With their red hair and silver earrings they stand out a mile. Frog (Damien) and Jay Connell are almost as conspicuous as the clowns, jugglers and rock musicians who have gathered in Mostar for the first post-war arts festival to be held in the former Yugoslavia. When asked where he comes from, Frog peers over his glasses and says "Ballyfuckinfermot". Someone puts on the soundtrack to Trainspotting. Lust For Life is Frog's favourite song.
Hurtling along the bumpy roads to Mostar you wonder how these two streetwise young Dubliners ended up as aid workers based around the area which saw much of the worst fighting of the Bosnian conflict. The city, located 150 km south of Sarajevo, is now totally divided. In 1992 the city came under attack from powerful Serb forces. Moslems and Croats fought together defending their home town. Friendships were forged against a backdrop of sniper fire and rocket launchers.
When the Serbs withdrew from the city in 1993 these bonds dissipated almost overnight. A bitter and bloody war lasting 10 months broke out between the former allies. Thousands were killed. Most of the city's incredible architecture, including Stari Most, the famous 16th-century bridge which spanned the Neretva River, was destroyed. The latter was pummelled to its watery grave by Croats in a politically motiveless act of vandalism. A malignant twist in this tale of two cities.
Frog (24) speaks the local language fluently when a policeman stops our vehicle at Metkovic, on the border between Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. His and Jay's (25) first encounter with the former Yugoslavia came three and a half years ago when they accompanied their blind mother on a pilgrimage to nearby Medjugorje. "We were offered a short trial as volunteers with a charity called Nobody's Children," he says. After six weeks working with orphaned and homeless children at camps surrounding Mostar they didn't want to go home.
Home, says Frog, a part-time musician, meant the Ballyfermot blues. A future on the dole, a life on street corners. When the call came to return to Mostar there was never really any other option. Moira Kelly, who founded Nobody's Children and is currently working to transport seriously ill Bosnian children to Irish hospitals, said she asked them back because they were "irreplaceable". "Friends thought we were mad. Some still do," says Jay. They receive an allowance of $150 per month and rely on family and supporters back home to keep them in jeans and trainers. The past three years have revealed a "whole new world" for the brothers. "It has opened me up," says Frog.
The Irish were in Mostar en masse this summer. Irish aid worker Jadzia Kaminska returned to the city with her Dublin-based charity Cradle, which has made the children of Mostar its priority since the war began. She cites the experience of her father, who arrived in Ireland as a child refugee from Poland after the second World War, as the catalyst for her work. She has set up a primary school in Mostar and established a violin project to rekindle the long association the instrument enjoys with the city. In addition to providing vital supplies such as nappies and medicines, she has pioneered a type of humanitarian aid which, with this year's music and arts festival, several international charities are keen to develop.
She says that "creative activity and laughter are an essential part of the healing process," and believes that continuity is "crucial" in any projects concerning the former Yugoslavia. Cradle has received financial backing from Vince Power of the Mean Fiddler group since 1993.
Travelling with Cradle are three veterans of street theatre who between them have toured Chechnya, Russia and central Bosnia. Caroline Moore, Johnie K. and Paul Gillett performed clown shows all over the city and organised a series of art and stilt-walking workshops for children. The reaction was such that Paul is seriously considering setting up a circus school in Mostar.
Cradle's bright purple bus provokes smiles as it passes through the city, upstaged somewhat by a "Paddytravel" tourist coach en route to Medjugorje. The civil defence bus has been donated by Cradle to a local aid agency to make things such as day trips possible. Most children in Mostar do not know what a picnic is.
Adjusting to the unwritten geographical and administrative rules that govern life in Mostar can prove difficult for the uninitiated. The river splits the city in two. On the west bank are Croats; on the east, where much of the worst destruction is visible, are Moslems, or as most prefer to be called, Bosniacs. Different currencies, car licence plates and even telephone cards are used on either side. Despite the removal of any checkpoints or barriers few people, particularly men, cross the dividing line. The consensus is that without the presence in the city of the NATO-led Stability Force (SFOR), Mostar would return to war.
Things are changing. Until recently two separate police forces patrolled the city and the surrounding area. The joint police force established last month, after over a year of negotiation, is "significant" says Mirsad Behram, a journalist at one of East Mostar's radio stations.
"It makes sense that people crossing to the other side will be more willing to do so if they know it is policed by members of their own community. It will also encourage refugees to return. Remember, we all lived peacefully together before the war," he says. Conor Comiskey and Frank McPhillips, two gardai stationed in Mostar with the International Training Police Force agree: "The joint patrols will make a difference but things move slowly here. Small problems are big problems in Mostar," says Comiskey.
Only half of the city's 100,000 inhabitants are originally from the city, the rest were driven here from other parts of the former Yugoslavia after ruthless episodes of "ethnic cleansing". Many believe that more subtle "ethnic cleansing" continues, although since the arrest of around 80 of the city's known criminals last February there have been few violent incidents. The EU's Office of the High Representative (OHR) has received complaints - "95 per cent from Moslems still living on the west side" says an OHR spokesman - from people receiving massive electricity bills covering the entire duration of the war. "There is no way I can pay a 3,000 deutschmark bill," says one woman. The average monthly wage here is 150 deutschmarks. It is a city where the streets have no names, or at least names which locals recognise. Since the war ended Croat authorities on the west have changed many of the street signs asserting their own Croatian identity and resisting the unity of the US-brokered MoslemCroat Federation, of which Mostar is a part. Sitting in one of the many bustling cafes that are a feature of the west side, Maja Pavlovic confirms that "nobody knows the new names". Like others in Mostar she would welcome a return to the time when Croats and Moslems lived side-byside united by a love for their city. "But my friends have family who were killed by Moslems," she says. "To ask them to forgive and forget is an insult."
Forgiving and forgetting. So much bloody water under the once majestic bridge. In Ljubinje, a Serbian town some two hours' drive from Mostar, children and their parents travel from up to 50 km away to see the Cradle clown show. Posters of Radovan Karadzic with the words "Don't Touch Him" and "He's for Peace" line the trees here as the circle closes tighter around the suspected Serbian war criminal, who has been indicted. Televisions are placed outside cafes as a soccer team from Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, take on a team from the Croatian capital Zagreb. The Serb-dominated Yugoslav team lose 5-0.
In the stadium the children cannot contain themselves when Johnie K., a shaven-headed clown, accidentally on purpose drops his dungarees to reveal spotted tights and bright red underpants. The adults join in Paul's fireshow, although the musclebound male volunteer refuses to plunge a fiery torch down his trousers. "It was a fantastic show," says Caroline afterwards. "You could see that these people have been starved of this type of entertainment for such a long time."
One man who remembers when the city of Mostar was a thriving entertainment centre is Kema Dedovic who runs the folk dance group Camarad on the east side. Standing in the destroyed cinema where his group continued to rehearse throughout the grenades and gunfire of the war he comments that "music soothes the savage breast . . . Before the war there were many painters, musicians and dancers based here in Mostar. Most of them have left", he says.
It is appropriate, given Mostar's cultural history, that agencies such as Cradle, Nobody's Children, Warchild and Irish Refugee Trust come together in this way to breathe new life into Mostar. Artists from Belfast travelled here to share their own perspective on living and working in a conflict situation. Rock musicians from England performed at outdoor rock concerts. Peter O'Doherty, a musician from Derry, organised raves on the platform of an old railway station with DJs from Manchester and London - although "rave hasn't quite caught on here yet", he concedes.
At one of Cradle's impromptu shows outside a cafe on the west side, hundreds of young adults are bent double with laughter as Johnie K. - dressed as Charlie Chaplin - twirls his cane and blows kisses to the girls. "When are you coming back?" asks Monica, who learnt her perfect English from an Irish professor at the local university. "We never get anything like this." Her friend Lilja watches Paul blow fire into the starry Mostar sky and says: "the new cinema just opened but I don't think people are ready to spend three hours sitting in a dark, closed space. But," she laughs as Charlie Chaplin puckers up, "we are certainly ready for this".