Bosnian capital shaken by radical Islam (moderate muslims under attack by Wahhabism)

The people of Sarajevo, renowned for their pluralism, have been shaken after a series of incidents including the murder of a Muslim woman by her Islamic extremist son who questioned her faith.

Upholders of Bosnia's moderate version of Islam say the problem caused by an influx of hardline fighters during the country's 1992-1995 war has worsened in recent months, highlighted by the gruesome murder.

"Bosnia's tradition of Islam is tolerant, it promotes pluralism and we should not allow those representing a one-track ideology to teach us," says Jasmin Merdan.

The 26-year-old -- a practising Muslim who portrays himself as a "victim" of the Wahhabi ideology before abandoning it -- is one of the few courageous voices in Bosnia who dares to criticise extremism.

"They express their convictions with violence, introduce anarchy in mosques and preach intolerance," says Merdan, who recently founded an association in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo to fight against "those who deny basic teachings of Islam".

Supported by a handful of independent journalists, Merdan recently published a book condemning the harmful influence on Bosnian people of Wahhabism, a radical version of Islam.

Merdan says the book was "warmly welcomed by imams who do not dare to speak" but sparked death threats against him and pressure from members of the Wahhabi community.

Several incidents since the beginning of the year have shaken Sarajevo and confirmed Merdan's fears.

In February, a young man who recently converted to Wahhabism killed his mother reportedly because she refused to join him for morning prayers.

After the murder, the 23-year-old went to a "Wahhabi" mosque with blood on his hands and clothes, telling his fellow believers that he just made a "sacrifice to God".

In addition, several young couples have complained to the local media and police that they had been harassed by "bearded" men in parks while they were kissing and hugging.

According to Merdan, they were members of the so-called "Sharia militia" -- a group of self-styled religious police. However local police said they were not aware of the group's existence.

Wahhabism is a hardline version of Islam that originated in 18th century Saudi Arabia. It took its roots in Bosnia, whose Muslims are mostly followers of moderate Islam, in the country's 1992-1995 war.

During the conflict, hundreds of volunteers from Islamic countries -- known as "holy warriors" or mujahedin -- came to Bosnia to fight alongside its mainly Muslim army.

All of the foreign fighters were expected to leave the country following the war, but an unknown number of them remained and obtained Bosnian citizenship mostly by marrying local women.

"Since the war, the number of followers of Wahhabism has been growing," says Merdan, slamming the "passiveness" of Bosnia's laic and religious authorities.

Some 40 percent of Bosnia's 3.8 million inhabitants are Muslims. Orthodox Christian Serbs represent about 31 percent, while Roman Catholic Croats account for around 10 percent.

Merdan voiced regret that the Bosnian Muslim religious leader, Mustafa Ceric, has never publicly condemned the activities of the Wahhabists.

Meanwhile, the editor-in-chief of a Bosnian weekly, Vildana Selimbegovic, deplored the "isolation" of the few Muslim theologians who voice their dissatisfaction with the presence of Wahhabists.

"Politicians do no want to or are too afraid to talk. The majority of Muslims remain silent. It seems that they will remain silent until the devil claims his due," Selimbegovic wrote in the weekly Dani.

Sarajevo's imposing King Fahd Mosque, named after the late Saudi monarch who financed its construction, has in the past few years become the core of Bosnian followers of Wahhabism.

"Sometimes I ask myself whether I am really in Sarajevo. The number of bearded men and women dressed in chadors will soon be equal to other people," comments Adnan, a young Muslim who lives near the mosque.

Adnan says that the King Fahd Mosque has attracted a number of Wahhabi families from surrounding neighborhoods.

"If we allow them, in 20 years, people like me will not be allowed to speak," he stresses.

This is what I found concerning the mass graves issue. I thought that it was posted once but I couldn't find it. So, I'm going to post it again. Any comments or additions or corrections would be good.....

This was written to Hoplite comments concerning mass graves in Kosovo. Granted this is a summary.

Let’s start from the beginning. First of all, I had said that there were no Albanian “mass graves” in Kosovo that I could recall. This has been my experience from 1999 to 2004.

When the tribunal's teams reached Kosovo, shortly after the international peacekeepers, they were given reports of 11,334 people in mass graves, but the results of its exhumations fall well short of that number. In a few cases, such as the Trepca mine where hundreds of bodies were alleged to have been flung down shafts or incinerated, they found nothing at all.

The tribunal's indictment of President Milosevic includes the charge that during NATO’s bombing campaign that Serb police shot 105 ethnic Albanian men and boys near the village of Mala Krusa in western Kosovo. Witnesses claimed hay was piled on the bodies and set alight. Tribunal experts believe the remains may have been tampered with later, since the bones of only a few people were found.

Colonel Douglas MacGregor of the US Army, the man who commanded NATO's "Joint Operations Center" which "managed" the tasking of the air war for General Wesley Clark, personally wrote MPR to rebut the story. Quote: "We sent in a team to inspect the mines as soon as NATO troops arrived in Kosovo. There was no evidence of any mass murder in the mines, bodies or anything else." He confirmed.

Let’s put the situation in perspective, and I appreciate your interest by bringing Batajnica into the picture. The reports that were given by refugees and subsequently repeated by the Western government spokesmen during this conflict talked of indiscriminate killings and as many as 100,000 civilians missing or taken out of refugee columns by the Serbs.

When Yugoslav forces withdrew from Kosovo in June 1999, the MSM was told that 100,000 Kosovo Albanian men of military age were missing or deported to Albanian Macedonia. Cohen in his infinite wisdom said, “They may have been murdered”. Thus reflecting the fear was that they may have gotten the same fate of the Muslims that were executed when Serb forces overran Srebrenica, according to the Western Reports, and we know how they reported; “Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia” by Peter Brock, for starters.

So that this won’t become a thesis or mini-series lets start by saying, after their initial excavations, the tribunal had received reports of another 350 “suspected” grave sites. According to the Tribunal, they did not attempt to uncover them due to its perceived cost and that the cost…..didn’t justify the effort of finding lost relatives of the living victims. There were reported, some suspicious mounds or patches of rough earth in fields where villagers reported a foul stench, which turned out to contain dead animals or to be empty.

Reportedly, a presentation of forensic findings, which established that some of the corpses discovered in mass graves at a police training range in Batajnica, near Belgrade, were Albanians killed in Kosovo and later transferred to Serbia in a well- organized operation. This possibility has been challenged, by other sources.

In June, 1999, reports state that NATO found that there was no real campaign of "ethnic cleansing," "slaughter" or "genocide." What they found was something vastly less than a crisis requiring international intervention. But the Press and politicians got involved, continued to maintain the perception that there had been a genocide committed. Speculation is that they wanted to preserve their reputations, maybe justify the continuation of operations all the way to independent Kosovo.

Reports indicated that twice, convoys of innocent Albanian loyalists, were slaughtered by NATO bombs dropped from 15,000 feet: At that altitude, and to an eager pilot zooming about in an F-16, or Canadian F-18, a tractor hauling a hay wagon may look like an army Two-and-a-half ton truck --a "Deuce and a half". Well, collateral damage is excused in a just war, as we are told. But the evidence continues to show that NATO's air war, "Operation Allied Force," was not just, and the incidents of bombed out tractors, busses, a passenger train, marketplaces, factories, refineries, bridges and a broadcast studio, add up to a roster of unpardonable offenses against a people that was not entirely guilty.

As a matter of fact, the discovery of the body of Momcilo Ristanovic near Suva Reka apparently represents the beginning of identification of a significant number of Serbs who are on the list of 1,300 non-Albanian persons abducted in Kosovo.

According to Boskovic, a significant number of kidnapped Serbs were buried at the new cemetery near Suva Reka. They were most probably killed in June, July or August of 1999 by Albanian terrorists at the time of KFOR's arrival during the revenge killings.

Reports indicate that bodies of hundreds of dead, found in various parts of the province were first buried by KFOR troops in a common grave in the Pristina settlement of Dragodan.

The Hague investigators reportedly exhumed these graves in search of evidence of war crimes by Serb forces in Kosovo. However, once they realized that the bodies were actually those of executed Serbs, they abruptly ended their investigation and ordered the reburial of the corpses at the new cemetery in Suva Reka. Surprise………

However, two years later around 2001, someone from KFOR apparently became conscience-stricken: when it was determined that the mass grave near Suva Reka contains the human remains of at least 150 Serbs and most probably those who had been kidnapped. KFOR and UNMIK belatedly announced the continuation of the identification process and, at last, the inclusion of Serbian pathologists.

Then, another surprise, and another Mass Grave in Malisheva having Serbs, was investigated. This report came about early August 2005. The workers of Office for Missing Persons and UNMIK forensic teams from Pristina, headed by their Chief, Pablo Baraybar, started searching for a mass grave in the territory of Malisheva Municipality. The searches were made in the same location where three months before a mass grave with 13 bodies was found, according to the information’s; they also belonged to the Serbian nationality.

Jose Pablo Baraybar stated: No mass graves in Kosovo (Danas/Fonet)
UNMIK head for missing persons Jose Pablo Baraybar has stated that there are no mass graves in Kosovo. According to him, mass graves are at several locations in Serbia, with over thousand victims, the largest being in Batajnica where there around 800 corpses. We’ll get to this case later.

In April 1999, the State Department stated that perhaps 500,000 Ethnic Albanians were missing and feared dead at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic’s army. About a month later, Defense Secretary William Cohen told a television interviewer that "about 100,000 military-aged men" were missing (Newsweek). After the end of the war in June, NATO revised the estimate to about 10,000. Guess what? In a report to the Security Council the chief prosecutor for the UN War Crimes Tribunal said that so far 2,108 bodies have been found in 195 "mass graves". More are expected to be uncovered when the ground thaws in spring. The high estimates currently hover around 7,000. The report added that many of these bodies were in individual burial plots, and only 11 sites reported more than 50 bodies. I am not trying to belittle the slaughtering of civilian Kosovars (however many), but instead, I am trying to analyze the politics of war in a more realistic way than what the major networks have so far been doing.

Of particular interest is the gravesite reported in Izbica/Izbice, Srbica/Skenderaj that reported a massacre of civilians took place in Izbica at the end of April 1999. Villagers buried the bodies, and the burial was "documented by the UCK on videotape".... Supposedly, on 2 June, Serb forces "removed" the bodies to an unknown destination. The ICTY team arrived at the beginning of July and exhumed 142 graves.......ALL WERE EMPTY

Late August 1999, in Gnjilane, it was reported that a mass grave with bodies of 50 Serbs demonstrated that atrocities continued to be perpetrated by rampaging ethnic Albanian terrorists against Serbs in Kosovo-Metohija since the arrival of international KFOR peacekeepers earlier. Another report also cited that Serbs who wanted to find out the fate of their relatives or friends after the discovery of a first grave with 13-15 bodies, were told by an unnamed UN police officer that another grave with 50 bodies had been found in the vicinity of Gnjilane and that investigation would be undertaken soon,.

Civilian casualties are an unfortunate consequence of any war. What crimes Serbian soldiers committed on the ground for whatever reasons they had need to be investigated, but so does NATO strategy, especially its bombing of civilian installations and either gross incompetence or deliberate targeting of the resident population. There is controversial evidence that the latter was probably the case.

Actually, one has to make the point more strongly: Del Ponte’s 2,108 figures was simply the number of “exhumed corpses”. It therefore included not only Albanian civilians, but also Serbian civilians, KLA combat deaths, Yugoslav army combat deaths, Serbian and Albanian NATO-bomb victims, Serbian and Albanian KLA victims. This means that only *a fraction* of the 2,108 can be Albanian civilians. So Del Ponte was misinforming when she said that "the true number of ethnic Albanian victims may be much higher," as if the 2,108 were even all Albanians!

Remember, the original claim was 100,000 massacred Albanian civilians. But we are now down to a mere fraction of 2,108. So, that doesn’t leave much at NATO’s entire original allegation.

It turns out that NATO dropped bombs primarily on civilian targets, including convoys of tractors and cars full of…*Albanian civilians*. So, it appears at first glance Del Ponte’s hoped-for corpses did not materialize, and by August 2000, as the UN and NATO forensic experts wrapped up their investigations, the *total* body count was barely higher and still…“under 3,000” (the exact number given was 2,778).[7] And of these, given NATO's official estimate before the bombing, no more than a *fraction of 778* can be Albanian civilians, all of whom can easily be accounted for as victims of NATO and KLA activity.

I found a very interesting State Department quote: Report by The U.S. Department of State

"The investigation of atrocity sites and confirmation of death claims is currently an ongoing, laborious and time consuming task. The vast majority of death claims, though, have likely been recorded by international authorities. In sum, over 500 mass grave and killing sites have been recorded by the ICTY, KFOR and other international organizations. The total number of bodies reported to the ICTY at over 500 gravesites is over 11,000. Of these 500-plus sites, the ICTY has confirmed completion of field investigations at about 200 sites, as of early November 1999. Over 2,100 bodies have been confirmed to be found by investigators at over 160 sites, or an average of about 11 bodies per site." Noticed the word, “Reported” and not found or confirmed. Now the word confirmed comes out when they talk about the 2,100 bodies, but where did they actually meet their fate?

So, this brings us to a refrigeration truck, which contained bodies, came to the surface in the waters at Kladove in the spring of 1999. At about the same time Milosevic was being indicted and going to trial. The Milosevic's regime concealed the first tracks of the monstrous transport of bodies. At that time the investigations were discontinued due to political-police pressure. Meanwhile the current authorities announced that there are at least three more mass graves. But the tracks of the main culprit, Vlastimir Djordjevic were somehow lost.

Two years had passed since the bodies were discovered and identified and nobody in Serbia had been charged for this crime. It is thought that the current power is hesitating not only to conduct an investigation, but also to indict, because they have supported the claims of their predecessors that the bodies were civilians who were murdered during the bombings, and not victims of the Serb police and military actions during the campaign.

Then two Serb policemen who had come to The Hague as "unwilling insiders" confirmed that the operation to remove all traces of crimes committed in Kosovo and the hushing-up of the scandal about the refrigerator truck full of corpses in the Danube were carried out on instructions from top-level politicians, namely the then interior minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic and president Slobodan Milosevic, according to their testimony. This was done at about the same time keeping in mind of the political agenda of giving possible false testimony in order to justify Milosevic's arrest. Then, on the other hand it could be possible that they were telling the truth.

So, accordingly the Yugoslavs supposedly did the impossible. Fighting the terrorist KLA with one hand, and defending from an unprecedented shower of NATO bombs with the other, they were still able to haul "hundreds, maybe thousands" of dead bodies out of Kosovo. And they succeeded without once getting caught in the act by either NATO or the KLA.

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