RUSSIA RELIGION NEWS

Crimean Muslims complain of vandalism against mosques

MUFTI OF CRIMEA: ARSON AND ATTACKS ON MOSQUES CONTINUE

Religiia v Ukraine, 5 December 2014

 

Hadji Emirali Ablaev, the mufti of Crimea, published a statement of the muftiate of Crimea in connection with the recent arson of a mosque on the peninsula, Religiia v Ukraine reports, with reference to DUMK [the Ecclesiastical Board of Muslims of Crimea].

 

Hadji Emirali Ablaev said that since the early 1990s, when the indigenous Muslim people of Crimea, the Crimean Tatars, began to return to their historic homeland and to restore mosques and cemeteries, there began in Crimea attacks upon Muslim religious objects. At the same time "in more than 20 years of systematic attacks on Muslim sacred objects not one criminal has been punished."

 

Thus in the past year, in the period from October 2013 to November 2014, four mosques in Crimea have been subjected to attack. On 13 October 2013, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Kurban-Bayram, unidentified persons set fire to the central mosque in the city of Saki. On 15 October 2013, fire broke out in the mosque of the village of Rovnoe of Krasnogvardeisk district. On 13 June 2014, early in the morning, when the whole Muslim world was conducting one of the sacred nights, Berat, unidentified persons threw Molotov cocktails at a mosque in the microdistrict of Lugovoe in the city of Simferopol. On 12 November 2014, unidentified persons tried to set fire to the mosque in the village of Solnechnaia Dolina of the Sudak district. Intruders broke out a window on the first floor of the building, entered the mosque, laid wood in the room and set in on fire, and then disappeared. Security managed to extinguish the fire in time.

 

The Ecclesiastical Board of Muslims of Crimea regularly calls the attention of authorities and the public of Crimea, which is now annexed by Russia, to the problem and notes that the absence of punishment engenders new crimes.

 

"Attacks on religious buildings of any confessions, whether monasteries, synagogues, churches, or mosques, are unacceptable in any civilized country of the world. In Crimea, where representatives of various nationalities and religious confessions live, attacks on religious sacred objects immediately lead to the outbreak of interethnic and interconfessional hostility and to disruption of the fragile peace between peoples that has been carefully constructed in all these years," the DUMK statement says. (tr. by PDS, posted 8 December 2014)


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