BOSNIA: A replacement for the Ottoman bridge, destroyed in Bosnia's civil war, was opened yesterday. Daniel McLaughlin was there
When 12 men leaped from Mostar's Old Bridge last night, their fellow Bosnians cheered the extravagant reopening of the graceful span across the Neretva river and clinked glasses to a future free from the kind of strife that flattened it 11 years ago.
More than 50 international delegations, including heads of state from across the Balkans and Britain's Prince Charles, attended a glittering ceremony to mark the rebirth of an architectural and cultural treasure that was destroyed by the shelling of Bosnian Croats determined to seize historic Mostar from their Muslim neighbours.
The attack shattered not only the physical link between the town's two communities - a 30-metre arc of cool limestone and marble - but symbolised the collapse of the ethnic harmony that had prevailed here for 500 years.
Bosnia had been a province of the Ottoman empire for a century by the time the Old Bridge was completed in 1566, the masterwork of architect Mimar Hajrudin.
Later it was the focal point of perhaps Yugoslavia's most ethnically integrated town, as well as the springboard for divers who plunged the 20 metres into the swirling green waters of the Neretva, to gasps of admiration from visitors.
When Croatian tankfire sent the bridge's pale stone tumbling into the river in 1993, many of Mostar's 105,000 residents abandoned hope of ever again living in peace with their old neighbours.
Along with the shelling of the medieval Croatian city of Dubrovnik by Serb and Montenegrin forces, the destruction of Mostar's Old Bridge was the most potent symbol of the wanton destruction of a war that killed more than 250,000 people and displaced almost two million.
Amid the fizz of fireworks and the music of local bands last night, Mostar's residents enjoyed the climax of a programme of events to mark the opening of their "new Old Bridge," which was re-created at a cost of about $15 million collected from numerous donor states.
It was built from fragments of its shattered predecessor that were dredged out of the river, and with local stone cut and finished in a traditional Turkish style.
"This is a bridge which has a soul of its own," Mr Sulejman Kupusovic, the man in charge of the reopening ceremony, said this week. "Even when it was destroyed and did not exist, it was present among the residents even more than ever.
"I am sure this bridge will do more for the unification of Mostar and Bosnia - more than declarations or politicians together - because it is, simply put, our history."
But, just as the international effort to rebuild Mostar cannot hide all the bullet-scarred buildings along the old front line, so symbols of hope cannot paper over the deep cracks that riddle relations between Catholic Croats and their Muslim neighbours.
More than 2,000 police were in Mostar to provide security for its visitors yesterday, and an armoured personnel-carrier lumbered outside the town's top hotel.
Violence is now a rarity, but Croats and Muslims barely mingle, sending their children to schools on opposite sides of the Neretva, riding buses that never cross the river and even supporting different football teams.
Sick of the prevarication of local leaders, the international community's high representative for Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown, has ordered the dissolution of the ethnically divided municipalities in Mostar and wants it run as a unified city, with one set of emergency services rather than the current two, which both refuse to give aid to the other side.
The former British MP this week denounced the destruction of the Old Bridge as "the momentary triumph of evil" and said he had high hopes for its power to reconcile Mostar's communities.
"Its reconstruction represents a permanent triumph of will, the will to do whatever is necessary to ensure the ultimate victory of civilisation over primitivism."
For most people in Mostar, however, time and money seem the key to salving the wounds of recent history.
"I don't hate the Muslims. I was young when the war happened," said Jelena (19), a Croat.
"And the bridge is beautiful, so perhaps it will bring the tourists back. Perhaps it will even help us get into the EU eventually. But it seems we have only come a short way, and there is still far to go."