Dispute With Communist Officials Blocks Opening of New Mosque in Yugoslavia

Yugoslav Muslims have built one of the grandest mosques in Europe, at a cost of $4 million, but they cannot pray in it because of a wrangle with the Communist authorities.

The White Mosque in the northern city of Zagreb is one of the biggest and costliest modern mosques outside the Islamic world, with Arab benefactors providing much of the money.

Built, burned, and rebuilt, it has been bogged in controversy from the start, about 20 years ago. Its opening has been prevented because the authorities say it is illegal.

The mosque, big enough for 3,000 worshipers, is the third-largest in all Europe, the Zagreb Islamic community says.

Its white and green interior and gold leaf, though stark, is more lavish than anything built here since the days of the Austrian Empire, which ruled the area until 1918.

“The authorities are withholding the user’s permit for the building because they say the original documents are not valid,” local mullah Sevko Omerbasic told reporters.

The local authority had ruled that the Islamic community’s building permit and certificate of land use were not in order.

Zagreb’s 30,000-strong Islamic community has built not only a mosque, but a community center including Islamic shops, a restaurant, slaughterhouse, movie theater and sports hall.

The authorities want the community to pay a $650,000 fine before the documents can be revised to make the mosque legal, Omerbasic said.

The community is resisting and the case has gone to court. Omerbasic said he expects it to be settled by the end of February, when he hopes the mosque will open.

The mullah and the authorities have presented the dispute as a legal one, but local newspapers have indicated that the wrangle has domestic and foreign political dimensions.

The main Croatian official newspaper Vjesnik noted that the entire Yugoslav Islamic community had been involved in funding the building, planning for which dates back to 1964. It asked: “Why did the appropriate authorities issue permits if they were not in accordance with law?”

It said the case has “damaged not only the interests of the Muslim faithful but those of the country as a whole. Thus the matter has become a political problem.”

Local sources said some officials here see the mosque as an unwanted seal of permanence for Muslims in a predominantly Catholic region, which has historically despised races from the south.

Four million Yugoslavs adhere to Islam, the biggest Muslim community in a European state west of Turkey, and there are 3,000 mosques of various sizes around the country.

One oil magnate was reported to have donated $500,000 toward construction of the $4-million mosque. The same amount was reported to have come from Libya, with other large contributions from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Jordan.

The newspaper said Yugoslavia had been informed by unidentified unofficial sources that blocking completion of the mosque “would be harmful to Yugoslavia’s interests.”

The suggestion was that such a move would upset Arab countries, with whom Yugoslavia maintains close ties and upon whom its beleaguered industry depends heavily for oil imports.

The Islamic community negotiated for four years with authorities until 1967 before agreeing on a site for the mosque on the edge of the city. Fourteen more years went by before a building permit was issued and the foundation stone was laid.

Consecration was planned for 1984 but a fire broke out.