The removal of the remains, mostly of Muslim martyrs, from the Liska harem, is again a topic that extends to the Mostar City Council. While the families strongly condemn this move, the city authorities want to turn this location into a park. Due to many years of debate about this topic, the Liska harem now looks completely neglected and has become a place where stray dogs are gathered.
Tajma Demic‘s father was buried in the Liska harem in the war nineties. She considers reopening old painful wounds from the war completely unnecessary and incomprehensible. This is not the first time that the politicians who lead Mostar try to collect certain points through painful topics. And while politics does not choose the means for its goal, Tajma says that she will never agree to her father’s remains being removed from this location.
During the aggression of Mostar, people were forcibly buried in the Liska harem because of the morgue to which this was the closest location. And now, 30 years later, instead of a decent monument to the heroes of Mostar who lie here, the construction of a park is mentioned. This is specifically the proposal of Mayor Marijo Kordic, who presented this initiative as part of the proposal to change the controversial street names in Mostar.
The mayor’s idea is to erect a monument on the site of the Liska harem, among other things, to all civilian victims of the Mostar war, which, according to Kordic, was supported by the association of the same name. The association confirmed that support was only given if the families agreed and that they proposed other locations for this monument. The opposition in Mostar says that the story that a park is drawn here in the spatial plan does not hold much water.
”The very story that the reason is some spatial plan where it is drawn as a park is bizarre because we have so far changed the spatial plan several times so that we could change the spatial plan here and declare this place a cemetery, that is, a harem,” says Arman Zalihic, SDP councilor in the Mostar City Council.
As long as the city government insists on opening topics that should have been finished 30 years ago, the citizens cannot even hope for changes. There was also mentioned that the arrangement of the park should be done in the Partisan Memorial Cemetery, which only takes this city back to a distant past full of divisions, Federalna writes.
