Al Qaeda Bogeyman at Work as U.S. Rethinks Balkans

Reuters ^ | Mon October 6, 2003 07:23 AM ET | By Douglas Hamilton

[mark502inf]

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Serb and Croat nationalists are warning Washington that Bosnia's Muslims will let Al Qaeda infest the soft underbelly of Europe, unless they are called in to guarantee security should the U.S. military quit the Balkans.

Western diplomats in the region discount the threat. They believe the nationalists' real goal, as ever, is to isolate the Muslims and split Bosnia on ethnic lines, while winning kudos as America's staunch ally in some "clash of civilizations."

But they worry that scare-mongering may sway Congress.

An October article in the Washington Times says Bosnia "now serves as a base" for Al Qaeda. Croats are the best U.S. ally on the "front-lines in the war against Islamic terrorism in the Balkans" and can be its "eyes and ears," the Times says.

A new paper by U.S. think tank Strategic Forecasting also calls the Balkans a "frontier conflict...in the U.S. war against the Islamist world," but proposes that Serbs handle security.

This is news to Westerners who live in the Balkans, where ethnic rather than religious friction is the real concern. A senior diplomat notes that the September 11 hijackers planted cells in the cities of Western Europe and the United States.

MORE BARS THAN MOSQUES

Since the September 2001 attacks, Washington has mostly ignored the Balkans. The influential, neo-conservative Project for the American Century and the American Enterprise Institute have both said little about it on their Web Sites since 2000.

The idea of extracting 4,000 U.S. troops from NATO peace missions in Bosnia and Kosovo was raised in September by visiting General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as a means of partially relieving U.S. overstretch in Iraq.

[mark502inf]

Haven't tried to post an excerpt before. I apologize in advance if this doesn't work.

Nice recap at the end of the much less influential role Islam plays in the Balkans than in the Middle East. Lots of propaganda & misinformation about "Islamists" in the Balkans, but the real deal is ethnicity, not religion.

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[JohnGalt]

Wolfowitz in Skopje – What Next for Macedonia?"
by Christopher Deliso May 20, 2003

[Hoplite]

Seems to me that we really haven't seen too many Al Qaeda members from Afghanistan, never mind the Balkans.

But you've got to give it to our friends on FR - some of them have made quite an effort trying to sell the Balkans - Al Qaeda connection. I'm just sorry you weren't around for the whole "hijackers as Bosnian citizens" fiasco.

[inquest]

So the article quotes the Washington Times, and then does basically nothing to debunk its claim. I guess we're just supposed to know that the WT is one of those eeevil conservative newspapers, and therefore can't be trusted.

In any case, I think it might be a good idea to quote a bit more extensively from that briefly mentioned article:

In the past, Saudi Arabia has sent millions of dollars in aid to "humanitarian" agencies that encourage Bosnian Muslims to promote the doctrines of Wahhabism, a particularly intolerant and puritanical version of Islam. Mosques have been established throughout the Muslim-Croat federation, many of whom preach the need for "jihad" against the country's Catholic Croats and Orthodox Christian Serbs.

The result has been numerous acts of terror perpetrated upon civilians — especially the Croats. During the past several years, Catholic churches in and around Sarajevo have been vandalized by Islamic extremists. Cemeteries where Croats were buried have been desecrated. Many ordinary Catholics are afraid of walking on the streets of Sarajevo with a cross around their neck for fear of being attacked.

The most notorious incident occurred on Christmas Eve, when three Croats — a father and his two daughters — were gunned down in their home by an Islamic militant near the town of Konjic. Their crime: celebrating Christmas.

An all we have in response is a quote from Paddy Ashdown saying, Nothing to see here!

[swarthyguy]

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Serb and Croat nationalists are warning Washington that Bosnia's Muslims will let Al Qaeda infest the soft underbelly of Europe, unless they are called in to guarantee security should the U.S. military quit the Balkans.

Western diplomats in the region discount the threat. They believe the nationalists' real goal, as ever, is to isolate the Muslims and split Bosnia on ethnic lines, while winning kudos as America's staunch ally in some "clash of civilizations."

But they worry that scare-mongering may sway Congress.

An October article in the Washington Times says Bosnia "now serves as a base" for Al Qaeda. Croats are the best U.S. ally on the "front-lines in the war against Islamic terrorism in the Balkans" and can be its "eyes and ears," the Times says.

A new paper by U.S. think tank Strategic Forecasting also calls the Balkans a "frontier conflict...in the U.S. war against the Islamist world," but proposes that Serbs handle security.

This is news to Westerners who live in the Balkans, where ethnic rather than religious friction is the real concern. A senior diplomat notes that the September 11 hijackers planted cells in the cities of Western Europe and the United States.

MORE BARS THAN MOSQUES

Since the September 2001 attacks, Washington has mostly ignored the Balkans. The influential, neo-conservative Project for the American Century and the American Enterprise Institute have both said little about it on their Web Sites since 2000.

The idea of extracting 4,000 U.S. troops from NATO peace missions in Bosnia and Kosovo was raised in September by visiting General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as a means of partially relieving U.S. overstretch in Iraq.

If this puts a Balkan pullout on the 2004 election agenda, the Al Qaeda scare could blacken the image of Bosnian Muslims and benefit those vying to be what the Times, in an echo of the 13th century Crusades, called the "rampart of Christendom."

There are seven million Muslims in the Balkans. But this is not Afghanistan, Chechnya or the Middle East.

It is customary to remove shoes on entering a home, but veiled faces and long beards are rare. There are more bars than mosques, serving women in jeans. Life does not come to a halt five times a day for prayer, and Sharia law is not an option.

There is no growing fundamentalist fervor and no deep resentment of or hostility to America -- rather the reverse.

There is no "war" or terrorist emergency. The main priority of secular governments in Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia is to complete reforms so they can join the European Union.

The Washington Times, however, states that a "resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia...seeks to either wipe out or convert all Christians in the region."

Strategic Forecasting says Islamists in Albania and Bosnia are able "to hit U.S. troops in both areas." A Balkan Al Qaeda, it warns, "could explode in Washington's face at any time."

Both analyzes cite sparse and questionable anecdotal evidence as the basis for their alarming conclusions.

"INSULTING AND INACCURATE"

The fundamentalist bogeyman serves as an "I-told-you-so" justification for vicious treatment of Muslims by their Serb and Croat neighbors in the wars of 1992-95. Potentially, it can help wreck the Dayton pact that has bound Bosnia since 1996.

The idea of consigning Balkan security to the Serbs, whose two wartime leaders are on the run from charges of genocide, meets with incredulity.

Bosnia's International High Representative, Paddy Ashdown, rejected the Times' "insulting and inaccurate prejudices from afar" insisting it "is not a terrorist base nor will become one."

"Those of us who live in the Balkans have yet to see any evidence of Islamic terrorism," he told the newspaper.

The Turkish Ottoman empire occupied the Balkans for 400 years from the 15th century, introducing a tolerant Islam. But communist secularization greatly eroded its influence.

Balkans Islamic scholars told Reuters the "white Al Qaeda" scare relies on ignorance of the faith and of Muslim gratitude for America's role in stopping Serb aggression.

Today, about 10 percent of Bosnian Muslims attend Friday prayers, said Ahmet Alibasic of Sarajevo's Faculty of Islamic Studies. But the number of those praying five times a day -- the key measure of devoutness -- is maybe just a few percent.

Stalinist Albania banned religion in 1967, declaring an atheist state and turning mosques and churches into warehouses. Religion has not revived strongly since communism fell in 1991.

"Islam in Albania has a peripheral dimension because it has been away for too long," said Islamic poet Ervin Hatibi.

Next door in Kosovo, where Muslim Albanians number two million or 90 percent of the population, a similar picture emerges: the percentage of fervent believers is quite small.

The soil for extremism, as Ashdown said, is no more fertile here than in U.S. or Western Europe cities where the September 11 hijackers planted their cells. Even if it were, tolerating extremism would be the fastest way to kill U.S. support for united Bosnia and Kosovo's hopes of independence from Serbia.



>>>>Western diplomats in the region discount the threat.

So what's new?

[seth456]

Bubba and the RATS really messed this up.

[moni kerr]

Atrocities in the Balkans are not exclusively perpetrated by Slavic Muslims. If the Croats could ditch their fond memories of the Ustasha and the Serbs give up their perpetual god of victimhood they could both begin to reclaim some moral ground. But until that happens they will all keep on behaving badly. In the Balkans, the past is prologue. No one there wants to talk honestly about what wrongs their side has done, only about what wrongs have been done to them.

[Cicero]

Well, a great many of us have been saying that clinton fought the war on the wrong side, even before it started.

The Serbs used to be our main allies in the Balkans. Clinton decided to ally himself with the Muslims. He winked his eye when thousands of terrrorists poured into Bosnia. And he bombed civilian targets in Yugoslavia in order to turn Kosovo over to a bunch of drug-running, church-burning Albanian thugs.

Reuters just noticed?

[Cicero]

Yes, there have been atrocities on all sides. But clinton and the liberal press have been pretending that the only atrocities were performed by Serbs.

A whole different question is, what is in the national security interest of the United States, and what promotes the stability of Europe?

It's not paving the way for Muslim terrorists (many of whom came in from outside) to enter Europe.

[The_Reader_David]

No. Writing that 'the real deal is ethnicity' in the context of the Balkans shows an absolute misunderstanding of the Balkans. Serb, Croat and Bosniac are all the same ethnicity! The defining difference is religion.

[Hoplite]

Pray tell - since WW2, when we sided with Tito, not the Serbs, when have the Serbs been on our side in anything?

Did they help us in Korea or Vietnam?

Show me you actually have some semblance of a clue rather than just blindly repeating what others have told you - the Serbs weren't autonomous or in any position to be our allies in anything until Yugoslavia broke apart in the late '80's, and under Milosevic they unequivocally acted against our interests in the region, not for them.

[inquest]

It wasn't the point of my post to talk about who's most to blame for the atrocities. My point was to point out that Paddy Ashdown is a Clintonite lying hack when he says that nobody's seen any evidence of Islamic terrorism in the Balkan's. I suppose it all comes down to what your definition of "terrorism" is.

Quoting him to "prove" that there's no al-Qaeda in the Balkans is like quoting Walter Duranty to "prove" that there was no genocide in the Ukraine under Stalin.

[pankot]

You couldn't be more right. Back then I believed Bubba was laying the groundwork, along with Gen. Clark, for partition of southern Serbia and allowing a radical Islamic foothold in the Balkans. Typical Liberal move.

[Prodigal Son]

Douglas Hamilton from Reuters. Well, well, well. That guy's on my media hit list since Operation Iraqi Freedom and before. A little more subtle than Robert Fisk. Guy thinks he's clever. He changed Comical Ali's words once from "America will be stuck in a swamp from which they will never escape" to "American will be stuck in a quagmire..." Hamilton just rewrites the facts and history as he sees fit.

This guy is a piece of work. When you see his name on the article, keep in mind he was one of the ones putting heavy duty negative spin on everything that was happening back in March/April. He has an agenda to say the least.

[mark502inf]

No. Writing that 'the real deal is ethnicity' in the context of the Balkans shows an absolute misunderstanding of the Balkans. Serb, Croat and Bosniac are all the same ethnicity! The defining difference is religion.

Good point on ethnicity--I stand corrected.

In clarification however, I think it would be incorrect to say you can line up a Croat, a Bosniac, and a Serb and say they are the same except for their religion. Over the centuries, each of those groups has developed a sense of separateness & nationality derived in some degree from religion, but also based on geography & culture & time spent under the dominion of others such as the Ottoman Empire or Austro-Hungary and so on. Throw in the areligiousness of communism for 45 years and the result is that the primary driver of contemporary conflict between the groups is nationalist identity. The same goes for the Macedonians and Albanians, who can more properly be described as ethnically separate. One result is that to a large extent, churches & mosques are not seen as primarily religious structures, but as symbols of the nationality with which they are associated.

Thanks for catching me on the mis-use of ethnicity.

[Steve_Seattle]

The Times of London has also reported that al-Quaida and other Islamists have hopes to use the Balkans as a staging ground for further mischief in Europe, and I believe it. I believe pan-Islamic sentiments are more powerful than ethnic loyalties.

[mark502inf]

I believe pan-Islamic sentiments are more powerful than ethnic loyalties.

True for a few, but not for the vast majority in the Balkans. There are always some fanatics; remember we've had that problem with a few American citizens. What the writer said about more bars than mosques is true--and the bars are a lot more crowded, also!

The biggest problem with the Balkans is that weak governmental control over some areas combined with organized crime, corruption and established smuggling routes make it a place where terrorists can stage and move into and out of with less fear of interdiction.

[inquest]

The biggest problem with the Balkans is that weak governmental control over some areas combined with organized crime, corruption and established smuggling routes make it a place where terrorists can stage and move into and out of with less fear of interdiction.

So does this mean you're not denying that al-Qaeda is active in the Balkans?

[konijn]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/index/bosnia/feb96/nbos156.htm