Banja Luka – Faith Matters https://www.faith-matters.org Working with Faith Communities Countering Extremism, Supporting Integration & Challenging Hatred. Founded by Fiyaz Mughal Tue, 27 Oct 2020 15:40:31 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://www.faith-matters.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/favicon.png Banja Luka – Faith Matters https://www.faith-matters.org 32 32 95725945 Two arrested over wartime killing of 78 civilians https://www.faith-matters.org/two-arrested-over-wartime-killing-of-78-civilians/ Tue, 27 Oct 2020 15:15:18 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=9358

Two people have been detained in Bosnia on suspicion of taking part in the killing of at least 78 civilians during the 1992-95 war.

The two men were apprehended in Banja Luka, the main town in the Bosnian Serb-run part of the country, according to the prosecutor’s office.

They are suspected of crimes against humanity over the June 1992 killings in the north-western village of Velagici.

Bosnian Serbs slaughtered imprisoned Bosniak civilians, who are mainly Muslims, outside the school building with automatic weapons.

The victims’ bodies were later driven away in trucks and dumped in a mass grave that was exhumed in 1996.

More than 100,000 people died during the war in Bosnia, which erupted when Bosnian Serbs rebelled over the country’s independence from the former Yugoslavia and moved to carve up a mini-state of their own, expelling Bosniaks and Croats from the territory.

]]> 9358 Frontline Insight: Lessons on hatred from Bosnia https://www.faith-matters.org/frontline-insight-lessons-on-hatred-from-bosnia/ Tue, 24 Jan 2017 01:02:12 +0000 https://faith-matters.org/?p=6426

Kemal Pervanic grew up in a Bosnian Muslim village surrounded by Serbs. “My schoolmates were just my schoolmates and my teachers were my teachers and that’s how it was until the early 1990s,” Pervanic told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at London’s Frontline Club. But in 1992 he was in a concentration camp being interrogated and tortured by his favourite teacher.

“If you are born in peace, and raised in peace, you take peace for granted,” Pervanic said. “If you speak to anyone out there right now, they’ll tell you that they’re crazy if you tell them that something like that may happen. But now after I lived through such events, I know that it can happen to anyone.”

It’s been over21years since the war inBosnia Herzegovinaended. Pervanic has become a writer and human rights activist. He believes that the process of reconciliation has hardly begun. “Reconciliation and peace building is going to take decades and many generations,” he said. “The process leading up to the war didn’t take long, five to seven years. So you destroy peace, you destroy a normal society so quickly. And it takes such a long time to rebuild it again.”

Now a British citizen, Pervanic splits his time between London and Bosnia. He fears that people in Western Europe don’t appreciate how fragile peace can be.

“We don’t think somebody will come take it away from us,” Pervanic says. “Because it can so easily be taken away from us we all have to become educators, and we all have to become involved in politics.”

]]> 6426 Historic mosque reopens in Banja Luka in Bosnia https://www.faith-matters.org/historic-mosque-reopens-in-banja-luka-in-bosnia/ Sun, 08 May 2016 19:33:22 +0000 https://faith-matters.org/?p=2609

Thousands of Muslims gather in the Bosnian city of Banja Luka to celebrate the reopening of an historic mosque destroyed during the country’s war.

The spire of the Fehadija mosque soars above the Bosnian city of Banya Luka, as the Muslim call to prayer echoes through the air.

This city is now mainly Orthodox Christian, but thousands of Muslims from across Bosnia have gathered to celebrate the reopening of this historic structure.

It’s restoration is a symbol of the slowly healing rifts between the country’s various ethnic and religious groups, according to outgoing Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davatoglu.

The video highlights Turkey’s ourgoing Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu as saying

“Bosnia-Herzegovina, with all its nations, its Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox and Jews, is one body, one heart.”

The mosque was originally built by Ottoman rulers in the 16th century but was demolished during the Bosnian was in 1993 and its stones scattered.

Experts said they were able to find 70-percent of the stones for the rebuilt structure.

But as difficult as that was, it could prove to be easier than bridging the rifts that still divide the country, according to former Serb Republic president Dragan Cavic.

The Serb Republic President and Banja Luka resident, Dragan Cavic, said,

“The next thing that will happen is we will be rebuilding the trust, but it will take more time to do that.”

But Banya Luka now has the soaring spire of the rebuilt mosque to show that difficult goals can be achieved.

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