Fundamentalist Islam Finds Fertile Ground in Bosnia

[Menydh]

Fundamentalist Islam Finds Fertile Ground in Bosnia

Spiegel Online
November 9, 2007

The Dayton Peace Accords called for the removal of foreign combatants from Bosnia after the Balkans war. But hundreds of mujahedeen fighters stayed, and today they are successfully spreading their fundamentalist Islamist views.

Thick iron bars block the entrance to Abu Hamza's store in Sarajevo's Islamic shopping center. Affixed to the bars is a handwritten note: "My Bosnian citizenship has been revoked. I have to defend myself, and for this reason my store is only open sporadically."

Abu Hamza, a bearded 42-year-old man originally from Syria, sits in his store among colorful veils and gold-embroidered tunics and speaks in a gentle voice about Bosnia's fate. He believes that there will be either an evolution of true Islam or a revolution.

Abu Hamza is one of the stars among the missionaries who want to spread a strict interpretation of Islam in Bosnia. He came here in the early 1990s, one of thousands who aided their Muslim brothers in the war against the Serbs. In return, they were given Bosnian citizenship.

This meant that they were "nationalized" and thereby did not fall under the provisions of the Dayton Peace Accords, which stipulated that all foreign combatants had to leave the country. The United States in particular was annoyed by the trick and, under pressure from Washington, a Bosnia government commission revoked the Bosnian citizenship of nearly 400 "suspected mujahedeen of foreign heritage," including Abu Hamza. The suspects are believed to have ties to Islamic terrorists.

American diplomat Raffi Gregorian, deputy high representative for Bosnia, speaks of a growing number of al-Qaida sympathizers in the country. Gregorian works for the Office of the High Representative, the civilian peace implementation agency in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Terrorism experts fear Bosnia could become a base for extremists, since many Bosnian Muslims have become radicalized through the influence of foreign combatants as well as the charitable Islamic organizations that spread their beliefs with money.

Before the war, women in full-body coverings and men with long beards were a rare sight. Today, though, they hardly turn a head.

Wahhabism is quickly gaining ground in the country, with polls showing that 13 percent of Bosnian Muslims support the conservative Sunni Islam reform movement. The movement is financed primarily by Saudi Arabian backers, who have invested well over a half-billion euros in Bosnia's development -- especially in the construction of over 150 mosques. The 8,187 square meter (88,124 square foot) King Fahd Mosque in Sarajevo alone cost €20 million ($29 million), and it's also where radicals go to pray.

In trying to transform the country into a theocracy, the new preachers of fundamental Islam aren't just fighting with the Koran. In Kalesija, militant Wahhabis drove out the local imam after a fight between local Muslims and the Wahhabis. In the village of Dedici, residents took up their shotguns to defend their mosque against the attacking fanatics. Recently, the Careva Mosque (Emperor's Mosque) in Sarajevo locked its doors during prayer for the first time in its 441-year history when a group of Wahhabis tried to enter and perform their own prayer rites.

A notorious mujahedeen commune in the remote village of Bocinje, 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of Tuzla in northeastern Bosnia, is considered the birthplace of the religious movement. Shortly before the end of the war in 1995, the mujahedeen unit moved into Bocinje. The combatants occupied the homes of Serbs who had been driven out, and they established a fundamentalist enclave there. Among the high profile visitors who have come to Bocinje is Aymen al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's second in command.

In 2002, after shooting, fighting and legal injunctions, the missionaries were forced to leave the village. But it is believed that camps still exist in the surrounding woods, where Bosnians are trained as terrorists.

One of the leaders of the Bocinje enclave was Abu Hamza, who says he has faith in the country's youth. They have discovered Islam, he says with a smile, as an answer to the nationalism of the Serbs and Croats. "They see us as an authority," he says. "We protected them during the war, while their politicians were safe in shelters or out of the country."

Abu Hamza is unperturbed when older Bosnians sometimes hold out beer bottles to him tauntingly from their cars. He saw Muslims who drank alcohol die in Srebrenica, he says, and it seems almost as if he sees God's punishment in this fact.

Every day he expects police to come and take him to the airport to be deported, he says. But that day has yet to come. The Bosnian government isn't making any moves and the country's interior minister says most of the 400 suspects can't be found.

People like Abu Hamza have made preparations for the worst. Some foreign Islamic organizations plan to claim those without citizenship as their representatives in Bosnia -- and, as a means of precaution, Bosnian sympathizers have adopted their fellow Muslims.


[source]

[Menydh]

Terrorism experts fear Bosnia could become a base for extremists, since many Bosnian Muslims have become radicalized through the influence of foreign combatants as well as the charitable Islamic organizations that spread their beliefs with money.

Before the war, women in full-body coverings and men with long beards were a rare sight. Today, though, they hardly turn a head.

To put the blame entirely on the war is a bad excuse. The war ended a regime (Yugoslavian) which made it less likeable the use of these Islamic external signs. Had the end of the old Yugoslavia occured by means other than war, the result would have been pretty much the same as it is obvious that a country with a Muslim majority is a number one target for the spread of Islamism, regardless of whether the Muslim population is religious or just cultural.

Islamic organizations would have sent their proselitists just the same, as it would still have been a fertile ground.

Another thing to notice is that the suggestion that Bosniaks may have radicalized because they've seen Islamic jihadists helping them, and that this may have made them open to their influence, is also short from being anything realistic.

Those who helped them most were not the Mujahedeen, but the UN forces. Most of which were from nominally Christian countries.

[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

To put the blame entirely on the war is a bad excuse. The war ended a regime (Yugoslavian) which made it less likeable the use of these Islamic external signs.

The Bosnian Muslims were very Yugoslavian-minded before the war. The Islamic community worked completely normally during those times. The Muslim leaders at first opposed the break-up of Yugoslavia, for two reasons: 1. because they thought that Bosnia would disintegrate in case of the Yugoslavian break-up (they anticipated a perspective of its division between Serbia and Croatia); 2. because in the case of break-up, even if Bosnia survived as a state, the Bosnian Muslims would be cut off from Muslims living in other "republics" of the Yugoslav Federation (Serbia, ie. the region of Sandžak; Montenegro; Kosovo; Macedonia). They had a sense of belonging together with Muslims from other "republics". There was even a function of the general chief of all Muslims in Yugoslavia. The function was called reis-ul-ulema (Arabic word: "the chief of the imams"). In 1990, when there was much talk about the disintegration of Yugoslavia, with claims for national independence made by Croatia and Slovenia, leaders of the Bosnian Muslims still supported the fruther existence of the federation as it was before. They opposed both Croatian-Slovenian conception (break-up of the federation into fully independent states) and the Serbian conception (more centralized federation, with even stronger Serbian domination, in fact, a disguised Greater Serbia). They did not change this attitude until the war began.

It is also noteworthy that Yugoslavia pursued the policy of active membership in the so-called Organization of the Movement of non-Alligned Countries, whereof it was itself a part. There were many Muslim countries in the non-alligned movement and the cooperation with them was quite intensive. Bosnian Muslims were seen as a kind of mediators between Yugoslavia and the Arab countries. Islam wasn't neither suppressed nor prohibited. On the contrary. But of course, there was no Wahhabism.

Even financing mosques from abroad (from the Arabic countries) was not prohibited.

Originally Posted by Mynydd

Had the end of the old Yugoslavia occured by means other than war, the result would have been pretty much the same as it is obvious that a country with a Muslim majority is a number one target for the spread of Islamism, regardless of whether the Muslim population is religious or just cultural.

An opposite claim could be made: Islam had more liberty of movement in the old Yugoslavia, the birthrates were higher than those of the rest of the population and the Islamic population was dispersed in several "republics". For example, while Croatia was part of Yugoslavia, Muslim Albanians from Kosovo could come and settle here, because it was one country. Since independence it is not the same, because there are frontiers now and they are foreign citizens. So you could also claim that Yugoslavia was more fertile ground for the spread of Islam...