An Islamist state in Europe

[Defensor Fidei]

Commentary by Jeffrey Kuhner
11/28/2005

The Bush administration has decided to get involved in another
dangerous nation-building project,this time in the volatile Balkans.
More ominously, the effects of this intervention will be to lay the
groundwork for an Islamist state in the heart of Europe.

Last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the leaders of
Bosnia’s three main groups; Muslims, Serbs and Croats, met in
Washington to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Dayton Accords,
which ended Europe’s worst bloodletting since 1945. But instead of
limiting itself to a symbolic remembrance ceremony, the
administration pressured Bosnia’s political representatives to sign
an agreement demanding constitutional reforms by early next year.

The plan seeks to establish a centralized, unitary state dominated by
a strong government in Sarajevo. The ultimate goal is to do away with
most of the post-Dayton institutions, and forge a more cohesive state
that will finally eradicate the country’s ethnic divisions.

Bosnia’s current political system, with its rotating tripartite
presidency, parallel administrations and vast bureaucracy, is neither
rational nor efficient. Reform is needed. The American-backed plan,
however, is a recipe for disaster. It is a form of radical social
engineering that will have to be imposed against the wishes of the
country’s Serb and Croat populations. More importantly, it will pave
the way for potentially turning Bosnia into Europe’s first Islamic
republic. This will destabilize not only the Balkans,
but the entire European continent.

What is remarkable about this plan is that it has been spearheaded by
the very same Balkanists in the State Department, who are most
responsible for the disaster that has befallen the peoples of Bosnia.
During the Bosnian war of 1992-1995, State Department officials
refused to lift the arms embargo against the Muslims and Croats. This
effectively favored the murderous Serb forces, since they had access
to the vast depots of weapons left over from the fall of
Yugoslavia. The result was that hundreds of thousands were
slaughtered and several million were expelled from their homes.

Due to the West’s passivity in the face of Serb genocide, many of
Bosnia’s Muslims became radicalized. Thousands of foreign Arab
fighters, known as the mujahedeen, infiltrated into the country in
order to wage jihad against Christian Serb and Catholic Croat forces.
Iran and Saudi Arabia’s influence over the Bosnian Muslim authorities
grew as the war ground on. Radical Islam took root in the Balkans.

Most of Bosnia’s Muslims remain secular or moderate. But in his
recent book, “Faith at War,” Yaroslav Trofimov, the Wall Street
Journal’s foreign correspondent, documents the chilling rise of
militant Islam since the end of the fighting.

Mr. Trofimov shows that the Saudis have been funding numerous
mosques in Sarajevo, where long-bearded men promote Wahhabism, a
particularly intolerant version of Islam. The Saudis have also
supported charities that serve as fronts for al Qaeda. Islamist radio
stations, such as Radio Naba, and radical organizations, such as the
Young Muslims, have proliferated. Parts of Bosnia, like the village
of Bocinja, serve as enclaves for the country’s remaining mujahedeen.

What is most disturbing, however, is the influx of young Bosnian
Muslim fighters into Iraq, where they are joining the Islamofascist
insurgents in their barbaric campaign against U.S. forces. At one of
Sarajevo’s main mosques, the second highest-ranking cleric in the
country, Ismet Spahic, has publicly denounced the U.S.-led war in
Iraq as “genocide.”

This small minority of Islamic militants is growing, acting like a
cancer on Bosnia’s body politic. Instead of taking forceful action to
stop this threat, the United States, the European Union and the
authorities in Sarajevo have ignored it.

They have also turned a blind eye to the growing persecution of
Bosnia’s Christians, especially Croatian Catholics. Locked into a
federation with the country’s majority Muslims, the Croatians have
seen their numbers dwindle as they slowly leave their ancestral
lands. Their basic rights are repeatedly violated.

Before the war there were 820,000 Catholics in Bosnia-Herzegovina
and now there are 466,000, said Cardinal Vinko Puljic, the leading
figure of the Catholic Church in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We never
received any form of help or
support for our people to return.

The Croatians are dying. If this package of constitutional reforms is
passed, it will be the Serbs’ turn to be submerged by the growing
Muslim majority.

The only way to bring about lasting stability in Bosnia is not by
centralizing power and trying to forge an artificial “Bosnian”
identity as the U.S. plan foolishly seeks to do. Rather, it is to
adopt the Switzerland model: make Bosnia into an efficient
decentralized state, where power is devolved to ethnically-based
cantons that will have considerable political, religious and cultural
autonomy.

By making all three ethnic groups masters in their own house, it will
give each of them, especially the minority Serbs and Croats, an
incentive to view Bosnia as their shared, common homeland. It will
also help to contain radical Islam by providing an internal system of
checks and balances, which will prevent any kind of potential Islamic
movement from seizing national power.

To the Balkanists in the State Department, however, Bosnia is a giant
laboratory for their experiment in multiethnic nation-building. Like
other such experiments; Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union,
Czechoslovakia, it will fail. This time the cost to the West will be
even more severe: an Islamic inroad into the center of Europe.
Washington will rue the day.

http://www.caausa.org/articles/octno...%20Europe.html

[Defensor Fidei]

Terrorist Cells Find Foothold in Balkans Arrests Point to Attacks Within Europe
By Rade Maroevic and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 1, 2005; Page A16

SARAJEVO, Bosnia -- The raid netted explosives, rifles, other arms and a videotape pledging vengeance for the "brothers" killed fighting Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq. Police found the cache in an apartment occupied by an underground group that was aiming to blow up the British Embassy in Sarajevo, Western intelligence officials said.

The Oct. 19 bust in Sarajevo confirmed a suspicion among several intelligence agents that Bosnia and other parts of the Balkans are becoming a launching pad for terrorist attacks in Europe.

Repairing battle damage in suburban Sarajevo has been part of the rebuilding process in Bosnia since the peace accord. But areas of the Balkans are still lawless and are seen as ripe recruitment territory for Middle East radicals.

In particular, Islamic radicals are looking to create cells of so-called white al Qaeda, non-Arab members who can evade racial profiling used by police forces to watch for potential terrorists. "They want to look European to carry out operations in Europe," said a Western intelligence agent in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Montenegro, adjacent to Bosnia. "It's yet another evolution in the tools used by terrorists."

Parts of the Balkans, stuck in lawless limbo after years of war in the 1990s, are ripe recruitment territory for Middle East radicals, intelligence officials say. Bosnia is still divided among Muslim, Croat and Serb population areas, even if nominally united under the 10-year-old Dayton peace agreement that ended ethnic warfare.

Muslim enclaves in Serbia are restive, and Muslim-majority Kosovo remains an estranged province campaigning for independence six years after NATO bombing forced out Serb-dominated Yugoslav troops.

The Balkans have long been a freeway for smugglers of cigarettes, drugs, weapons and prostitutes. "All the conditions are present. Embittered Muslims, arms, corruption -- everything underground operators need to get established," said the Western intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The raid on the Sarajevo group, which was said to have had contacts with cells in Denmark and Britain, was not the only event that raised concern.
During the summer, Italian and Croatian police arrested five people who allegedly plotted to bomb the funeral of Pope John Paul II in Vatican City in April.

In addition, Serbian police accidentally came across a key suspect in the March 2004 bombings of Madrid commuter trains while he was traveling through the country by train. He arrived in the Balkans in July, and Serbian police investigators conjecture that he was seeking haven either in Bosnia or Kosovo and perhaps safe passage to the Middle East. They quickly extradited the man, Abdelmajid Bouchar, a Moroccan citizen, to Spain.

U.S. and allied intelligence officers have long worked together in Sarajevo to keep an eye on Islamic radicals in Bosnia. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the CIA and other foreign agencies set up a joint, fortified headquarters to keep tabs on terrorism suspects in Bosnia, a Western intelligence source in Sarajevo said.

The spy teams operate separately from the chief international overseers of Bosnia, the Office of the High Representative, according to the official.

During the three-sided war in Bosnia, hundreds of fighters from Arab and other Middle Eastern countries flocked to Bosnia to fight on behalf of the Muslim faction against Croats and Serbs. Many of the foreign mujaheddin , or holy warriors, were expelled after the war, according to the Bosnian government, but others remained and received passports.

Today, parts of Bosnia framed by the cities of Zenica, Tuzla, Sarajevo and Travnik are home to these immigrants and compose the core regions for Islamic militancy, Bosnian police and Western intelligence officials say.

Until recently, the immigrants tried to keep a low profile. Western intelligence officials here and in Belgrade surmised that they wanted to exploit Bosnia as a logistics and transit point and not invite a crackdown from local police or European Union peacekeepers.

The Sarajevo arrests changed that perception. A Bosnian Interior Ministry official, Robert Cvrtak, released the names of four detainees from the raid:
Cesur Abdulkadir, who is of Turkish heritage; Mirsad Bektasevic, a Swedish citizen of Bosnian origin; and Bajro Ikanovic and Almir Bajric, both Bosnian citizens. Among their activities, Bosnian police said, were hiding explosives inside lemons and tennis balls and trying to set up training camps in the hills near Sarajevo.

Last Thursday night, Bosnian police arrested a fifth suspect in the town of Hadzici, near Sarajevo. The police found about 20 pounds of explosives hidden in woods near his home. The man, whose name has not been made public, is suspected of being in charge of providing explosives to the rest of group.

Police officials here say Bektasevic, 19, also ran a Web site on behalf of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian who heads the insurgent group al Qaeda in Iraq. He had pictures of the White House in his computer, they added.

Bektasevic operated under the code name Maximus and kept in touch with a group of at least three men in Britain. British police arrested them in early November, according to press reports.

A week after the original Sarajevo arrests, police in Copenhagen detained four men ages 16 to 20 and said they had planned suicide bombings somewhere in Europe. "We had a very short period to investigate, but our information indicated that their action was imminent," said a police spokesman, Joern Bro. The Danes believed that the Copenhagen suspects had been in contact by phone and e-mail with Bektasevic.

In August, police in Croatia arrested five Bosnians whom Italian military intelligence had fingered for involvement in a plot to bomb the papal funeral. The group originated in Gornja Maoca, a town in northeastern Bosnia, and had planned to smuggle rocket launchers, explosives and detonators into Italy. The plot fell apart, Western intelligence officials said, when a suspect was arrested in Rome in April. The Croatian police, acting on a tip from the Italians, found the others in Croatia.

The capture of Bouchar, suspected in the Madrid train bombings, in Serbia in July surprised police there. They had thought he was just another Middle Easterner traveling illegally through the country until an Interpol fingerprint check revealed his identity.

Authorities say Bouchar had narrowly escaped death or capture shortly after the Madrid attacks, when police there sealed off an apartment where suspects were hiding. Seven men died in the residence by detonating explosives.
Bouchar, however, was taking out garbage at the time and fled, Serbian and Spanish officials say.

He traveled to Brussels, where he expected to obtain forged documents, authorities said. However, his contacts there were either under arrest or fleeing police. He moved on and spent time in Austrian and Hungarian jails, but was freed. No one in either country checked his fingerprints.

When picked up heading toward Belgrade, he was wearing a new business suit.
Western intelligence officials in Belgrade note that Serbia, although predominantly non-Muslim, has pockets of Muslims in the Sanjak region near Montenegro as well as Kosovo and other areas along the province's border.

Williams reported from Belgrade.

[Defensor Fidei]

Bosnia: Haven for Islamic radicals?
By Nicholas Wood International Herald Tribune

SARAJEVO A police raid last month on an apartment near this city's airport uncovered evidence of an imminent suicide bombing, intensifying the fears of Western security services that Bosnia is becoming a haven for Islamic radicals.

The raid, which was carried out after an extensive surveillance operation by the Bosnian police and Western intelligence services, turned up an arsenal of weapons in the apartment, including suicide vests, about 30 kilograms, or 65 pounds, of exploding bullets and high explosive, and a machine pistol.

Investigators said they also found a videotape in which three men - at least two of them teenagers - are seen asking forgiveness from God for their "sacrifice," a recording made just hours before the raid. The two teenagers were arrested.

Subsequent investigations by the Bosnian police have led to the arrests of three more men, all Bosnian citizens, whose identities have not been revealed. Two of them were arrested on Nov. 19 and accused of providing support for the group.

The third was detained on Nov. 24 and charged with supplying explosives. The police said they had seized 10 kilograms of explosives kept by the same man in a forest in Hadjici, outside Sarajevo.

The weapons seizures and arrests, most notably of the two teenagers found in the apartment in the suburb of Ilidza - a Turk who had been living in a Muslim community in Denmark and a Swede of Bosnian heritage - have provided government and international officials here with evidence that a terrorist cell was working in Bosnia.

They have also shed light on a complex web that stretches well beyond the Balkans and that security services fear could threaten Western Europe.

Diplomats and international officials close to the investigation describe it as a series of overlapping networks, in which young Muslims from Scandinavia have been recruited as possible suicide bombers and sent to Bosnia. Government officials here say the group in Bosnia used the former Yugoslav state as a staging ground for attacks elsewhere in Europe.

"All the indicators show that Bosnia is a territory where they can come and rest, organize their activities and then go and carry out" an attack elsewhere, Dragan Mektic, Bosnia's deputy security minister, said in an interview.

The police have accused two of the Bosnian suspects with planning an attack in "internationally protected property," a commonly used law-enforcement euphemism for an embassy. But senior Western diplomats and Mektic said there were no indications that the target of the Ilidza cell was in Bosnia.

The surveillance began in late September, Mektic said, and focused on at least 10 people, some of them from the region, others Bosnian passport-holders with ties to the Middle East. During that time, five of the people rented the apartment in Ilidza, as well as rooms in a house in Hrasno Brdo, a rambling hilltop suburb of Sarajevo.

When the police finally moved to make arrests, they captured only three of the 10. The third person - who was not on the suicide tape - had rented the Ilidza apartment on the others' behalf. He was dropped from the investigation.

The potential for Bosnia to become a terrorist base has long been a concern of security services in Europe. The 1992-1995 conflict here ripped apart Bosnia's Muslim, Serbian and Croatian populations, opening the way for weapons' smuggling and organized crime.

The religious and ethnic overtones of the war attracted, at a minimum, dozens of Muslim fighters from the Middle East, many with experience fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, who brought with them the influence of radical Islam.

Many of those fighters settled here and married Bosnian women. They have remained largely at the margins of the Islamic community. While more conservative, they have not had a significant impact on Bosnia's Muslims, who by and large are moderate in their religious outlook.

Periodically, former fighters and others who came to Bosnia to help Muslims have been placed under investigation by Western and Bosnian security services, which claim to have thwarted several terrorist attacks as a result.

In January 2002, six Algerians living in Bosnia were accused of plotting an attack on the American Embassy in Sarajevo. No evidence of the alleged plot was made public, and a Bosnian court dismissed the charges and ordered the men released.

But the Bosnian government, under pressure from the United States, transferred them to American custody. They were flown to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they remain.

Bosnia gave passports to more than 800 former fighters and aid workers from the Middle East. Both the United States and Saudi Arabia have accused Bosnia of giving passports to known terrorists, sometimes under aliases.

Few details have been revealed about those believed to be coordinating the Sarajevo group, but Mektic and international officials close to the investigation say that Bosnia's liberal passport policy as well as its porous borders made it appealing as a terrorist base, despite the presence of several thousand European Union-led peacekeepers. The process of obtaining passports has been made more stringent over time.

"The flow of people, narcotics and other materials is very difficult to break," said Jonathan Ratel, a prosecutor in the department that deals with organized crime in Bosnia's State Court.

The background of the two men in custody has helped investigators make connections between the operation here and the rest of Europe.

Abdulkadir Cesur, 18, and Mirsad Bektasevic, 19, were arrested in the raid near the airport. Both had traveled to Bosnia three weeks earlier, according to Bosnian border police records, and had come from Muslim communities in Denmark and Sweden. Cesur is Turkish but has Danish residency, and Bektasevic left Bosnia at the age of 6 and became a Swedish citizen.

Acting on phone records, a senior international official close to the Bosnian investigation said, the Bosnian police tipped off their counterparts in Denmark about the possibility of a parallel group in Copenhagen.

On Oct. 27, the police in Denmark, working with the Bosnian authorities, arrested four men, all between the ages of 16 and 20, and seized computers, computer discs, books with radical Muslim literature and Danish kroner worth about $32,000, from separate addresses. Since then, three more people have been detained in connection with the Bosnian arrests. Out of the seven, none of whom have been identified, six attended the same mosque in Copenhagen's Noebbro district.

One international official close to the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is formally the responsibility of Bosnia's state prosecutor, said that the group had sought to recruit suicide bombers from established immigrant communities in the West.

"They are indoctrinated into thinking that they could be a huge cause for their people," said the official. "They are young and impressionable and potentially disenfranchised from the society they find themselves living in."

Bektasevic's background appears to fit that description. Unemployed since leaving school a year and half ago, he had begun to attend a mosque in Gothenburg, the city nearest their home on Sweden's west coast, said his mother, Nafija Hamedovic.

She described her son as having come under the influence of three men: a Palestinian from Syria, a Kurd and a Somali.

"He was not religious before, but in the past two years he practiced more seriously," she said in an interview by telephone.

"Some people frightened him and talked to him about hell, and told him he would be tortured in hell if he does not pray and does not believe," she said.

But she dismissed the idea that he could have been a suicide bomber, explaining that he had gone to stay with her relatives in Sarajevo and that he had no outside support.

"It's a lie," she said. "He didn't even have any money. I even had to pay for his bus ticket to Bosnia."