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Stars And Stripes Tuesday, April�16, 2002 West feeling the fallout of efforts to aid Bosnian Muslims a decade ago By Gregory Piatt, Stars and Stripes Stripes Sunday magazine, April 14, 2002 [In 1996, an investigative report by the Los Angeles Times accused the Clinton administration of funneling money to buy weapons for the Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the Times, the plan was similar to one used by the Reagan administration to fund the Contras in Nicaragua through Iran in the Iran-Contra affair from 1983-88. It supposedly involved an effort in 1994 to fund weapons assistance or to encourage other nations, namely Iran, to break the international embargo on supply weapons to the Bosnian Muslims through Croatia. In a November 1996 report, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found no evidence that the administration was involved in any such covert activity. The committee did find that the Clinton administration knew about the Third World Relief Agency � a Muslim organization that also had ties to Osama bin Laden and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the radical Egyptian cleric convicted of masterminding the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 � and its activities beginning in 1993. The United States took no action to stop the organization's fund-raising, transportation of fighters or arms purchases because of the administration's sympathy for the Muslim government and ambivalence about maintaining the arms embargo. The Clinton administration didn't break any laws when it adopted a "no instructions" policy or when it remained silent when Croatian President Franjo Tudjman asked the U.S. for its view in 1994 on Iran using the Third World Relief Agency to ship weapons through Croatia to Bosnia, the Senate committee said. The closest the administration came to breaking the law was when Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who was then the director of Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explored options with Bosnian leaders about lifting the U.N. embargo, encouraging greater third-party arms flows and the clandestine flow of embargo-breaking arms, the committee said in its report. Clark, who went on to become NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, told the committee he had viewed the discussions as an exploration of overt policy options because he had no authority to develop covert options. The committee report said that while Clark told Bosnian officials that he had no authority, his positive tone on covert embargo-busting might have given those officials a stronger impression than he intended. While the administration eventually stopped enforcing the embargo, it is "ludicrous" to think that it broke any laws, said Robert Hunter, U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from 1993 to 1998. � Gregory Piatt] Many of the foreign Muslim fighters who participated in the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina flowed into the region with U.S. and NATO knowledge through an arms pipeline that evaded a U.N. embargo. Now, the West is feeling the fallout of its attempts to help the Bosnian Muslims in their fight. Some of the Mujahedeen, many who came into Bosnia under the guise of working for an aid agency and stayed, are believed to have contacts with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network, which sent fighters to the country and funded the pipeline. "There was minimal concern among the allies [about the flow of arms and Mujahedeen during the Bosnian war]," said Robert Hunter, U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from 1993 to 1998 and now an analyst with the think tank Rand in Washington, D.C. Some of the Mujahedeen, who fought and stayed after the war, remain a threat to NATO peacekeepers � including 3,100 U.S. troops, CIA Director George Tenet told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee last month. "U.S and other international forces are most at risk in Bosnia, where Islamic extremists from outside the region played an important role in the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s," Tenet said in his March 19 testimony. "There is considerable sympathy for international Islamic causes among the Muslim community in Bosnia." Much of this sympathy comes from local groups organized by some of these fighters, which have indirect links to terrorist groups, a former colonel with the Bosnian army's military intelligence unit told the Stars and Stripes. The colonel, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he fears retaliation, said he was told to monitor the Mujahedeen during the last years of the war. He said there were about 500 Mujahedeen who came to help Bosnia from 1993 until the end of the war. The colonel broke down the Mujahedeen into three types: � Holy Warriors � those who came to die as "kamikazes" for the Islamic cause. � Criminals � those who "are not real Muslims but came to profit from the war." This is the largest group that stayed in the country, and many now "work or have worked for aid agencies and get paid a lot of money." These Mujahedeen use "sweet words" to recruit local people to extremist groups. It's in this group that "the terrorists hide because they are not real Muslims." � Fundamentalists � this group is the "most dangerous for Bosnia because they want to set up a fundamentalist state." "Many people think that most of these fighters came from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey, but from what I saw, most came from Sudan, Libya and Egypt," the colonel said. "Most of them were Sunni Muslims." Bin Laden, who was living in Sudan at the time of the Bosnian war, is a member of the Sunni sect of Islam and had a hand in bringing the fighters into Bosnia along with funding the embargo-breaking arms pipeline, wrote bin Laden expert Peter L. Bergen in "Holy War Inc.," a book about the al-Qaida. "A Vienna-based charity linked to bin Laden, Third World Relief Agency, funneled millions of dollars in contributions to the Bosnians," wrote Bergen, who has interviewed bin Laden and is a CNN analyst. "Al-Qaida trained Mujahedeen to go and fight in Bosnia during the early '90s, and bin Laden's Services Office also maintained an office in neighboring Croatia's capital, Zagreb." The Mujahedeen came into Bosnia from Croatia, the colonel said. "They came into Croatia at the ports of Split and Rijeka. Those were big centers." Along with the fighters, the arms pipeline came through Croatia and was funded by Third World Relief Agency, the Washington Post reported in a September 1996 story. The wartime Bosnian government depended on the Third World Relief Agency, which obtained and paid for weapons from Iran and other countries along with supplying fighters, the Post reported. With a U.N. arms embargo in place, the Bosnian Muslim government was driven into alliances with some of the world's most radical states that were then on a U.S. State Department watch list of countries that support terrorism as well as terrorist movements, the Post story said. Now, many of the Mujahedeen and weapons bought and shipped by Third World Relief Agency remain in the Balkans. Peacekeepers in Bosnia and Kosovo are faced with trying to locate these weapons and apprehend the fighters. Many of those weapons turned up in Kosovo in the late 1990s and during last year's Albanian insurgency in Macedonia, Kosovo peacekeeping force officials have said. During his Senate testimony in March, Tenet said the Mujahedeen who remain in Bosnia, aided by weak border controls, large amounts of weapons and organized crime in the Balkans, pose an "ongoing threat to U.S. forces there," as well as to the stability of the area. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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