Balkanalysis.com

The Mythical Bosnia

According to Antiwar.com’s Nebojsa Malic, “The Christian Science Monitor says Bosnia is terror-free. Nonsense!” Find out why here.Just about anyone with half a functioning brain knows that Bosnia-Herzegovina is the paragon of errors in this Brave New World of eternal war for eternal… whatever. Its very existence is a paradox – a multiethnic country created through violent secession from a multiethnic federation on grounds of ethnic nationalism – and its constitutional order is a product of an American-imposed armistice. It is one, yet divided and subdivided. It is a democracy, but is ruled by a viceroy with absolute power. Its Constitution says international human rights conventions take precedence over any local laws – yet its people’s lives, liberty and property are just about the most restricted in Europe. It is supposedly at peace, yet the 1992-95 war never really ended – it just changed theaters, from the battlefield to the parliaments. It is supposedly rebuilt, but that is only the outside veneer, a Potemkin deception for the visiting foreign dignitaries and local kleptocrats.

Not so to a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor, where a headline on March 24 joyfully declares that “In rebuilt Bosnia, [there is] no terror toehold,” and that “Bosnia-Herzegovina’s postwar success is a nation-building model.”

Really? How did that happen? Shouldn’t there have been a memo…?

One doesn’t need to waste time on Colin Woodard’s fascination with reconstructed homes and office buildings. There are still too many ruins in Bosnia, even eight years after the war, and with the amount of money that flowed into the country over the past decade, that the capital was rebuilt is no wonder. Hey, even Mobutu’s Kinshasa was once a modern city. The rest of Congo/Zaire… well…

But he goes on to quote “experts” who claim that Bosnia is not an attractive “potential host” for Al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks. They “seek out ‘weak states’ with porous borders, ineffective governments, and sympathetic locals.”

Let’s see:

Porous borders? Check; plenty of those. Bosnia is a huge transit point for human trafficking, not to mention drugs and guns.

Ineffective governments? One central government, two entity governments (Muslim-Croat Federation, Serb Republic), ten cantons in the federation – that’s thirteen. Bosnia likely has the most bureaucrats per capita in the world, and the only thing they are effective at is ridding their people of their money. So, check.

Sympathetic locals? Um, how about the veterans of “El Mujahid,” a notorious militant Islamic unit that fought Serbs and Croats in central Bosnia? Or the mujahidin who appropriated several ethnically cleansed villages in the Bosnia River valley, and beat up Serbs and Croats who try to return to their homes? How about the fact that the wartime government of Alija Izetbegovic issued passports to dozens, if not hundreds, of foreign Muslims, including one Bin Laden lieutenant (Mehrez Amdouni) and reportedly Bin Laden himself? Why else does anyone thing people can’t travel anywhere with a Bosnian passport, even now, without first obtaining half a dozen permits and visas? And there’s the Wahabbis – but more on that in a minute.

So much for that argument. But who are Woodard’s “experts” with such poor knowledge? No surprise: one Senad Slatina of the infamous International Crisis Group, the folks who dismissed all reports of terrorism in the Balkans as “Serbian propaganda” back in 2001 – before at least half a dozen suspected terrorists have been caught.

The CSM says Slatina noted the presence of 10,000 NATO peacekeepers as a deterrent to terrorists. In 1996, there were three times that many, and yet they discovered and raided a bona fide terrorist camp a little ways outside Sarajevo. There was also a plot to kill the Pope during his visit, in 1997.  So, when the unnamed “Western diplomatic source” tells the CSM that “There is no evidence that there are or were Al Qaeda camps in Bosnia,” he is most certainly not telling the truth.

Next up is another impeccable source, Bosnia’s Grand Mufti and Izetbegovic’s right-hand man in promoting militant Islam, Mustafa-effendi Ceric, “whom foreign diplomats praise for his efforts to promote tolerance and reconciliation.” Is this not the same man who exhorted Muslim women to “give birth to more soldiers” during the war, or called mixed-marriage children “genetic trash”? The same man who was envisioned by a British Muslim group as the potential Grand Mufti of Europe once there was an Islamic Parliament of Europe in Sarajevo? In person, he is pure congeniality. Behind one’s back, if one’s an infidel – not so much.

Sure, “Saudi money built the enormous King Fahd Mosque on the edge of Sarajevo, and there has been a noticeable increase in the number of young people wearing long beards or head scarves since the war’s end.” But Ceric brushes off any concerns, claiming “his” Muslims are peaceful and friendly. And we’re supposed to take his word for it?

Who has allowed and promoted the rise of Wahabism, but Ceric? And did not Alija Izetbegovic, Ceric’s political mentor, write back in 1971 that the primary goal of a Muslim rebirth movement was to “Islamize the Muslims” in its own country, so they would seize power once the conditions were right?

Woodard notes that Bosnia’s Muslims have “lived among a Christian
majority for centuries.” But for most of that time, they lived in privilege under the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. In World War Two, their conduct towards Bosnian Serbs was anything but peaceful. During the 1992-95 war, caused in part by Izetbegovic’s refusal to honor a treaty with Serbs and Croats, Muslims fought both Serbs and Croats and one time, and even fellow Muslims who defied Izetbegovic’s will. The late Izetbegovic, whose legacy still dominates Bosnian Muslim politics, has been accused with good reason of wanting to establish a Muslim-dominated centralized Bosnian state.

So when the report quotes Jakob Finci, one of the few remaining Jews in Bosnia (and why is that?), saying that he doesn’t think “everybody has given up on the idea of splitting Bosnia into two or three parts,” that’s likely because the likes of Ceric and Izetbegovic’s other political heirs haven’t given up on the thought of making it one – and Muslim.

Between Izetbegovic’s writings, pre-war intolerance, wartime conduct, mujahidin and terrorist ties, and the postwar rise of militant Islam, can you blame Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats for feeling just a bit anxious? And when Bosnia’s international occupiers and their media handmaidens start pretending there is absolutely nothing to all these facts, and react to any attempt at discussing them with a “La-la-la, I can’t hear you!” well there’s something for all to be worried about.