Part 2 of 2
Could a radical, potentially violent parallel society be emerging in the Muslim dominated region of the war-torn republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, eight months after the signing of the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the European Union?
There are indications of this. Resid Hafizovic, a professor at the Islamic University, was the first to speak of a “potentially deadly virus” in Bosnian society. The head of the Bosnian federal police has recently admitted that there is a growing threat of “terrorism with an Islamistic character” and has cited indications that suicide bombers have begun to equip themselves with explosive belts.
“They have everything to blow themselves up. Whether they do it depends on the orders from their leaders,” says Esad Hecimovic, author of a standard work on the mujahedeen in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Last March, officials of the special anti-terror unit arrested five men, including four Salafites in Sarajevo.
The Bosnian leader of the group, a former fighter in the Al-Mujahedeen Brigade, reportedly has sponsors in Germany and Austria who helped him acquire explosives. In connection with the arrests, police conducted raids in remote mountain areas and seized caches of arms and military equipment that were used for combat training exercises.
After discovering that some of the masterminds behind 9/11, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had been active in Bosnia, international pressure increased on the government in Sarajevo in 2002. Foundations were closed and police searched the Sarajevo office of the Saudi High Commissioner for Aid to Bosnia, which had until then enjoyed the protection of the United States.
Al-Qaida veteran Ali Hamad from Bahrain and Syrian-born Abu Hamza are currently in custody on the outskirts of Sarajevo and awaiting deportation. Intelligence sources say that Hamza secretly channeled money between Arab sponsors and Bosnian Salafites. The amount of €500 – an average monthly salary – is reportedly rewarded for every woman who decides to wear a full-body veil.
The Islamists are slowly but surely permeating the firm ground upon which Sarajevo##s society stands.
##We Are only Interested in Opening Ourselves as an Islamic Society##
The fact of the matter is that politicians from all parties are playing the background music to a radicalization that threatens not just the secular character of Bosnia, but also the unity of this country comprised of Muslims, Serbs and Croats. This includes some local politicians who have demanded that school classes be strictly divided according to religious confessions – and in December, 2008 obtained, in several places, the first ban affecting state-run daycare centers in Sarajevo. The ban concerned the Christian Santa Claus who, until then, even Muslim children had revered as “Little Father Frost.”
Haris Silajdzic, the Muslim representative of the presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, played a very active role as foreign minister and prime minister during the war but now, after years of power struggles. He is still widely regarded as one of the most artful advocates of Muslim interests in this multi-ethnic state. Silajdzic says he sees no indication of an Islamization of Sarajevo or Bosnia. In his opinion, it is more important to talk of ensuring that the Muslims receive justice after the “genocide” of the 1990s.
Mustafa Spahic is a professor at the traditional Gazi Husrev Beg Koran School, the oldest in the country. Back in the former Yugoslavia, he spent five years in prison for Islamic activities – together with Alija Izetbegovic, who later became the president of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Sarajevo, Europe##s stronghold of Islamic spiritual life, is not about to allow itself to become a branch for Saudi Arabian fanatics, says Spahic.
Bosnia##s grand mufti, Mustafa Ceric, is accused of failing to take a clear position.
He received Germany##s prestigious Theodor Heuss Award in 2007 in recognition of his contribution to strengthening democracy. Nowhere is he more appreciated than in Germany, and nowhere is he more severely attacked than among scholarly circles back in his home country. There are reasons for this disparity, say Ceric##s critics: The Germans are hoping that the grand mufti would train and export liberal imams to help them gain the upper hand with their own problems with Islamists.
Ceric – or “homo duplex,” the man with two faces, as he is derisively called in Sarajevo — is tired of having to comment on things that he would rather not even call by their names: Wahhabism, Salafism, terrorism. “Before we start,” he says “do we actually even know what we##re talking about?”
The grand mufti##s nervousness is understandable. After all, the support of the West for him, a key Muslim nationalistic figure in Bosnia, undermines an objective that was explicitly laid out in the Dayton Peace Agreement under the leadership of the West, namely the continued existence of a multi-ethnic – not an Islamic-dominated – state in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Ceric has never left any doubts about his deep roots in the liberal Bosnian Islamic tradition. But the fact that he does not shy away from maintaining close contacts with the Salafit camp, including one-time Osama bin Laden mentor Sheikh Salman al-Auda from Saudi Arabia, has drawn criticism. “Totally unfounded,” says Ceric: “We are only interested in opening ourselves as an Islamic society.”
Nermin Karacic was an influential leader in the Bosnian Salafites. He was the head of al-Furkan, a radical organization that was supplied by the Saudis, as he says, with “suitcases of cash” – under the patient eyes of the Americans. They didn##t sound the alarm until Sept. 11, 2001. According to the US Treasury Department, due to repeated “observations of the US Embassy and United Nations buildings in Sarajevo ” and “connections to al-Qaida,” al-Furkan was declared part of the global terror network and banned by the Bosnian authorities.
“I swear by God that I knew nothing of al-Qaida,” Karacic says. He hasn##t been convicted of any crime.
When a new film about his life is soon released, with all its re-created scenes from his life, the training camp of the Salafites, which he headed, and the King Fahd Mosque, where the Imam now preaches the obliteration of Israel, will he be proud that he has left this life behind him?
The slender man suddenly hesitates, gazes across the river bank to the positions where he once sat as a sniper in the fight against the Serbs, and says: “It##s not really as if I spit on everything that existed back then.” Without the help of the mujahedeen, Karacic says, he would have seen “no light at the end of the tunnel” during the war.
And when it comes to matters of faith, says Karacic, he still feels a close tie with those brothers in arms from abroad: “I still feel like a Salafit.”
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Der Spiegel (abridged)