Word: mostar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Rusmir Cisic, a Bosnian muslim engineer, remembers the day his native Mostar lost the bridge from which the city takes its name. For more than four centuries the Stari Most, or Old Bridge, linked the Mediterranean and Ottoman worlds, Christianity and Islam, West and East. Its graceful arch and stone towers in southeastern Bosnia were a meeting place for Serbs, Croats and Muslims as well as travelers from as far away as Istanbul and Glasgow. That ended with the Bosnian war, when the Neretva River became a front line between the town's Croat and Muslim residents. Some tried...
TIME recently spoke to a former Red Beret, now in hiding, who described joining the unit just before it overran his hometown of Mostar in southeastern Bosnia on a cool fall day in 1991: "They took about a hundred Muslim and Croat civilians--men and women--from a shelter and lined them up on the banks of the Neretva River," recalled the heavily scarred Bosnian Serb, now 28. "Standing on the other side, I watched as five of the Red Berets executed them all. Some were shot; others they knifed or bludgeoned with rifle butts as they screamed for mercy...