MUSLIM HATE IN BOSNIA
Fears of New Ethnic Conflict in Bosnia
By DAN BILEFSKY
The New York Times
Published: December 13, 2008
SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — Thirteen years after the United States brokered the Dayton peace agreement to end the ferocious ethnic war in the former Yugoslavia, fears are mounting that Bosnia, poor and divided, is again teetering toward crisis.
On the surface, this haunted capital, its ancient mosques and Orthodox churches still pocked by mortar fire, appears to be enjoying a renaissance. Young professionals throng to stylish cafes and gleaming new shopping malls while the muezzin heralds the morning prayer. The ghosts of Srebrenica linger — recalling the worst massacre in Europe since World War II — but Sarajevans prefer to talk about President-elect Barack Obama or the global financial crisis.
Yet for the first time in years, talk of the prospect of another war is creeping into conversations across the ethnic divide in Bosnia, a former Yugoslav republic that the Dayton agreement divided into two entities, a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serbian Republic.
The power-sharing agreement between former foes has always been tense. Now, however, the uneasy peace has been complicated by Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in February, which many here worry could prompt the Serbian Republic to follow suit, tipping the region into a conflict that could fast turn deadly.
“It’s time to pay attention to Bosnia again, if we don’t want things to get nasty very quickly,” Richard C. Holbrooke, the Clinton administration official who brokered the Dayton accord, and Paddy Ashdown, formerly the West’s top diplomat in Bosnia, warned recently in an open letter published in several newspapers. “By now, the entire world knows the price of that.”
The peace agreement, negotiated at a United States Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, accomplished its goal of ending a savage three-and-a-half-year war in which about 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims. A million more Muslims, Serbs and Croats were driven from their homes, while much of this rugged country’s infrastructure was destroyed.
But the decentralized political system that Dayton engineered has entrenched rather than healed ethnic divisions. Even in communities where Serbs, Muslims and Croats live side by side, some opt to send their children to the same schools, but in different shifts.
And the country’s leaders are so busy fighting one another that they are impeding Bosnia from progressing. Locked in an impasse of mutual recrimination are Haris Silajdzic — the Muslim in the country’s three-member presidency, who has called for the Serbian Republic to be abolished — and the Bosnian Serb prime minister, Milorad Dodik, who is supported by Russia and Serbia and who has dangled the threat that his republic could secede.
Bosnia, which has received more than $18 billion in foreign aid since 1995, remains a ward of the West, its security guaranteed by 2,000 European Union peacekeepers.
Sketching a worst-case example, Srecko Latal, a Bosnia specialist at the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Sarajevo, warned that if the Serbian Republic declared independence, Croatia would respond by sending in troops, while the Bosnian Muslims would take up arms. If Banja Luka, the capital of the Serbian Republic, were to fall, he continued, Serbia would be provoked into entering the fray, leading to the prospect of a regional war.
“For the first time in years, people are talking about war,” Mr. Latal said. “They are tired of it, and they don’t want it. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility.”
Leaders across Bosnia expressed hope that Mr. Obama would be more engaged in Bosnia than President Bush has been, while emphasizing that the president-elect’s multicultural background made him ideally suited to mediate here.
And although Bosnia was featured in a painful campaign gaffe for the probable new secretary of state, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton — who stepped back from a claim that she had ducked sniper fire during a visit here as first lady — many here are optimistic that she will have a vested interest in salvaging Dayton as part of President Bill Clinton’s legacy.
Bosnia’s prospects for stability, analysts say, would also be helped if it joined the European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc. But progress has not been encouraging. In a damning report assessing Bosnia’s readiness to join the bloc, the European Commission, the group’s executive body, warned in November that “inflammatory rhetoric has adversely affected the functioning of institutions and slowed down reform” while corruption and organized crime were significant.
The world is so concerned about Bosnia’s stability that the United Nations Security Council has extended the mandate of its senior envoy to Bosnia, who was supposed to leave this year, until June. Still, Miroslav Lajcak, the envoy, said in an interview that while the situation is critical, it was a sign of Bosnia’s progress that politics now trumped security as the biggest challenge.
“The political situation is difficult, volatile and unstable, but it is not undermining security,” he said. “Violence can’t be ruled out, but I don’t see the prospect of another war.”
For the country to progress, leaders on all sides say, the structure established by the Dayton accord must be overhauled. The country’s two entities have their own Parliaments, and there are 10 regional authorities, each with its own police force and education, health and judicial authorities.
The result is a byzantine system of government directed by 160 ministers, a structure that absorbs 50 percent of Bosnia’s gross domestic product of $15 billion, according to the World Bank.
While untangling that bureaucracy would be difficult, persuading the country’s leaders to put aside their fundamental differences might be harder.
In October 2007, the country experienced one of its worst political crises when Bosnian Serbs protested a new voting system aimed at preventing politicians from blocking major reform efforts by simply not showing up at meetings.
Fearing that it could be outvoted by other ethnic groups under the new rules, the Serbian Republic condemned the measures and Mr. Dodik threatened to withdraw his party’s representatives from all Bosnian institutions. The crisis finally ended after some concessions were made to the Bosnian Serbs, and the European Union rewarded the country by initialing an agreement cementing Bosnia’s ties with the bloc.
Mr. Silajdzic, who as Bosnia’s wartime foreign minister was at Dayton, argued in an interview that the institutional structure created there had served to legitimize the genocidal policy of the Serbs during the war. He urged the world to help write a new Constitution that would create a unified state based on economic regions, effectively consigning the Serbian Republic to the dustbin.
“The problem with Dayton is that it created an ethnocracy rather than a democracy and has become an umbrella under which Slobodan Milosevic’s project of ethnic cleansing is hidden,” he said, referring to the former Serbian president. “If the situation is allowed to continue, the message this sends the world is, ‘Kill thy neighbor and get away with it.’ ”
For Mr. Dodik, the prime minister, such talk just proves that Bosnia’s Muslim leadership is intent on domination.
“If Silajdzic doesn’t like Dayton, then why did he sign it?” he asked.
Mr. Dodik, a charismatic former basketball player with a large power base in the Serbian Republic, was once a Western darling for his wartime and postwar opposition to Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb nationalist leader now on trial in The Hague on war crime charges. But many Western diplomats say he has since adopted Mr. Karadzic’s nationalist language and they blame him for impeding Bosnia’s progress.
Mr. Dodik recently further inflamed tensions by filing criminal charges against a senior United States envoy and foreign prosecutors in Bosnia, accusing them of plotting against his government after they opened a corruption investigation into the Serbian Republic’s infrastructure deals, including one for $146 million government building in Banja Luka.
“We are tired of being treated like a banana republic,” Mr. Dodik said.
Guessing whether he will tear the country apart has become a favorite parlor game in Bosnia in recent months. In the past, he has said that a referendum for independence could be a fair way to settle the Serbian Republic’s status.
But in a recent interview, he said that secession was not on his agenda.
“I have said many times that my aim is not secession and we have not taken a single step toward that,” Mr. Dodik said. “What has been said is a fabrication.”
Most Serbian analysts agree that secession would be tantamount to political suicide for the prime minister. Beyond the obvious threat of provoking a war, aligning the Serbian Republic with Serbia would diminish Mr. Dodik’s power and lead to further isolation internationally.
In the former Yugoslavia, the lives of Serbs, Croats and Muslims were closely entwined for 45 years, with intermarriage not uncommon in larger cities like Sarajevo. But Mr. Dodik said the dissolution of the old state and the war that followed had destroyed whatever optimism he once had about different ethnic groups collectively deciding one another’s fates.
“Bosnia is a divided country,” he said. “There is not a single event or holiday, except for New Year’s or the First of May, that we celebrate together. I have lost all of my illusions.”
Clashes mar Bosnia's first gay festival
2008
SARAJEVO (AFP) — Dozens of homophobic hooligans attacked participants of Bosnia's first-ever gay rights festival in Sarajevo on Wednesday, leaving at least eight people injured, said police.
The scuffle broke out at the end of the opening ceremony of the four-day festival in front of the Academy of Fine Arts in downtown Sarajevo.
"When I was getting out of the academy, I was suddenly struck in the back," Pedja Kojovic, a local journalist, told AFP. "Three other people then came running and beat me up."
Emir Imamovic, a journalist who tried to help Kojovic, was severely beaten, police said. Another journalist was also injured.
A heavy police deployment prevented more violence from spoiling the event, with a security cordon keeping protestors shouting "kill the gays" and "Allahu Akbar" (a Muslim expression meaning God is Great) at bay.
A police officer on the scene said groups of anti-gay protestors had spread to nearby streets and were attacking people. A police officer was struck in the head during the clashes.
About 50 people participated in the opening day of the festival, which had already prompted fears of violence, with homophobia overriding usual divisions among the country's wartime foes -- Muslims, Serbs and Croats.
The country's Muslim majority is particularly upset about the festival because it opened during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Many, including members of various ethnic political parties, have declared homosexuality an illness and labelled the behaviour deviant.
Jihadists Find Convenient Base in Bosnia
Terrorists who previously targeted the U.S. are now in Bosnia, where they have access to a "one-stop shop" of jihad training camps, weapons and illegal Islamic 'charities' -- all at the doorstep of Europe, terrorism experts said.
"[Convicted terrorist] Karim Said Atmani recently returned to Bosnia after being released early from French prison for 'good behavior,'" terrorism expert and author Evan Kohlmann said.
Atmani, a Moroccan, was linked to the "millennium bomb plot" and convicted by a French court of colluding with Osama bin Laden. He has been linked to the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), an organization responsible for airplane hijackings and subway bombings in France.
"This is very disturbing," said Kohlmann. "Atmani promised he would wage jihad until the end. That doesn't mean until a plea deal, or early release; it means until death or victory."
Also finding haven in Bosnia is Abu el Maali, who like Atmani, was a foreign national who fought in the Bosnia war. El Maali was later accused by French authorities of attempting to smuggle explosives in 1998 to an Egyptian terrorist group plotting to destroy U.S. military installations in Germany. He was also accused of leading terrorist cells in Bosnia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"This activity is very significant," said Kohlmann. "Senior members of the former Muslim Brigade and their top commanders are still there, and they're still active."
The Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation (AHF), a charity that was later found by the U.S. Treasury to be underwriting terrorist operations including al Qaeda, shut its offices in Bosnia after the U.S. announcement but reopened under the name "Vazir." The new organization was registered as an "association for sport, culture and education."
In 2002, the U.S. Treasury Department reported that the Bosnia office of Al-Haramain was linked to Al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya, an Egyptian terrorist group that was a signatory to bin Laden's Feb. 23, 1998, fatwa -- or religious edict -- against the United States.
Cybercast News Service viewed videotape shot by Kohlmann of activity at the former Sarajevo offices of Al-Haramain. "All they did was white-out the old sign," said Kohlmann.
Cybercast News Service has also obtained a video that terrorism analysts say depicts an active jihad training camp in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a region previously described by analysts as an ideal gateway for terror missions into Europe.
The video, which is over four minutes in length, shows outdoor maneuvers, explosives training and training inside what appears to be a school gym. Exercises in hostage-taking are also shown.
Cybercast News Service obtained the footage from Gregory R. Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association. The footage, said to have been shot before autumn 2004, was first aired in May 2005 before an audience of senior military officials during the Strategy 2005: The Global Strategic Forum held in Washington, D.C.
The presence of active jihadist camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina was also confirmed by attorney and counter-terrorism expert Darko Trifunovic, who previously served as a diplomat in the foreign service of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Kohlmann said that the main camps used during the war have been closed, and a different tactic for jihad training has emerged: disguising them as youth camps. "These days, usually the kind of jihad camp you'll see in Bosnia and other countries are so-called 'youth camps.'" They are usually led by a former member of the mujahadeen, someone with military experience, and perhaps a fundamentalist cleric, said Kohlmann.
"They take young people into the hills or even a national park and conduct makeshift jihad training. As ridiculous as it sounds, they've found it's very difficult to track this sort of thing."
Christopher Brown, research associate with the Transitions to Democracy Project at the Hudson Institute, echoed the report. "A lot of these camps are very mobile," he said. "Bosnia has a lot of rugged territory where such camps can be set up temporarily."
The idea that there are no jihadist camps in Bosnia and radical Islam has not gained any foothold there, as some analysts suggest, is "ridiculous," according to Brown. He points to the raising of two Waffen-SS divisions under the encouragement of the mufti of Jerusalem during World War II, up to the spread of Wahhabism by the Saudis beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.
"Al Qaeda cells were set up in Bosnia in the early 1990s by Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, and bin Laden was said to visit the area twice in the mid-1990s," Brown added. "Iran was very involved in supporting the Islamist separatist movement in Bosnia, and Hezbollah was doing training there in the 1990s."
Training also takes place inside youth centers and school gyms, according to Trifunovic.
The goal is a network of like-minded cells as opposed to having the sort of permanent camp that would fuel an active frontline, said Kohlmann. "It's not that surprising. This sort of thing goes on in the U.S. as well," he said.
"Only a very small minority of Bosnians are attracted to this," said Kohlmann. "This is primarily a foreign phenomenon -- mostly consisting of Syrians, Egyptians and Algerians."
From the time of the Bosnian war, local Muslims experienced friction with the foreign jihadists and opposed the idea of an Islamic state, as well as condemned their atrocities, said Kohlmann. That friction continues.
Marko Attila Hoare, research fellow at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, cautions against arriving at broad conclusions based on the reports of jihad camps. "The evidence suggests that talk of 'active jihadist camps' in Bosnia has been greatly exaggerated," he said.
"Over 10 years since several thousand Islamic radicals fought in the Bosnian war of the 1990s, Bosnia -- unlike New York, Madrid and London -- has yet to experience a single Islamist terrorist outrage. Nor have any Bosnian Muslims been implicated in Islamist terrorist acts elsewhere. Al Qaeda tried and failed to turn Bosnia into a jihadist base; the moderate version of Islam practiced there is not conducive to Islamism," said Hoare.
Statistics compiled before the war and in 2004 suggest that the majority of Bosnian Muslims do not attend mosque regularly and have a predominantly European secular outlook regarding politics.
Hoare has previously described the Palestinians, Chechens and "other enslaved Muslim peoples" as "caught between the Scylla of colonial oppression and the Charybdis of Islamofascism."
Hoare has contended that "there can be there can be no freedom for Muslim peoples without the defeat of the Islamofascists and everything they stand for; and there can be no defeat of the Islamofascists without liberty for all Muslim peoples."
Hoare told Cybercast News Service: "It is entirely likely that foreign Islamists are still trying to recruit disaffected Bosnian Muslims, but these latter are likely to make less willing recruits than are members of the Muslim communities of Western Europe."
Hoare's analysis is in line with that of French political scientist Giles Keppel, who in the book "Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam" described the Islamists' attempt to graft jihad onto Bosnian operations as a failure.
Defense analyst Frederick Peterson believes that to a certain degree, talk of majorities not favoring the Wahhabist strain of Islam is a "deceptive argument."
"There doesn't need to be a majority to be a threat. When push comes to shove, they will identify with the side most like them and either be silent, harbor or abet," Peterson said. "We know that the mujahadeen in Bosnia were al Qaeda and Iranian-sponsored, and they are still there today."
"We have terrorist operatives who have targeted the U.S. back in a relatively un-policed region that offers one-stop shopping in conventional arms and open spaces for training, ideological support, recruitment drives and funding," said Kohlmann. "It's a very disturbing phenomenon."
By Sherrie Gossett
Cybercast News Service
Assyrian International News Agency.
BOSNIA: SERBS DEEM MUSLIM LEADER'S COMMENTS 'IRRESPONSIBLE'
Sarajevo, 25 August (AKI) - Bosnian Serb leaders slapped back at their Muslim
colleague, Sulejman Tihic today, for saying that if they didn’t like the
country, they could pack up and leave. The row, seen as a part of political game
before October's parliamentary elections, centres on Muslim demands for the
abolition of the Bosnian Serb entity, Republika Srpska (RS) and Serb threats to
hold a referendum on independence if Muslims persisted in their demands.
Tihic, a Muslim member of Bosnia’s three-man rotating state presidency, said on
Thursday that those who want to secede form Bosnia can pack up and leave, "but
can’t take away an inch of Bosnian territory". According to the Dayton peace
accord that ended civil war in Bosnia, the country was divided into two
entities, a Muslim-Croat federation and RS, but the international community,
which safeguards peace in Bosnia, has been gradually stripping entities of
their state prerogatives, stepping up Muslim demands for abolition of RS.
Borisav Paravac, a Serb member of the state presidency, slammed back at Tihic,
saying his statement was an "irresponsible and scandalous act". "Bosnia isn’t
his private property," said Paravac, adding that RS covers 49 per cent of
Bosnia’s territory and that Serbs are one of three constituent peoples, with
equal rights.
RS Prime Minister Milorad Dodik retorted that Tihic’s statement represented a
drastic example of “hate and chauvinism” which will only further inflame ethnic
passions in Bosnia.
"In Tihic’s statement one can easily recognize an Islamic concept which sees
Bosnia as its exclusive right," said Dodik. "Serbs are constituent people in
Bosnia claim the same right to the country and to live in it," said Dodik.
The high representative of the international community in Bosnia Christian
Schwarz Schilling last week appealed to the leaders of all three nationalities
to stop “inflammatory rhetoric”, but the quarrels continue relentlessly as the
election date draws closer.
CHRISTIAN JENNINGS IN SARAJEVO
The Scotsman
March 19, 2007
FOUR members of an ultraconservative Muslim sect have been arrested following a raid on a mountain terrorist training camp in Serbia.
A large cache of weapons, ammunition, hand grenades, face-masks and plastic explosive with detonators was also discovered at a cave near Novi Pazar.
A judge ordered the four Serbian nationals to be detained for 30 days to allow police and intelligence officials to investigate their alleged activities at the training site.
Dragan Jocic, the Serbian police minister, said: "We are determined to prevent any form of violence and terrorism. We are continuing to comb the terrain and search for other members of the group."
Police said that up to 30 members of the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect had been gathering at the camp at Ninaja, a mountain in the southern Sandzak region.
The mountainous and heavily forested area sits near Serbia's border with Bosnia and Montenegro. Its population is about 50 per cent Muslim.
The Wahhabi movement - which preaches a brand of "pure Islam" backed by Osama bin Laden, the head of al-Qaeda - originated in Saudi Arabia in the early 18th century.
The sect first emerged in the Balkans during the 1992-95 civil war in Bosnia, when thousands of mujahideen fighters from Islamic countries came to fight on the side of local Muslims.
Many of the fighters have remained in the country since the war, and foreign police and intelligence sources say that some of them have been responsible for indoctrinating local youths.
However, western security sources say that the main terrorist threat posed by neighbouring Bosnia is as a source of arms and explosives.
One official based in Sarajevo described the Bosnian capital as "a weapons shopping-centre surrounded by highly porous borders".