SARAJEVO, August 20, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Several thousand Muslims gathered in the southeastern Bosnian town of Visegrad on Saturday, August 20, to celebrate the inauguration of a historical mosque, the first to be rebuilt since the end of the 1992-1995 war.
"May this mosque become a symbol for future tolerance in our town," the Serbian mayor of Visegrad, Miladin Milicevic, told a crowd of over 3,000 people who had traveled from across Bosnia to attend the ceremony, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The old mosque -- built in the 15th century under the Ottoman Empire -- was destroyed by Serb forces during the bloody war.
As children in white stood among rows of coffins, survivors commemorated on Monday, July 11, the 10th anniversary of Srebrenica massacre, while the West regretted its failure to prevent Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.
At least 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in 1995 when Bosnian Serb forces and irregular Serbian police units backed by Belgrade overran the town, which was supposed to be a UN-protected "safe area".
Return
Senior Muslim politicians from across Bosnia and a representative from the Serbian Orthodox Church showed up for the ceremony.
Sulejman Tihic, the Muslim member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, encouraged Muslims to return to their homes in the region of Visegrad, from which they were expelled during the war.
"We must reconstruct our state together with our Serbian and Croat neighbors," he said.
The peace deal that ended Bosnia Hercegovina's war left the country split into two semi-autonomous halves, the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serbs' Republika Srpska.
At the beginning of the war, hundreds of civilians -- many of them Muslims -- were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in Visegrad, according to the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
Before the war, more than 13,000 Muslims lived in the Visegrad area -- making up more than 60 percent of the town's total population.
As of today, only some 2,000 Muslims have returned to the area.
In Srebrenica, the majority of its 28,000 Muslim pre-war inhabitants still live elsewhere, but few of them opted to return home.
Serbs woke up on June 9 to a gruesome video showing members of Serbian paramilitary units executing Muslim civilians near Srebrenica.
For the first time since the end of the Bosnian war, the shocking video avalanched countless reactions among the citizens, until then mainly denying Serb forces' involvement in the killings and contesting the civilian status of the victims.