Posted on 05/19/2007 2:00:12 PM PDT by kronos77
Belgrade, 18 May (AKI) - A prominent Bosnian publicist and author has accused a Muslim member of the country's three-man state presidency, Haris Silajdzic, of fostering radical Islamism and of protecting Islamist terrorists connected with Al-Qaeda. Dzevad Galijasevic, author of a trilogy "Epitaph for Bosnia" and former mayor of central Bosnian town of Maglaj, said in an interview to Belgrade weekly NIN on Friday that Bosnia wasn't just a shelter, "but a base from which terrorists are being sent to western countries."
Galijasevic, himself a Muslim, said the "Islamisation" of Bosnia didn't start during Bosnia's 1992-1995 civil war, when thousands of mujahadeen from Islamic countries came to fight on the side of local Muslims, but many years before. The radicalisation of local Muslim population was started by the war-time Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic, who spelled the project of Islamisation of Bosnia in his book "Islamic Declaration" published in the 1970s. The book was packed with with religious intolerance and pleaded for the creation of a Muslim state "from Algiers to Indonesia", Galijasevic pointed out.
Izetbegovic was jailed by the then Yugoslav communist authorities and the book was banned, but it later helped him to impose himself as a national Muslim leader when Bosnia seceded from former Yugoslavia in 1992, triggering civil war between Muslims, Serbs and Croats, the country's three main ethnic groups.
"The war has only intensified and accelerated this process," said Galijasevic.
He said it was it Izetbegovic and Silajdzic, at the time prime minister, who invited mujahadeen to come and fight in Bosnia, many of whom later remained in the country and continued work on the radicalisation of local population.
(Excerpt) Read more at adnki.com ...
Ping!
Figures. It dates back to Turkish rule in the area. Not saying the Turks are bad, necessarily...but it doesn’t surprise me in the least
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