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. See Video

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 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."

The place is a complete disaster. Not only did Clinton ensure the genocide of the Serbs, he destroyed the economy, with help from the greedy at the UN of course.

PRISTINA, Kosovo -- As the world looks to the United Nations to help calm turmoil in Iraq, another volatile Muslim land freed from tyranny by American firepower has the international body tied in knots. The problem: what to do with a decrepit plastics plant on Bill Clinton Boulevard?

Bombed by a U.S. jet in the war that broke the grip of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, the Plastika Co. factory emerged from the 1999 conflict with a hole in the roof, rent by ethnic strife and hobbling toward bankruptcy. U.N. officials decided that the best way to kick-start the economy was to sell off Plastika and dozens of other remnants of a defunct socialist order in the former Yugoslav territory of Kosovo.

Instead, the privatization program has kicked up little but resentment. And Kosovo, once touted as a model of international cooperation, has become a showcase for the difficulties and dangers of trying to heal a fractured society through a lumbering international bureaucracy.

The U.N.'s Kosovo chief, a retired Finnish politician, quit in May, pleading fatigue. Rioting in March left more than 20 dead, scores of buildings destroyed and more than 100 U.N. vehicles ablaze. Both electricity and water are in short supply. More than half of Kosovo's population, Europe's youngest, is unemployed, and hostility among ethnic groups shows scant sign of subsiding. The International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research unit, has warned that Kosovo risks becoming "Europe's West Bank."

It's a troubling turn at a time when the White House has asked the U.N. to help stabilize Iraq. Once sidelined by Washington, the U.N. helped to shape the interim Iraqi government installed on June 28, and it has a big role in preparing for future Iraqi elections. Washington also looks to the U.N. to help with relief work and to shore up the legitimacy of Iraq's shaky new order -- a far tougher task than stabilizing Kosovo.

"Kosovo is a fairly friendly environment, but the U.N. is falling apart here," says Blerim Shala, editor of Zeri, a daily newspaper. "How can it expect to function in a place like Iraq?"

Kosovo, unlike Iraq, mostly welcomed foreign military intervention. Ethnic Albanians, more than 90% of the population, cheered a U.S.-led air campaign in 1999 and later renamed a central street after Mr. Clinton. That conflict marked the final death rattle of Yugoslavia, a multiethnic federation set up in 1929, held together by Communist dictator Tito from 1945 to 1980 and torn apart by wars of secession in the 1990s.

The U.N., which took charge in Kosovo after the 1999 war, also got a warm reception, winning praise for rebuilding homes and other work. A beleaguered Serb minority, though furious at the end of Serbian control of the region, looked to the U.N. and peacekeeping troops for protection from vengeful Albanians.

With time, however, the mood curdled. Ethnic Albanians, mostly Muslim by heritage but now largely secular, began to bridle at Kosovo's status: still technically part of Serbia but ruled by foreigners and uncertain of its future. This contrasts with the situation in other breakaway regions of Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Macedonia, which all had become independent states.

Elections in Kosovo produced a local government but it had little power. The U.N. -- thanks to a Security Council resolution that left Kosovo in constitutional limbo -- still runs police and courts, sets economic policy, controls power and telephone utilities and provides a currency, the euro. The vehicle of power is something called the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo.

Soon after arriving in Kosovo, the U.N. began to look for ways to relieve joblessness, an explosive social problem that played into the hands of Albanian militants demanding immediate independence. Aided by the European Union, the U.N. embraced privatization. For 18 months, U.N. lawyers haggled over the ground rules. Finally, in June 2002, U.N. officials here created a property office called the Kosovo Trust Agency.

It took control of both large state-owned companies, such as a crumbling electricity utility, and around 400 smaller, worker-run firms. The agency got off to a halting start. Its first chief, an elderly, cigar-smoking German with a heart condition, quit after 19 days. His successor put armed guards outside his office and fretted about his personal liability in the event of legal action by Serbia, which claims Kosovo's assets. He quit after five months. Colleagues gave him a farewell gift: an old suit stapled with writs. They called it the "law suit."

After months of further fine-tuning, the U.N. last summer gave a green light to a modest privatization program that focused on smaller worker collectives. Few of these produced anything of value, but they controlled half of Kosovo's prime real estate, land that needed to be freed up for the economy to develop.

Worried that no investor would buy businesses swamped in murky debts to Yugoslav entities, the U.N. decided to separate assets from liabilities, spinning off debt-free new companies for sale. It also ruled that 80% of proceeds go into a trust to cover future legal claims. The U.S. Agency for International Development, an arm of the State Department, applauded and brought consultants to assist the selloff. Serbia denounced the plan as illegal.

To launch the program, Ahmet Shala, an ethnic Albanian and deputy head of the property agency, flew to New York and posed with Mr. Clinton for a photograph. They grinned and held a sign reading "Privatization has Started."

An auction in September attracted 180 bidders. The offers were opened at a ceremony at the U.N. headquarters in Pristina, the Kosovo capital, and broadcast live on local television. The master of ceremonies was Count Nikolaus Lamsdorff, a career diplomat and German nobleman, who had just been named deputy head of the U.N. mission and chief of its economic-policy division, funded by the EU.

Among the properties up for auction was Plastika. Set up to make body panels for Yugoslavia's socialist car industry, the factory started as a multiethnic enterprise staffed and nominally owned by Albanian and Serb workers. After Mr. Milosevic came to power in 1989, though, Plastika "cleansed" many of the Albanian staff. Its Serbian boss, a hard-line nationalist, sheltered a brutal paramilitary group in a factory storeroom.

The 1999 war ended Serbia's control of Kosovo -- and also Plastika's main business serving factories in Serbia. For several months, foreign peacekeepers escorted its Serb managing director to work and stood guard outside his office. They withdrew the protection after learning of the director's previous ties to extremists. He fled. Ethnic Serb workers, fearful of attack by Albanian co-workers, also took flight.

Needing cash to pay staff, a new Albanian management of the company rented the departed Serb's executive suite to a foreign-aid group and a local publishing house. The plant's plumbing backed up, and wheezing machinery began to break down. A local telephone company put in orders for a few plastic signs, but the plant, like much of Kosovo's economy apart from hotels and restaurants serving foreigners, stumbled. Factory foreman Rrahmon Hoti says he now spends much of his time weeding factory flowerbeds. Salaries, he says, have been cut and are often paid months late.

At the September auction, Mr. Lamsdorff declared Nexhat Krasniqi, a local businessman, the winner for Plastika with a bid of about $3.6 million. Mr. Krasniqi outlined ambitious plans to develop Plastika's downtown property into a housing and office complex and move the plastics business to less valuable land. Factory workers, by now all Albanian, celebrated with fake champagne: The U.N.-drafted rules entitled them to 20% of the proceeds. They booted out their rent-paying tenants.

A few days later, Mr. Lamsdorff invited Mr. Shala, the man in the photograph with Mr. Clinton, to lunch and told him the showcase privatization program would have to be suspended. Mr. Lamsdorff says he made the decision after learning that a disgruntled businessman had gone to court in New York over a Kosovo lumber business. The suit quickly fizzled but, says Mr. Lamsdorff, it underscored the legal peril of tackling property rights in a territory whose own overall ownership is so unclear.

"There is not another place on earth where privatization is as complicated as it is here," he says. "People got scared."

Mr. Shala, aghast, demanded a written order, which arrived later in the day and triggered a firestorm of protest. Local politicians, trade unions and media reacted with fury. An investor roadshow at a New York hotel the same week flopped. Overnight, privatization became a lightning rod for disenchantment with the U.N. over a host of problems, from Kosovo's dire economic situation to its uncertain political status. Plastika was left once again in limbo.

Six members of the U.S. Congress wrote a letter to Mr. Lamsdorff saying they were "dismayed by your recent decision to freeze further privatization ... and we urge you to rescind this decision immediately."

Wary of experts paid by the U.S. government, whom he termed "hired guns," Mr. Lamsdorff retained an old family friend as his own adviser on privatization. The new recruit: the cigar smoker who had lasted just a few days as head of the Kosovo Trust Agency. He in turn recommended a former colleague for his old job as boss of the property agency. This new property chief, Marie Fucci, had extensive experience as well as a doctorate, but part of her résumé aroused immediate hostility: She'd also worked on a privatization plan in Serbia.

The Kosovo Trust Agency quickly split into feuding factions as the Italian-born Ms. Fucci set about trying to revamp a program she denounced as "quick and dirty." She brought in new staff and sidelined USAID hires. In a later report to the U.N., she suggested that privatization be placed on hold until the political status of Kosovo is decided, "given the legal uncertainties [and] given the proclivity of prominent Kosovars to align themselves with criminal figures." She offered no specifics of criminal activity. She also argued that the U.N., rushing to get privatization off the ground, had set up a system that served only ethnic Albanians while riding roughshod over the rights of ethnic Serbs.

Mr. Lamsdorff, impressed by her arguments, began to rethink the whole process. Privatization as initially conceived by the U.N., he says, had become "a last chance to get rich quick. It attracted all kinds of people and all kinds of money."

Thirty-six staffers of the property agency signed a petition protesting the halt, and ethnic Albanians on the agency's board started boycotting meetings. An EU consultant quit, denouncing Ms. Fucci and Mr. Lamsdorff as wreckers, and moved to a post in Afghanistan.

Paralysis at the property agency, which controls Kosovo's power company, also aggravated another big problem: frequent power cuts. Piet Faling, recruited last fall from South Africa to become the electricity utility's eighth managing director since 1999, was dismayed by the turmoil: "I came from South Africa expecting to join the august U.N. and EU, but instead I found total incompetence."

Confronted with a bureaucratic civil war, the U.N. in New York asked its legal office to adjudicate. Among other things, the office ruled that the Kosovo Trust Agency wasn't formally a part of the U.N., and therefore its officials had no immunity under international law. The office recommended that the agency get liability insurance and proceed with privatization. Rival camps in Kosovo each claimed victory and continued to argue.

By December, the feuding, covered in detail by the local media, had become a full-blown political crisis. Bajram Rexhepi, a former guerrilla-army surgeon who served as Kosovo's elected but largely powerless prime minister, publicly demanded Ms. Fucci's resignation and suggested she was working for Serbia. Ms. Fucci wrote to Mr. Lamsdorff threatening to sue the prime minister for defamation. The letter, leaked and read out on TV, stirred more outrage.

Mr. Krasniqi, Plastika's would-be buyer, and businessmen who had submitted winning bids on other properties complained bitterly: They'd handed over money but still hadn't received anything in return. Mr. Krasniqi got his money back in February.

In early March, Harri Holkeri, an aloof former Finnish prime minister in charge of the U.N. mission, asked Mr. Lamsdorff to at least endorse the results of the auction six months before. This was done -- minus Plastika and several other companies. The Plastika deal didn't go through because of concerns that Mr. Krasniqi, the winning bidder, had colluded with other bidders. Mr. Krasniqi, who had formed a consortium with some of the loser afterward to fund the project, denies any impropriety.

In March, to honor businessmen whose bids had been approved, Mr. Lamsdorff organized a cocktail party. None of the businessmen showed up. The following day, Kosovo erupted in rioting. The immediate trigger of the rampage, the worst violence here since the 1999 war, was a report, later proved false, that Serb youths had caused the drowning of three ethnic Albanian children.

The riots further darkened hopes of economic recovery. A visiting team from the International Monetary Fund fled Pristina in a U.N. evacuation helicopter.

In a subsequent report to the U.N. on the riots, Mr. Holkeri, the U.N. boss in Kosovo, said the U.N. mission had been shaken to "its foundations," adding: "The violence has forced us at [the mission] to take a long hard look at ourselves." On the eve of the Easter-weekend holiday, with Mr. Lamsdorff off on the ski slopes in Switzerland and Ms. Fucci away in Greece, Mr. Holkeri took another look at privatization. He phoned Mr. Lamsdorff to say he wanted Ms. Fucci to go. Mr. Lamsdorff grudgingly concurred.

In early May, Mr. Holkeri had a private meeting in New York with the U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan. Rumors flew that Mr. Holkeri, too, was about to get axed. Stopping in France on his way back to Kosovo, he collapsed and was taken to a hospital. He announced he was quitting the U.N.

Shortly afterward, U.N. headquarters summoned Mr. Lamsdorff and several other officials to New York for urgent talks to try to break the privatization logjam. Ms. Fucci, though fired, also took part. The meetings ended with a pledge to restart stalled auctions -- once the rules had been revised yet again to incorporate some of Ms. Fucci's proposals, which require closer scrutiny of would-be buyers and changes in the auction system. Thirteen enterprises now are due to be auctioned off, starting this fall. Plastika isn't among them. Investigators, meanwhile, are looking into allegations of corruption in earlier sales.

At Plastika, staffers have been scrambling to survive. They recently rented out part of a factory yard for use as a disco and have been sending letters to the U.N. demanding compensation for the money lost when they kicked out their tenants last year. "We just sit here waiting and reading the newspapers," says Hysen Ramabaja, the plant's financial director. "Week after week, it's always the same: Wait until next week."

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