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Bosnian Serbs Attack Muslims Over Mosque
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina, May 7 (News Agencies) - Thousands of Bosnian Serbs staged violent protests and attacked Muslims Monday over the rebuilding of a mosque destroyed during the Bosnian war, trapping several senior officials and foreign envoys in a nearby building for several hours.
Police said they evacuated all the officials, who included U.N. envoy Jacques-Paul Klein and Bosnian Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija, from the building at around 6:30 pm (1630 GMT).
The demonstrators dispersed at around 7:00 pm (1700 GMT).
Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic also left the building, which he had entered to join those trapped inside, who also included Muslim religious leaders. U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia Thomas Miller was also trapped, but was evacuated earlier by his bodyguards.
The officials were taken to a NATO peacekeepers' base in Ramici, a few kilometers (miles) outside the city, for their safety.
Klein told AFP by telephone that some 30 to 35 people were trapped in the Islamic community building surrounded by "an angry mob of drunks, radicals and extremists."
It was the second such incident in three days, and a signal that ethnic tensions still persist in post-war Bosnia, some six years after the signing of the U.S.-brokered Dayton accords which ended it.
The officials had come to watch a ceremony marking the opening of reconstruction work on the 16th century Ferhadija mosque in Banja Luka, which was dynamited by local Serbs in 1993 during the Bosnian war.
But the ceremony sparked violent protests by around 3,000 to 4,000 Serb demonstrators.
Police said 30 people, including three policemen, were injured when the crowd threw stones and bottles at a few hundred Muslims.
The rioters also torched seven buses and two vans that had brought Muslims to Banja Luka, the capital of the Bosnian Serb republic and the site of large scale ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs during the war.
Explosions, probably from fuel tanks, could be heard, but the crowd prevented firemen from approaching the buses and other damaged vehicles. The rioters also attacked an armored vehicle with diplomatic license plates.
Bosnian Serb protesters, chanting "We do not want mosques, build churches," and "Serbia, Serbia" as well as the name of a Bosnian Serb wartime leader and notorious war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, also burned an Islamic flag from the Islamic community building and replaced it with the Bosnian Serb flag.
The Bosnian Serb leadership expressed "deep regret" over the incidents, saying in a statement it condemns "any form of violence." It urged the interior ministry to launch an investigation and identify those responsible.
Bosnian Serb Minister of Interior Affairs Perica Bundalo and the chief of the Banja Luka police station, Vladimir Tutus, both submitted their resignations over the unrest, a government statement said.
Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic will decide whether to accept the resignations after studying reports on the riots, said the statement, released following a government session.
The international community roundly condemned the unrest.
The United States said the incidents had "set back the cause of inter-ethnic tolerance."
"Assaults on officials, on the Bosnians who were attending the ceremony, on members of the international community - this is all unacceptable," U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
The top international envoy to Bosnia, Wolfgang Petritsch, who said he was "appalled", echoed the U.S. view.
"I am shocked that the [Bosnian Serb republic] still appears to be a place with no rule of law, no civilized behavior and no religious freedom," Petritsch said in a statement.
He slammed the Serb authorities for failing to provide security, ensure the rule of law and "live up to their commitment to protect religious freedom."
"The planned ceremony, which should have been a symbol of peace and reconciliation, has been destroyed by the actions of a violent and unruly crowd," he said urging Bosnian Serb authorities to arrest those responsible.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) head of mission to Bosnia, Dieter Woltmann, stressed that "such a demonstration of uncivilized and violent behavior is utterly intolerable and an embarrassment for" the Bosnian Serb republic.
The Swedish presidency of the European Union also condemned the "unprovoked violence."
It was the second incident of its kind in Bosnia in three days.
On Saturday, violent clashes left several people injured during a ceremony to lay the foundation stone for another mosque, a 16th-century structure also destroyed during the war, in the southern Serb-run town of Trebinje.
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