Do you think you will ever return to live in B&H?
Nah. That's a pretty much closed book. The main (well only really) problem I have is that there are no jobs: in most areas the unemployment rate is 40% or above, and rising! One day I would like to purchase a house in the mountains there though and maybe divide my time between there and the UK, but definetely not a full return.
Do the people seem to believe the war is really over and that all three ethnic groups can live peacefully together?
They do believe the war is over (and most people are sick of reffering to it) but living together is still a big problem, and racism is, unfortunately, fairly widespread. This is a particular problem in Mostar, which is still cleanly divided between a Muslim and Catholic side. Though bear in mind the people in B&H are basically the same race-the only thing that's really different is religion. The Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats don't actually have a lot in common with their respective neighbours except for their religion, and they all talk in the local dialect rather then in the Serbian/Croatian one.
What are your memories of the war (if any and if you feel you can discuss them)?
I don't really remember the war as I was very small when it all kicked off (I was only 10 months old when the Serb army came to Mostar and put the city under siege). At the time I was living on the East (Muslim) side of Mostar and the soldiers turned up with a gun to the door and turned me and my (Catholic) mum onto the street. So we had to make our way accross to the Western (Catholic) side to my mum's parent's flat, and we all escaped to Croatia a week or two after that, where we stayed for 2 years. As a result all my earliest childhood memories are of being a refugee, and because we were in a safe area I didn't personally witness any fighting. But my mum and grandparents witnessed a lot of it, and when we let Mostar the city was already heavily destroyed, there were dead bodies in the streets and most of the mosques on the West (Catholic) side had been blown up and all traces of their existence removed.
What do you call your native language? And which alphabet did you learn first?
I personally refer to it as Serbocroatian. This term is now largely dead in the former Yugoslavia, and instead the languages are called either "Serbian", "Croatian" or "Bosnian" depending on where you are and who you talk to (and since Montenegro became independent there has been the creation of a "Montenegrin" language).
But really, it is all the same damn language, and the differences are absolutely minimal and most of the time aren't notieceable at all. It's like saying that British English and American English are two completely different languages. (Though I could briefly explain the differences between the various versions of Serbocroatian to you if you're interested).
In Mostar the dominant alphabet used is the Roman one, so that was what I learned first, and when I write in Serbocroatian I always write in the Roman version. I did learn Cyrillic as well but my skills in it are rather rusty and I can read more then I can write.
