"Why are you here?" It was not the first time I was asked the question. Tourism is a foreign concept in the Serbian half of Bosnia and especially around its administrative capital, Banja Luka. In this post-war climate most outsiders are unwelcome guests, whether they're NATO's Italian military police or international agency workers meddling in local affairs. Visitors arouse suspicion, interests are queried, motives questioned.
"Why are you here?" asks another local.
"I'm a tourist," I reply.
"Why are you really here?" he counters helpfully. "You are a spy?"
Two days earlier the city made world headlines because of a major riot. Moslem civilians and UN officials had come to Banja Luka to mark reconstruction of the magnificent 16th century Ferhadija mosque. Serbs destroyed it along with the city's other 15 Islamic temples during Yugoslavia's civil war. Bulldozers had done an all too thorough job and the first hint of reconstruction eight years later was an act pregnant in symbolism.
Serb nationalists
But eight years was too soon for hundreds of Serb nationalists. They objected to foreign diplomats like Jacques Klein, head of the UN mission to Bosnia, showing up for the ceremony. "I didn't know so many Western diplomats were Muslim," remarked one local journalist.
And so the mob broke through a cordon of riot police to stone the visitors, including Jacques Klein and Bosnian Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija.
Then they set fire to buses that had ferried worshippers into town.
Banja Luka, it appears, is not ready for reconciliation.
Local reaction to the pogrom ranged from dismay to apathy to resignation.
Did the Moslems have to make such a fanfare of it in the first place, asked some. Why couldn't they have just got on with rebuilding instead of bussing in a few hundred worshippers? And anyway, who were those strangers that came to town? Why were they really here?
Strolling around Ferhadija's rubble two days later it was business as usual except for the presence of armed police belatedly protecting the site. A mobile crane was brought in to remove the burnt-out buses squatting the car park. A policeman waved me away from taking a photograph.
Who are you? Why are you here? The city's antipathy to strangers is reinforced by the Lonely Planet guidebook used as a bible by many semi-independent travellers.
"Banja Luka was never much of a tourist centre," it notes. "And in 1993 local Serbs made sure it never would be by blowing up all 16 of the city's mosques, complementing the damage previously done by second World War bombings and a 1969 earthquake."
Hands of clock
The hands of a clock in the main shopping square are frozen to mark the exact moment of the earthquake but contrary to expectations this is a picturesque city with a fine 14th-century Roman fortress, open parks and the sweeping Vrbas River.
Most non-Serbs evacuated the city during the war but a small minority, including mosque-less Moslems, stayed and endured the war years with varying degrees of acceptance.
Despite their perseverance the city's profile changed dramatically. Here, as throughout Bosnia, ethnic and cultural diversity has been squeezed and jostled into homogenous lots. Serb, Croat and Moslem extricated from one another with the losers sent packing from every quarter. And so the influx of Serb refugees from other parts of former Yugoslavia swelled Banja Luka into a busy but impoverished centre of about 250,000 people with accommodation, money and jobs all at a premium.
The riot at Ferhadija was the first violent outbreak in years but Moslems and Croats considering a return to their native city will think again.
Long-distance bus companies immediately cancelled the main service to Sarajevo, fearing reprisals for the mosque attack. Rumours began circulating about roadblocks being set up by Moslems in surrounding towns, making it unsafe for Serbs to leave the city. As usual however, these rumours proved groundless.
Orthodox church
History repeats itself in these parts. Across the road from the Soviet-style Hotel Bosna rusting steel rods stretch into the sky. The vacant lot is the site of a Serbian Orthodox church which was razed by Croats during the second World War. Serbs want to restore the church but six years after work began the project ran out of funds. No dignitary from the UN or anywhere else came to give this church their blessing. Like the bulldozed mosque up the street renewal has stopped in its tracks.
Over coffee with Serb friends I suggest the watching world will react badly to TV images of elderly Moslems being stoned by angry young men from this city. But if my friends are fed up by what happened at Ferhadija they're not perturbed by the picture it represents to the outside world. They have given up on the world in the same way they feel the world has given up on Bosnian Serbs.
Forever doomed in the propaganda war they adopt the role of Bad Guys with a stubborn indifference. They're not interested in winning hearts or minds so why bother explain the conflict to outsiders who don't understand? "This is the Balkans," they shrug. "Why are you here?"