08

But here, though they were happy to play and dance on War Child's music afternoon, none of the Blagaj children wanted to talk. The trauma lies to deep.

Mujo

Mujo:  I think you'd need a whole army of psychiatrists to analyse all these people. I think the children are totally traumatised. It's only now that they're beginning to relax - and as that happens, they are starting to show how traumatised they are.

11.28

Kids with puppets

Colvin:  Here, where work on reconstructing young lives is just beginning, the danger of a political breakdown in most obvious. If conflict is allowed to return, many of these children, already scarred, will lose all hope and trust in the future. They deserve better.

11.58

Super:  HAMO

Blagaj Resident

Hamo:  Those kids, they are the biggest heroes of anyone, young and old, who survived this hell. They are heroes, they are national heroes, especially the kids. Yjey used to go for water - there's no water - no utility - no food, no nothing from us except air because we got air to breathe. Nothing else.

12.18

Group of kids listening to rock music

Colvin:  Now they have food, and the first stirrings of a normal life. Teenage rock groups seem an odd form of aid, but man cannot live by bread alone.

Mostar

Before the war, the city was a Balkan cultural jewel. At it's heart was the Stary Most - it means beautiful bridge - that had stood since the sixteenth century. Now even for Mostar's young, the memory of it nags like a broken tooth.

13.07

Elvedin Delic

I liked the way before things were. As a kid I liked it. I don't know what the political situation was. I don't care. I was just happy living in happiness with all my friends you know and that's just the way I want it to be.

Elvedin playing guitar on riverbank

Elvedin Delic is only sixteen. Like most kids here he seems ten years older. He spends his time working with War Child, practising guitar and writing songs.

Song:  Bad times came to Mostar

And Mostar was covered with sadness and pain.

The diamond river in the depth of the mountain

Found a place to hide her dreams.

And Mostar lives

Mostar lives on, yeah.

Mostar will never die...

13.53

Colvin: But young men like Elvedin are growing up in a Mostar which has become two cities. Teenagers should be able to come and go around their home town. The international presence here is supposed to guarantee freedom of movement.

Puljic & Colvin

Ask why at the Croats separatists' HQ in west Mostar, and the line s uncompromising.

Puljic:  These people don't have humane intentions. In Mostar, we have forbidden the work of 40 humanitarian organisations who were selling drugs.

14.44

Osborne

Osborne:  It's important to have the cameras for the children to be able to tell their story for the world to be able to see what the children are thinking. There again there's a very important story to tell. Unfortunately most of the world is entirely unaware of the misery that Mostar has been through. There have been some sensational pictures and then they went away and moved on to the next disaster.

14.54

Puljic

Puljic:  Please, let's spare the children from all of this. Let children come together spontaneously. Do we need some foreigner to come here and abuse out children?

Group of kids on video

Colvin:  In fact, far from using or abusing the children, UNICEF has now got them to the point where they produce their own shows, without any supervision from outsiders at all. Their one desire is to live in a normal, unified town.

15.35

Group of kids on step

Girl 1:  I'd like it if children from the western side could come so we could make programs together - but I would like to be sure they are good children. I would like us all to work together like before. I wouldn't like us to be separated now that the war is almost over.

15.52

Mostar

Colvin:  Mostar is just one town, just a single aspect of the patchwork of problems that the Dayton agreement tried to address.

But it's also the pacemaker. It's elections in June were supposed to pave the way for the much wider national poll due in September.

Now, Mostar's delicate consensus looks like being shattered. Are there any grounds for hope?

Osborne

Osborne:  You know, there's an informed optimism. There's a hard optimism, even a slightly kind of depressive optimism that I work on, that is on the theory that one just slogs on. That is life, is it not? You keep going until they knock you over. Isn't that not the principle.

16.36

Elvedin

Elvedin:  The real Mostar people all believe that the Mostar is going to be rebuilt again, because even in all this destruction, Mostar kept his soul.

16.53

River

Colvin:  It's hard to remain unmoved by the strength and optimism of the children of Mostar. But it's even harder to share their optimism. Because what they're up against is the bitterness, hatred and intransigence of their elders.

Singing