Four wars were fought by various nationalities to break away from rule by Belgrade--the Slovenes, the Bosniaks, the Croats, and the Albanians. In a fifth case, Macedonia, the first US troops into the Balkans were deployed at the request of the Macedonian government to deter Milosevic.
Of those five cases, in only two could any al Qaeda involvement be noted. In Bosnia, which attracted the greater involvement, it failed to bear fruit--the government is now democratic and secular, pro-American, and cooperative in the war on terror to include offering up troops to go to Iraq.
In Kosovo, the U.S. had learned its lesson in Bosnia and warned the KLA not to cooperate. As a result, when bin Laden sent his emissary to Kosovo in 1998, he was arrested in Albania and here’s a news report on what happened: He [Al Kader] confessed to being a member of one of bin Laden’s groups and told investigators he had been sent to give weapons to the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, then beginning their war against the Serbs. The KLA had promised US officials it would not co-operate with fundamentalists. Mr Kader said the KLA had turned him down and that he had returned to Albania, still with his weapons. And the nature of the elected Kosovo government (again secular, Catholic president) and support for the United States shows the still negligible role and influence of bin laden or al Qaeda.
Especially since 9-11, many Serbs have tried to re-cast the dissolution of Yugoslavia and subsequent conflicts in terms of Christian Serbs versus Muslims. That is revisionism intended to distract from what really occurred in order to gain them sympathy and support. It ignores the fact that three of the five break-away entities were Christian and that one of the two bloodiest and most destructive wars the Serbs fought was against Croatia, a Christian nation. It fails to take into account that Milosevic is charged with more counts of warcrimes against Christians than he is against either Bosniaks or Kosovo Albanians.
The problem in the former Yugoslavia was nationalism and the common denominator in every one of those conflicts was Serbia under Milosevic. The revisionism is the attempts to obscure that by exploiting our War on Terror and conservative distaste for Clinton.
David, thanks for the civility in your response.
Actually I hold the wars were fundamentally Orthodox Christians vs. Muslims. The case of Croatia is special because of the Ustashe connection of Tudjman and the WW II era history. A neo-Ustashe Croatia is as abhorent to Serbs as a neo-Nazi Germany would be to Jews, and for the same reason.
For all the claims of Serbs engaging in 'ethnic cleansing' (a term translated from a Serbo-Croation phrase invented by the Ustashe), The only areas to be 'ethnically cleansed' during the wars were the Serb areas of Croatia, and now evidently Kosovo.
The discovery of an al Qaeda link is not revisionism, but a confirmation of the position taken by the Yugoslav government at the time, on the basis of published works, that Izetbegovic's movement was Islamist.