prijava
SARAJEVO, April 11 (FENA) - Ambassador of the Republic of Turkey Haldun Koç today in Sarajevo announced that the Embassy had sent a diplomatic protest note to the BiH Ministry of Foreign Affairs over the incident of desecration of the Arnaudija Mosque in Banja Luka.
“We have received the news with great disappointment that the Arnaudija Mosque in Banja Luka, whose reconstruction is funded by Turkey, has been desecrated by what we consider to be an act of violence and aggression. Security measures should be tightened in such places,” Koç said.
He pointed out that mosques, like all other places of worship, are places that are considered sacred and that he sees this act as an aggression towards the mosque as an aggression towards people and is most severely condemned.
Koç said that Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of the best examples of tolerance that they wholeheartedly support and that this attack is a provocation of malicious people, but that all levels of government in BiH, including the RS entity, have severely condemned the attack, proving that there is sensitivity in BiH to these types of attacks.
An unknown person spray-painted a swastika and a Cyrillic four “s” with a cross on a wall of Banja Luka’s Arnaudija Mosque, a religious building in the process of reconstruction.
The person also wrote "Turk rauss" (Turks, get out), and the police stated they are searching for the perpetrators.
The Banja Luka Arnaudija Mosque is the only one of the 15 mosques in this area that were completely destroyed during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina that has not been reconstructed.
During the aggression on Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was repeatedly desecrated. The Arnaudija Mosque was destroyed on the night between May 6 and 7, 1993, the same night when the most famous Banja Luka mosque Ferhadija was demolished, and then its destroyed parts were transported to various locations outside the city.
The old Akshamluk-minaret somehow survived the destruction of Arnaudija Mosque, and in the days after the mines were placed and the mosque was blown up, the minaret was destroyed to the ground as well.
Arnaudija’s demolition has never been officially investigated, but it is certain that the demolition was committed by an undisclosed group of nationalists as part of the ethnic cleansing policy of the entity of Republika Srpska.
In 1998, the old mosque fountain, one gate, and one remaining wall of the mosque complex, were also demolished.
The works on the construction of this religious site, which was on the UNESCO World Heritage List, began in 2017.
(FENA) S. R.
