RI mosque to be built in Sarajevo

JAKARTA (JP): The Indonesian Council of Ulemas (MUI) has formed a committee to oversee construction of a grand mosque, to be named after President Soeharto, in the war-torn Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

Lukman Harun, the head of the council's foreign affairs section, said the committee comprises of people from both Indonesia and Bosnia Herzegovina.

Indonesia is represented by Lukman and Hasan Abdul Djalil, the ambassador to Hungary who also represents Indonesia in Bosnian affairs. Bosnia is represented by Bosnian Ambassador to Indonesia Mustafa Ceric Mufti, Bekir Izetbegovic from Sarajevo's City Development Institute and Ahmed Kapidzic of Sarajevo's Spatial Plans Institute.

The agreement to form the committee was reached last month in a meeting between Hasan Djalil and Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic.

A ten-hectare site for the project has been reserved in the west of Sarajevo, which has seen 1,000 of its mosques destroyed during the recent war. Lukman said it will be named the "Haji Mohamad Soeharto Grand Mosque."

The name was proposed by the Bosnian leaders who remember President Soeharto traveling to Sarajevo last year to offer his good offices in bringing about peace in the region.

It has been reported that upon learning about the plan to build the mosque, Soeharto said Bismillah (in the name of Allah).

A team of experts, including noted architect Achmad Noe'man from the Bandung Institute of Technology, will start work on the project before the end of the year.

The mosque, to cost about US$2 million, will combine both countries' architectures. The committee has raised US$1 million from the donations of various Moslem groups in Indonesia.

"We are calling for more people to participate," Lukman said. Donations can be sent to the MUI office at Jakarta's Istiqlal Grand Mosque, he said. (ste)