The Failure of Europe in Bosnia
SCHWARTZ, STEPHEN
The Failure of Europe in Bosnia And the continuing infiltration of Islamic extremists. BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ Sarajevo WHILE FRENCH AND DUTCH voters are only now venting their discontent with the...
...Like many others in the world these days, Bosnians are confused...
...A staggering 250,000 people were killed in the ensuing war (out of a population now around 4.5 million...
...command, spirits have appeared in the form of enormous spiders, weighing about a kilogram, that only attack U.S...
...Resid Hafizovic, a leading professor of Islam in Sarajevo, commented, "I cannot see how the police can allow that...
...in 2004...
...The whole world is facing it and there is no way to stop it...
...This has been a disaster for Bosnians, whether Muslim, Serb, or Croat...
...For that reason, Wahhabism has gained a foothold in the small towns and cities of the Sandjak...
...The local imam, Ragip Licina, was allegedly kicked in the stomach during prayers...
...Which part do you recommend...
...It only takes going to the King Fahd mosque during Friday prayer to be terrified...
...Back then, Europe actively obstructed Bosnian self-defense...
...To Serbs, Guantanamo is "notorious," with "inhumane" treatment and "inadequate" medical services...
...Wahhabis then tried to beat up clerics in numerous Muslim communities, where ordinary believers had to defend their religious leaders with physical force...
...soldiers, and the person who is bitten dies within seconds...
...Distribution of such materials is forbidden worldwide and is even punishable...
...has a makeshift stand offering books, brochures, multimedia CDs for religious Muslims, and various religious items...
...I have not watched all of it, I have not had the time, but I can attest that it is great...
...Enes Karic, a leading professor at the Bosnian Institute of Islamic Studies, told me, "In this country Muslims and Jews always formed a single umma," or religious community...
...weapons embargo that prevented the Bosnians from legally importing arms...
...In the Wal-Mart-sized, architecturally overbearing King Fahd mosque—which opened in 2000 on the outskirts of Sarajevo, built with Saudi money and named for the Saudi monarch—the imam is Nezim Halilovic Muderis, a Bosnian extremist agitator whose antics here I have followed since 1999...
...The particularly good part is the one where they kill a captured Russian soldier...
...Wahhabis] are fighting not only Russians and Americans, but Muslim traditionalists as well...
...says, stroking his long beard...
...If it is, Washington should not ignore Balkan Muslim clerics who are willing to help in the fight against terror...
...intervention in the Balkans that they leap to defend Arab extremists deported from Sarajevo to Guantanamo...
...The local struggle against radical Islam is not helped by the fact that Bosnian Serbs, a decade after they savagely shed the blood of their Muslim neighbors, remain so resentful of Clinton-era U.S...
...and their confusion makes many of them—especially the young—perfect targets for radical recruitment...
...The interview contains this chilling exchange: When you cut a man's throat, you cut the main blood vessels with the knife and death comes almost instantly...
...The sentiment is novel to hear but deeply felt by local Islamic intellectuals...
...But the situation remains difficult...
...BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ Sarajevo WHILE FRENCH AND DUTCH voters are only now venting their discontent with the European Union, the Bosnians have held Brussels in contempt since the onset of their civil war, some 13 years ago...
...Afghanistan, "Palestine: The Slaughter of Children," Chechnya (only parts five and six, actually, as the first four sold long ago...
...Muslim Bosnia and neighboring territories also face growing Islamist extremism...
...Late last year, the Serbian magazine Novi Reporter leaked a secret document produced by the Sarajevo authorities regarding six Algerian terror suspects shipped from Bosnia to Guantanamo...
...There are more and more of them," Licina commented, describing a series of "assaults on religious persons while they were performing mosque services...
...they never use the vocabulary of jihad, even in the wake of their bloody war, and they do not refer to Jews and Christians as "unbelievers," even though they fought and were victimized by Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats...
...Still, Wahhabis persist in hawking their beheading videos in the streets of Sarajevo, to the alarm of Muslim clergy and theology professors...
...He preaches the same line on the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq as is heard among the acolytes of terrorist leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi...
...European humanitarian colonialism has burdened the country with staggering unemployment (at least the official rate, 44 percent), severely retarded privatization and reconstruction, and perpetuated the partition between a Serbian-occupied zone and a shaky Muslim-croat federation...
...advertised his displayed merchandise that way, staring absentmindedly into the distance...
...Of course, they would not have killed him if he had cooperated, but he did not want to go with them...
...I am interested in Chechnya...
...I am particularly worried by the inertness of the system, which is not able to tackle this kind of a problem...
...Muderis's Friday sermons, available on Bosnian websites, are replete with incitement to violence in Israel, Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and the Philippines...
...You can see everything...
...Personally, I had no idea such things were happening...
...A Bosnian referred to in the article as "A.S.," he is a fixture outside the Governor's Mosque in downtown Sarajevo...
...Once again, the United States may be called upon to help the Bosnian Muslims...
...The British and French instigated a U.N...
...Although the men are not of Bosnian origin, the magazine called them Bosnian "nationals" (which plays well among Serbs, who typically mistrust Muslims), and also slammed the United States...
...The conversation took place recently in Sarajevo, in front of the Ottoman Governor's Mosque...
...In the decade since the massacre at Srebrenica, where Serbs slaughtered 8,000 Muslim men and boys, Brussels has ruled Bosnia, as provided for under the U.S.-orchestrated Dayton Accords...
...Recent reporting in the Serb daily Vesti described an attack on traditional Muslims praying in a mosque in the village of Lozna...
...administration, Bosnians are avid to become peers of Slovenia, the most successful post-Yugoslav republic, which entered the E.U...
...Across the border in northern Montenegro, in an obscure district called the Sandjak, Muslims of Bosnian tradition form a majority...
...Wahhabism is a phenomenon that is difficult to explain...
...There A.S...
...Licina said about 20 Wahhabis have appeared in Lozna...
...It is, to say the least, bizarre: "In Falluja, according to statements from the U.S...
...Moderate Bosnian Islam is holding the line against Wahhabi infiltration...
...Compilations of horror...
...They had to do it," A.S...
...He offers the biggest hits and compilations from recent battlefields worldwide...
...Wahhabi missionaries, promoting the ultraradical cult financed by Saudi Arabia, have come back to the Balkans after their expulsion from Sarajevo in the aftermath of September 11...
...Muderis is one of only a handful of clerics publicly preaching extremism...
...Bosnian authorities acted then with admirable speed in cracking down on the Saudi High commission for Relief of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a center of al Qaeda activity...
...It shows everything...
...Stephen Schwartz's Two Faces of Islam has just been published in Bosnian in Sarajevo...
...A.S...
...At the same time, and notwithstanding Bosnia's stagnation under E.U...
...Traditional Bosnian Muslim clerics are moderate...
...The Saudis have not attempted to reestablish that official presence in Sarajevo, but Wahhabi terror scouts continue to patrol its streets seeking new converts...
...Part six...
...That is the best part...
...President Bush and the Iraq war are unpopular here, above all because Bosnian Muslims look to Germany and Turkey for their political cues, and cannot help but be drawn to emulate those nations' anti-American attitudes...
...Cutting a man's throat is therefore the most humane thing we can do...
...Faced with continuing ideological aggression by Islamists as well as Serb nationalists, the Muslim Bosnians can expect no protection from Europe...
...To be frank, I am scared...
...A pattern duplicated elsewhere was described by the traditional Muslims of Sandjak: "In the summer, a young man who had studied Islam in Saudi Arabia held lecture sessions, bringing this kind of teaching to . . . the whole of Montenegro...
...A report published in the sometimes useful National Enquirer-style weekly Dani (Days) on January 14 included an interview with one of these men...
...But they are poor and neglected by everyone in the world except the Wahhabis...
...An educated guess is that at least 200 such meddlers are now at work...
Vol. 10 • June 2005 • No. 38
