SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - In Bosnia, where one man's hero is often another man's villain, some citizens have decided to honor a man Serbs, Croats and Muslims can all look up to -- kung fu great Bruce Lee.

Lee is best remembered for single-handedly taking on dozens of bad guys in a series of kung fu flicks. But the statue of the Chinese action hero in the ethnically divided city of Mostar is intended to remind people of Lee's lesser known values-- "loyalty, friendship, skill and justice," said Veselin Gatalo, a writer who helped come up with the idea.

...But can a monument to a karate-chopping, high-kicking B-movie star unite Mostar, a town that was both physically and psychologically scarred in Bosnia's 1992-95 war? Even now, Roman Catholic Croats and Muslims still live apart, sending their children to different schools, watching their own television stations and cheering for rival soccer teams.

"Lee is a true international hero and is a hero to all ethnicities in Bosnia and that's why we picked him," Gatalo said.

Bosnia's war killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Croats and Muslims and left the country divided into a Serb republic and a Muslim-Croat federation.

In Mostar at least, Gatalo, an ethnic Croat, hopes a statue to Lee will help erase the city's tarnished image as a place of bitter ethnic rivalries.

"We want that people, when you say Mostar, respond: 'that's the city that has a monument to Bruce Lee,'" Gatalo said.

The site picked for the statue is symbolic-- the Spanish Square, in the center of the divided city some 70 kilometers (45 miles) south of the capital Sarajevo.