http://washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20051218-125507-6951r
The Washington Times
Commentary:
Islamist state in Europe?
By Jeffrey T. Kuhner
Published December 18, 2005
The Bush administration has decided to get involved in another
dangerous nation-building project -- in the volatile Balkans. More
ominously, the effects of this intervention will lay the groundwork
for an Islamist state in the heart of Europe.
Recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the leaders of
Bosnia's three main groups -- Muslims, Serbs and Croats -- met in
Washington to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Dayton Accords,
which ended Europe's worst bloodletting since 1945. The administration
should have limited itself to a symbolic remembrance. Instead, it
pressured Bosnia's political representatives to sign an agreement
demanding constitutional reforms by early next year.
The plan seeks to establish a centralized, unitary republic
dominated by a strong government in Sarajevo. The ultimate goal is to
forge a more cohesive state that will finally eradicate the country's
ethnic divisions.
Bosnia's current political system, with its rotating tripartite
presidency, parallel administrations and vast bureaucracy, is neither
rational nor efficient. Reform is needed. The American-backed plan,
however, is a recipe for disaster. It is a form of radical social
engineering that will have to be imposed against the wishes of the
country's Serb and Croat populations.
More importantly, it will pave the way for potentially turning
Bosnia into Europe's first Islamic republic. This will destabilize not
only the Balkans, but the entire European continent.
During the Bosnian war of 1992-1995, many of the country's Muslims
became radicalized. Thousands of foreign Arab fighters, known as the
mujahideen, infiltrated into Bosnia in order to wage jihad against
Christian Serb and Catholic Croat forces. Iran and Saudi Arabia's
influence over the Bosnian Muslim authorities grew as the war ground
on. Radical Islam took root in the Balkans.
Most of Bosnia's Muslims remain secular or moderate. But in his
recent book, "Faith at War," Yaroslav Trofimov, the Wall Street
Journal's foreign correspondent, documents the chilling rise of
militant Islam since the end of the fighting.
Mr. Trofimov shows the Saudis have been funding numerous mosques
in Sarajevo. At these places of worship, long-bearded Imams champion
the doctrines of Wahhabism, a particularly intolerant version of
Islam. The Saudis have also supported charities that serve as fronts
for al Qaeda cells. Islamist radio stations, such as Radio Naba, and
radical organizations, such as the Young Muslims, have proliferated.
Parts of Bosnia, like the village of Bocinja, serve as enclaves for a
remaining mujahideen.
What is most disturbing, however, is the influx of young Bosnian
Muslim fighters into Iraq. They are joining the Islamofascist
insurgents in their barbaric campaign against U.S. forces. At one of
Sarajevo's main mosques, the second highest-ranking cleric in the
country, Ismet Spahic, has publicly denounced the U.S.-led war in Iraq
as "genocide."
This small minority of Islamic militants is growing, like a cancer
on Bosnia's body politic. Thus far, the U.S., the European Union and
the Sarajevo authorities have ignored the problem.
They have also turned a blind eye to the growing persecution of
Bosnia's Christians, especially Croatian Catholics. Locked into a
federation with the majority Muslims, the Croatians dwindled in number
as they slowly leave their ancestral lands. Less than half-a-million
are left. Those who remain suffer daily violations of their basic
rights.
The Croatians are dying. If these constitutional reforms passes,
it will be the Serbs' turn to be submerged by the growing Muslim
majority.
The way to long-term stabilization is not by centralizing power
and trying to forge an artificial "Bosnian" identity as the U.S. plan
foolishly seeks to do. Switzerland is a better model: Make Bosnia an
efficient decentralized state and devolve power to ethnic cantons with
considerable political, religious and cultural autonomy. Making all
three ethnic groups masters in their own house, will give each,
especially the minority Serbs and Croats, an incentive to view Bosnia
as their shared, common homeland. It will also help to contain radical
Islam by providing an internal system of checks and balances. This
will prevent any kind of potential Islamic movement from seizing
national power.
To the Balkanists in the State Department, however, Bosnia is a
giant laboratory for their experiment in multiethnic nation-building.
Like other such experiments -- Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union,
Czechoslovakia -- it will fail. This time the cost to the West will be
even more severe: an Islamic inroad into the center of Europe.
Washington will rue the day.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is editor of Insight on the News
(www.insightmag.com) and a contributor to the Commentary Pages of The
Washington Times.
Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
