Sarajevo -- The tiny students, some in their first year at a Sarajevo kindergarten, are led away from their classmates by a woman peering out from a headscarf who will give them a lesson on the basics of Islam.

"Kids have been asking me why they are being separated and what a religious class is," said a teacher, who asked not to be named. "It was so difficult at the beginning."

The "bula" -- an intermediary between an imam and the family -- grabs their attention with animal pictures on a laptop. She then goes on to explain how the Prophet Mohammed travelled from Mecca to Medina.

The lesson seems innocent enough for three to six-year-olds. But the decision by the Muslim-led county council to allow religious instruction in Sarajevo kindergartens has met a chorus of outrage from critics who fear it is part of an attempt to "Islamicise" Bosnia's capital.

In a country still smarting from a 1990s war that coined the term "ethnic cleansing," one vocal opponent warns there could be payback.

"Every wrong move could ... come back and hit us like a boomerang," said psychologist Jasna Bajraktarevic, who feels such teaching should be confined to the family home. "The introduction of religion classes in kindergartens is a kind of a Trojan Horse hiding a desire to provoke conflict among different confessions."

Not all agree. But the start of the classes in October ratcheted up tensions across the country, still split among rival ethnic groups -- Muslims, Serbs and Croats -- who shed each other's blood in the 1992 to 1995 conflict.

"All of this will just deepen divisions among people here, and that is wrong," said Helena Mandic, a non-Muslim mother who leads a group of parents challenging the decision.

Muslims account for about 40 percent of Bosnia's 3.8 million inhabitants. About 31 percent of Bosnians are Christian Orthodox Serbs and about 10 percent are Roman Catholic Croats.

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