http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic04/NewsST011004.html
January 10, 2004
JIHADIST HOTBED IN THE BALKANS: THE TRUTH IS OUT
by Srdja Trifkovic
For years we have been warning that flawed pro-Muslim Western policies would
turn the Balkans from a "protectorate of the New World Order into an Islamic
threat to Western interests" (Chronicles, December 2001). This has already
happened, according to a spate of media reports and statements by Western
governments and top diplomats over the past few weeks.
"US to build Balkan anti-terrorism center in Bulgaria," news agencies
reported on January 6, to monitor and detect terrorist threats to the United
States and Balkan countries. In addition to the CIA-staffed center,
Bulgarian media reported that the FBI also plans to set up an office in
Sofia working with the center. US intelligence experts are quoted as saying
that al-Qaida has a training base in the Balkans and uses the region as a
terror route to West
Two days earlier, on January 4, Associated Press warned that efforts to
tighten security for seaborne containers won't lessen the risk that
terrorists could sneak a nuclear weapon into Europe by land through the
Balkans. Tom Sanderson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies
and Chris Wright of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London
were quoted as saying that smuggling routes through southeastern Europe were
well established and said there was "a lot of scope" for collusion between
terrorist groups and criminal gangs.
Germany's news magazine Der Spiegel reported a month earlier (December 8,
2003) that the "monstrous" King Fahd mosque in Sarajevo-the largest in
Europe, on which the desert kingdom spent a total of $20 million-is a
terrorist threat. "Western security experts" are quoted as saying that
Bosnia could become "a hotbed of extremists ready to use force-and would
thus carry the fight of the Islamic terror syndicates against the 'godless
West' to the southeast of Europe." This creeping infiltration is
increasingly suspect to Western observers, the magazine says: "We are
extremely concerned," it quotes a German intelligence chief, August Hanning,
as saying; in some mosques preachers are already openly inciting against the
West, against Israel and the godless United States. During the war Bosnia
become a training camp for Islamist activists from all over the world, the
magazine quotes a French expert as saying, with up to 5,000 foreign
volunteers fighting with Izetbegovic's troops. Many remained behind, "too
many to be safe," according to George Friedman, director of Stratfor. The
Balkans are "of strategic importance" to Al-Qa'ida, he says; the
organization can use the region for its objectives at any time.
Such concerns are now reflected in statements by some U.S. diplomats and
Western governments. A remarkable example was provided by the U.S.
Ambassador in Sarajevo, Clifford Bond, who declared on December 17 that
there is a terrorist threat in Bosnia because of foreigners who arrived
there during the war and stayed on. In the same week Greece announced that
its national security interests were threatened by Al Qaida-aligned agents
in Bosnia. The Cabinet of Prime Minister Costas Simitis is concerned by the
threat from Bosnia to the Olympic Games in August 2004.
"UN Adds Bosnian Charity Director to Al Qaeda List," Reuters reported ten
days later (December 29). The name of Safet Durguti, an Albanian born in
Kosovo, was added to the list of 300 individuals whose assets should be
frozen due to suspected ties to Osama bin Laden or his al Qaeda network.
Durguti-apparently the key link between Islamic fundamentalists in Kosovo
and Bosnia-is the director of a charity called Vazir, based in the Bosnian
city of Travnik. According to the U.S. Treasury Department Vazir was simply
another name for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi charity that
was placed on the U.N. list in March 2002. It was formed in May 2003 as an
association for sports, culture and education but was based in the same
premises as Al-Haramain.
Dozens of similar statements and articles can be quoted from different
Western sources over the past month alone. In short, the problem exists, it
is freely admitted that it exists by policy analysts and government
officials alike, it has acquired massive proportions, and may not be easily
resolved any longer. As far back as 2000 a highly classified State
Department report-released in the aftermath of 9-11-warned that the
Muslim-controlled portions of Bosnia had become a safe haven for Islamic
terrorists who present a major threat to Europe and the United States, and
who were protected by the Muslim government in Sarajevo. The findings were
summarized in the words of a former State Department official:
Bosnia-Herzegovina is "a staging area" for Islamic terrorists.
The threat is not limited to a few elusive extremists: the ruling
establishment in Sarajevo has had a symbiotic relationship with the sources
of Islamic radicalism for over a decade. "Iran, Bosnia to Exapnd Ties,"
reported IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting) on December 21 on a
meeting of the Bosnian ambassador to Tehran Ibrahim Efendic and Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani. The latter said that "the Jihad (holy war) of the the
Bosnian and Palestinian nations is praiseworthy and a source of honor for
Muslims":
The resistance and faith of these nations will be registered in the history
of Islam, he added. Highlighting the geographical status of the Balkans,
Rafsanjani said Iran attaches great importance to Bosnia and Herzegovina and
expressed the hope to witness further expansion of bilateral ties between
the two countries. The outgoing Bosnian ambassador lauded the humanitarian
aid rendered by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The meaning of this unjustly overlooked news item is (1) that the "Bosnian
nation" is equated with its Muslim component only, all others being by
implication enemy aliens; (2) that Bosnian Muslim government officials are
received and treated in Teheran as allies in a jihad; (3) that Islamists see
Bosnia as no less important than Palestine to their strategic design
("geographic status"); and (4) that Iran's "humanitarian aid"-the label used
during the war as a cover for illegal arms shipments is still appreciated in
Sarajevo. Iran had already obtained a foothold in Bosnia, when the Clinton
Administration asked for-and obtained-Teheran's help in supplying the Muslim
army with weapons ("Clinton-Approved
<http://www.senate.gov/%20%7erpc/releases/1997/iran.htm> Iranian Arms
Transfers Help Turn Bosnia into Militant Islamic Base," U.S. Senate
Republican Policy Committee, January 16, 1997. This was done in violation of
the arms embargo initially demanded by the U.S. and behind the back of its
European allies (See "Fingerprints: Arms to Bosnia, the real story," The New
Republic, October 28, 1996). The CIA and the Departments of State and
Defense were kept in the dark until after the decision was made ("U.S. Had
Options to Let Bosnia Get Arms, Avoid Iran," The Los Angeles Times, July 1,
1996). Along with the weapons, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and VEVAK
intelligence agents entered Bosnia in large numbers.
The problem of collusion between American governments and Islamic radicals
antedates the wars of Yugoslav succession. Its roots hark back to the
support Bin Laden and other fundamentalist Muslims received from the United
States following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
According to former CIA director Robert Gates, the U.S. intelligence
services began to arm the mujahideen even before the Soviet intervention.
Mistaken and shortsighted as this strategy turned out to be, it was
conceivably justified by the dictates of the Cold War: one's enemy's enemy
is one's de facto ally, if not a trusted friend. Blowback was a risk, but
one at least arguably worth taking. A quarter of a century later, it is
necessary to rectify more recent mistakes of a similar nature. If the War
Against Terror is to be meaningful, the Bush administration should
investigate the biggest unknown scandal of the Clinton years: that
throughout the 1990's, the U.S. government aided and abetted al-Qa'eda
operations in the Balkans, long after he was recognized as a major security
threat to the United States.
There are foreign policy strategists in Washington who have sought for
decades to turn militant Islam into a tool of policy. This is not a flight
of critical fancy: it is a well documented fact; it is not challenged as an
accusation, but it is not unduly admitted either. In the beginning those
strategists, or their predecessors, may have underestimated the danger of
"blowback," but over the years they have bound good men to bad policy, and
they have reinforced failure with gold. "Blowback" is the apt metaphor:
poison gas blowing back from its intended victims to choke one's own
soldiers in their trenches. The strategy of effective support for Islamic
ambitions in pursuit of short-term political or military objectives has
helped turn Islamic radicalism into a truly global phenomenon.
The underlying assumption was that militant Muslims could be used and
eventually discarded-like Diem, Noriega, the Shah, and the Contras: CIA's
"Operation Cyclone" poured over $4 billion into setting up training centers
where young fanatics were sent to learn terrorist skills. The assumption all
along has been that the Islamic genie could be controlled. For the ensuing
two decades, in the conflicts that inevitably define the line between Islam
and its neighbors, Washington almost invariably supported the Muslims-most
notably in Bosnia and Kosovo. By January 1996, Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael
Lind of The New Republic approvingly wrote of the U.S. role as the leader of
Muslim nations from the Persian Gulf to the Balkans, with the Ottoman lands
becoming "the heart of a third American empire" (Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael
Lind, "The Third American Empire," The New York Times, January 2, 1996).
The Bosnian crisis started when Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader,
reneged on an agreement brokered by the European Union that provided for
continued power-sharing in Sarajevo. He opted for an unilateral declaration
of independence; in making this decision, he was supported by the U.S.
Ambassador in Belgrade, Warren Zimmerman. He was acting in line with the
Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who made it clear that a
goal was to mollify the Muslim world and to counter any perception of an
anti-Muslim bias regarding American policies in Iraq (Eagleburger's
MacNeil/Lehrer PBS NewsHour interview on October 6, 1992). The subsequent
portrayal in the media of the Muslims as innocent martyrs in the cause of
multicultural tolerance concealed the fact that the war was primarily
religious in nature. Before the first shots were fired, Alija Izetbegovic,
proudly proclaimed in his "Islamic Declaration" (1974; republished 1990)
that "there can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and
non-Islamic societies and political institutions": "The Islamic movement
should and must start taking power as soon as it is morally and numerically
strong enough not only to overthrow the existing non-Islamic power
structure, but also to build a great Islamic federation spreading from
Morocco to Indonesia, from tropical Africa to Central Asia."
This is hardly an unusual viewpoint for a sincere and dedicated Islamist,
and Izetbegovic should have been commended for his frankness. Nevertheless,
it should have been obvious in the West that the Bosnian-Muslims did not
want to establish a multiethnic liberal democratic society. The U.S. Army
Foreign Military Studies Office saw the situation more clearly than the
politicians: "President Izethbegovic and his cabal appear to harbor much
different private intentions and goals" ("Selling the Bosnia Myth to
America: Buyer Beware," Lieutenant Colonel John E. Sray, USA, U.S. Army
Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, KS, October 1995). Now
that Bosnia is a terrorist hotbed we know that this assessment was entirely
correct.
The core of Bin Laden's Balkan network are the veterans of El Moujahed
brigade of the Bosnian-Muslim army. It was established in 1992 and included
volunteers from all over the Islamic world whose passage to Bosnia was
facilitated by Al-Qaeda. The unit was distinguished by its spectacular
cruelty to Christians, including decapitation of prisoners to the chants of
Allahu-akbar. El Moujahed was the nursery from which an international
terrorist network spread to Europe and North America. After the end of the
Bosnian war, many Muslim volunteers remained ("Foreign Muslims Fighting in
Bosnia Considered 'Threat' to U.S. Troops," The Washington Post, November
30, 1995).
The potential threat persuaded the U.S. and other Western nations to oppose
the presence of foreign mujahedeen in Bosnia as part of the November 1995
Dayton peace agreements, which specifically called for the expulsion of all
foreign fighters. But the Muslim-controlled Bosnian government circumvented
the rule by granting Bosnian citizenship to several hundred Arab and other
Islamist volunteers-eliminating their "foreign" status before the accord
took effect. Many of them had taken over the former Serbian village of
Bocinja Donja, near the city of Zenica in central Bosnia; elsewhere they
took over properties and married local women, sometimes by force (
"Mujaheddin Remaining in Bosnia: Islamic Militants Strongarm Civilians, Defy
Dayton Plan," The Washington Post, July 8, 1996). The results followed
swiftly, in the form of a dozen executed or planned attacks-from a shootout
Lille in France to a terrorist cell Montreal, from the Y2K LAX conspiracy to
a wave of recent bombings in Istanbul-that can be traced to the Bosnian
Connection.
While an intricate Islamic terror network was maturing in Bosnia, Osama bin
Laden was busy looking for fresh opportunities in the Balkans. He found it
in Kosovo. European and Israeli sources warned that after Bosnia, Kosovo
promised to be the second Islamic bastion. The Clinton Administration
ignored the warnings (The Jerusalem Post, September 14, 1998). The KLA
earned its spurs in the eyes of its Islamist partners by blowing up
Christian Orthodox churches. The relationship was cemented by the zeal of
some KLA veterans who joined Bin Laden's network in Afghanistan:
Perhaps most telling about the minds of those who trained here is a document
found at the [Al-Qaeda] camp. "I am interested in suicide operations,"'
wrote Damir Bajrami, 24, an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, on his entry
application in April. "'I have Kosovo Liberation Army combat experience
against Serb and American forces. I need no further training. I recommend
(suicide) operations against (amusement) parks like Disney" (USA Today,
November 26, 2001, on documents found at an Al-Qaeda training camp).
Iranian Revolutionary Guards had joined forces with Osama bin Laden to
support the Albanian insurgency in Kosovo, hoping "to turn the region into
their main base for Islamic armed activity in Europe" (The Sunday Times of
London March 22, 1998). By the end of 1998, when Bin Laden's terrorist
network in Albania started sending units to fight the Serbs in Kosovo, the
U.S. drug officials complained that the transformation of the KLA from
terrorists into freedom fighters hampered their ability to stem the flow of
Albanian-peddled heroin into America (The Washington Times, May 4, 1999). By
that time the NATO bombing of Serbia was in full swing, however, and the
mujaheddin were once again American allies: "Al-Qaeda has both trained and
financially supported the KLA. Many border crossings into Kosovo by 'foreign
fighters' also have been documented and include veterans of the militant
group Islamic Jihad from Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan" (Ibid.).
All along, the Clinton Administration was positively elated about the shift
in alliances and attitudes displayed by the Kosovo intervention:
Insofar as Kosovo emerged as a unique case of U.S. support for a Muslim
population against an avowed Christian state and led to an alliance with a
Muslim guerilla army, it is something of a watershed event. The breakthrough
in Kosovo also came about at the tail end of major changes in the
international and domestic politics of Muslim societies over the course of
the preceding decade. Policymakers are challenged to respond to those
changes in order to bring American foreign policy in line with the reality
of Islam's place in domestic, regional, and international politics. Given
the importance of Islam to international affairs and the sheer number of
Muslims who live in areas that affect Western and U.S. interests, rethinking
America's foreign policy on Islam may be a welcome development (Georgetown
Journal of International Affairs
<http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/publications/%20journal/vol1_1/1_2.htm> ).
Where does more than a decade of U.S. involvement leave the Balkans? "The
small jihad is now finished and we have-some of us-survived the war. The
Bosnian state is intact. But now we have to fight a bigger, second jihad,"
says Mustafa Ceric, the Reis-ul-Ulema in Bosnia-Herzegovina-educated,
incidentally, at Al-Azhar in Cairo and the University of Chicago. Clinton's
intervention in the Balkans had for its end result the strengthening of an
already aggressive Islamic base in the heart of Europe that will not go
away. The unspoken assumption of the architects of such policies, that
generosity would be rewarded by loyalty, is mistaken: loyalty to unbelievers
is not a Muslim trait; pragmatism is-and, as Yohanan Ramati has remarked,
"pragmatism prescribes that when dealing with fools, one milks them for all
one can get, demoralizes them until they are incapable of protecting their
interests, and then deprives them of any influence they have left."
A generation ago it was understandable, even excusable, for bone-headed CIA
bosses to work up a hatred of atheism and enjoy dealing with believers. They
used Muslims in just the way they used the Church of Rome in the early 1950s
in their fight against the Communists. But appeasement by their feeble
successors in our own time only breeds the contempt and arrogance of the
radicals and fuels their ambition. Changing the self-defeating trend demands
recognition that the West is in a war of religion, whether it wants that or
not, and however much it hates the fact.
On the Islamic side this war is being fought with the deep and unshakeable
belief that the West is on its last legs. The success of the demographic
deluge is reinforced by the evidence from history that a civilization that
loses the urge for biological self-perpetuation is indeed finished. Falling
birthrates in Europe and the need to support European welfare entitlements
with a host of "guest-workers" and immigrants seem to make it inevitable
that the colonization of Europe by Islamic peoples will continue. Some
leaders such as President Bush may have been hoping to domesticate Islam
under the aegis of the nondenominational deism that is professed in their
rhetoric. The attempt will continue to fail. So far this failure has not
been admitted. Hence the enduring fantasy of an American-Islamic alliance
against extremism.
Of course, it would be preferable to have a reformed Islam as our global
neighbor, rather than the grim variations on the same theme that currently
prevail in Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, but
Islam's ability to reform itself is undermined by the appeasement of
Islamism that continues in the Balkans. Such appeasement will only enhance a
downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and
oppression that may culminate sooner or later in yet another bout of alien
domination.
Muslims, as Christians once did, tend to sympathize with each other in a
familiar and more or less nationalist fashion. If this tendency goes
unchecked it produces a lunatic account of world affairs in which Muslim
societies are always victims of the West and always innocent. It is not just
the extremists who believe that in Palestine, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, and
Kashmir, the Muslims are entirely in the right: at present, almost every
Muslim thinks so. The "politically correct" Westerners accept the Muslim
judgment. But this is extremely dangerous, as the West cannot afford to
concede such a large measure of moral approval to so self-conscious and
agitated a force in world affairs.
Western policy in the Balkans should be reappraised because to continue
encouraging the Muslim sense of pure victimhood-notably with the myth of the
"genocide" in Srebrenica, and the accompanying US-financed Muslim shrine-is
to feed the minds of would-be suicide bombers in Sarajevo and Pristina with
a political pap that nourishes their hate. The obstacle to doing so is often
the apologetics and the tradition of pro-Muslim appeasement of the Clinton
decade; but that appeasement must stop. Pandering to Islam's geopolitical
designs-in the Balkans, or anywhere else-and sacrificing smaller Christian
nations in the process, is counterproductive: the morsels will only whet the
Islamic appetite, paving the way to a major confrontation some time in this
century.
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