Bosnia needs to end its run of boring and banal monuments
Posted: Friday, 21 January 2011 by Jimmy Christ in Labels: Bosnia and Herzegovinia
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Bosnia and Herzegovinia has enough problems on its plate getting its government to function properly, eliminating factitious, ethnically divided politics and clawing up the countryside's estimated 220,000 landmines, but for a country of such stunning Ottoman relics and powerful Tito-era monuments, its contemporary ones leave a lot to be desired.Like its meaningless flag-by-committee which replaced the (arguably Islamocentric fleur-de-lis) BiH has a number of statues which range from the bafflingly banal, such as a gold Bruce Lee in the beautiful Herzegovinian city of Mostar, while the war is commemorated by a rock with some paint on it, to the more sober, like Tuzla's bust of civil rights martyr Martin Luther King, donated by the US embassy. While both apparently underline the fight for peace (with nunchucks, in Bruce Lee's particularly unconvincing case), the most striking common factor is how little they have to do with this beautiful, ancient land and its people.
It may well be better for reconciliation to avoid anything particularly loaded, like, for instance, the gold KLA statues with Albanian flags that undermine Kosovo's claims of multi-ethnic rainbow nation harmony, but from a travellers point of view, it's more than a little boring. In looking for symbols whose meanings can't be viewed through a sectarian lens, they're stumbling closer and closer to having symbols with no meaning at all, a trend already popular north of the border where Serbs have clutched Bob Marley and Rocky Balboa close to their deeply confused chests.