Muamer Zukorlic will be a thorn in the government's side as it seeks EU membership.

Serbian mufti taps into ethnic tension with Belgrade

SANDZAK, Serbia — In Belgrade this week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel demanded that Serbia abandon its attempt to govern northern Kosovo in order to become a candidate for European Union membership. Merkel’s visit to the Balkans follows recent violence on the border of Serbia and Kosovo, which Serbia refuses to recognize as an independent country.

But ethnic tensions don’t just simmer at the border. Within Serbia, a local mufti is demanding autonomy for the majority Bosniak region of Sandzak and accusing the government of “genocide in gloves” for its policies toward Muslim minorities.

Muamer Zukorlic, 40, the long-standing head of the Islamic community in Serbia, said last year that, though he respects Serbia’s borders, the least he will accept is “a highly regionalized Sandzak with a certain degree of autonomy.”

The rising tensions have accompanied Serbia’s bid for EU membership, an effort aided by the recent arrest of war crimes fugitives Goran Hadzic and Ratko Mladic. But Zukorlic’s demands reveal Serbia’s ongoing challenge: its Muslim minorities remain isolated from the Orthodox Christian majority.

“Zukorlic is the manifestation of Belgrade’s failure to cope with the Muslims in the country, he was probably inevitable,” said Sonja Biserko of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia.

Zukorlic runs Novi Pazar, the largest town in Sandzak, a historic region that stretches into Montenegro and borders Kosovo and Bosnia, as his own personal fiefdom. His harsh rhetoric toward Belgrade appeals to Bosniaks, many of whom feel like Serbia’s government would prefer that they disappear. Zukorlic also connects the situation of Bosniaks to a wider Muslim struggle. This past weekend, according to Serbia’s B92, he called on Bosniaks to accept only Allah as their master, saying “this is our response to the injustice, oppression and discrimination against us by the oppressors, aimed at returning us in the past century when we were not allowed to say who and what we are.”

Zukorlic studied abroad in Bosnia, Algeria, and Lebanon, funded by various Islamic institutions.
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