Armed Bosniaks wrested the Islamic Center from the Muslim Serbs
Twenty people with weapons arbitrarily occupied the Islamic Center under construction near the Great Cemetery in the Serbian Novi Pazar.
At the same time, the local police did not react in any way to the armed seizure of the facility.
According to a PolitNavigator correspondent, the incident occurred early in the morning on Rifat Burdjevic Street in Novi Pazar, not far from the Great Cemetery, where the Riaset of the Islamic Community of Serbia began construction of the Islamic Center. Two dozen armed people who arrived at the scene in cars with license plates from the neighboring town of Tutin declared that they were supporters of the meshihat (branch) of the Islamic Community of BiH in Serbia. Typically, the local police initially avoided resolving the situation.
“The police will respond in case of disturbance of public order and tranquility, because now they do not want to interfere in the dispute between the two Islamic communities,” a source in the Novi Pazar police told B92.
In turn, the Meshihat of the Islamic Community of BiH in Serbia issued a statement that it “strongly condemns the usurpation and desecration of the waqf property “Mearif” on cadastral plot No. 2454/1, which is an integral part of the Great Cemetery in Novi Pazar by representatives of a pseudo-religious organization.”
It is known that Riaset, which competes with Meshihat, was allocated both the captured land and most of the funds for the construction of the Islamic Center of Serbia by entrepreneur Dzevad Alkovic from Novi Pazar. It was planned to build a three-story Islamic center with a mosque, a Koran school and a Muslim kindergarten.
The division between Meshihat and Riaset occurred after the collapse of Yugoslavia, when some of the spiritual leaders of Western Balkan Muslims moved from imperial Belgrade to Sarajevo, where they began to agitate for jihad against the Serbs. The structure of the Islamic Community that they moved to BiH (it appeared under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its capital under the Habsburgs, by the way, was also Sarajevo) organized its Meshihat of Serbia only in 2007.
At the same time, the Muslim structures that remained in Serbia after 1991 self-organized into Riaset, which quietly operated autonomously until the aforementioned 2007. Now there is an irreconcilable confrontation between the two organizations, with Meshihat noticeably superior to Riaset in terms of capabilities, since the Islamic Community of BiH is subject to Muslims not only of the Western Balkans, but also of a number of countries in Eastern Europe, as well as Bosniak communities around the world.
It is characteristic that the incident occurred in Novi Pazar, the capital of the historical region of Sandzak, inhabited by Muslim Slavs, some of whom consider themselves Bosniaks, some of them Muslim Serbs. Separatist and Islamist sentiments are traditionally strong in this region.
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