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REVIEW ARTICLE Assessing Islamic Terrorism in the Western Balkans

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REVIEW ARTICLE Assessing Islamic Terrorism in the Western Balkans Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, June 2009 REVIEW ARTICLE Assessing Islamic terrorism in the Western Balkans: the state of the debate ARISTOTLE TZIAMPIRIS Introduction During the 1990s foreign mujahedin fighters espousing an extreme Islamic ideology fought on Balkan soil. The extent and consequences of their presence in the Western Balkans constitute a controversial issue that has often been subject to partisan manipulations in the service of national political agendas or the protection of personal political legacies. Given the post-9/11 international sensitivities and policy priorities, distortions, exaggerations and stereotyping are tempting ‘weapons’ in an effort to re-interpret the past and thus delineate the parameters of the region’s political future. Significantly, a series of recent serious scholarly efforts have addressed the manifestations of Balkan Islamic fundamentalism in a region that contains 7–8 million Muslims and in one case, alarmingly, proclaimed The Coming Balkan Caliphate.1 The purpose of this review article will be to assess the contemporary debate about the degree, nature and consequences of Islamic terrorism in the Western Balkans. It should be clarified that we will only deal with terrorist organizations and groups that have been linked to Islamic fundamentalist goals, and not terrorists ‘motivated by ethnicity or national identity’.2 In particular, this article 1See C. Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West, Praeger Security International, Westport, CT, 2007; J. R. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qaida, and the Rise of Global Jihad, Zenith Press, St Paul, 2007; and S. Shay, Islamic Terror and the Balkans, Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ, 2007. To these excellent studies, the pioneering and academically solid E. F. Kohlman, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan–Bosnian Network, Berg, Oxford, 2004 should be added. On the manipulation of Islamic terrorism in the Balkans, see S. Woehrel, ‘Islamic terrorism and the Balkans’, CRS Report for Congress, 2005, pp. 2 and 7. An International Crisis Group (ICG) report presciently points out that ‘Many politicians and propagandists in Serbia, Bosnia and [FYROM] have been given the opportunity to puff fresh air into stereotypes of fanatical bearded mujahidin, myths of Muslim “backwardness”, and theories about the “civilizational” abyss separating Islam from the West that served sinister purposes in the 1990s.’ International Crisis Group (ICG), ‘Bin Laden and the Balkans: the politics of anti-terrorism’, Report No. 119, 9 November 2001, p. i. The title of Deliso, op. cit., ultimately does injustice to the study’s content, argument and research. 2F. Bieber, ‘Approaches to political violence and terrorism in Former Yugoslavia’, Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, 5(1), 2003, p. 40. Bieber provides an authoritative typology of violence in the Balkans that includes a useful discussion and definition of terrorism. However, his primary emphasis is not on Islamic terrorism. ISSN 1944-8953 print/ISSN 1944-8961 online/09/020209-11 q 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/19448950902921143 210 Aristotle Tziampiris will address the disputes concerning jihadi involvement in Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia) and also in the various struggles connected to the predominantly Muslim Albanian factor in Albania, Kosovo and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM).3 The development of Bosnia’s Islamic character will first be explained. There will be a presentation of the Muslim SS division that operated in the region during the Second World War and of the Islamic beliefs of Alija Izetbegovic who was President of Bosnia during the civil war in the 1990s. Particular emphasis will be given to the economic aid provided by the international Muslim community to their coreligionists in Bosnia and especially to the arrival of mujahedin fighters who militarily assisted their cause. This article will focus on their numbers, nature of activities, impact on the war and popular support that they might have enjoyed. An attempt will be made to evaluate the extent of terrorist operations following the conclusion of the civil war and also after 9/11, as well as the reforms that Bosnia has undertaken in order to participate in the war against terror. An examination of the presence of Islamic terrorism in Albania will follow. Emphasis will be given to Osama bin Laden’s visit to the country, al-Qaeda’s locally planned targets and to Albania’s most recent reform measures relating to international efforts against terrorism. We will then turn to Kosovo and the alleged links of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to Islamic terrorism. Various claims will be evaluated and the nature and goals of the organization dissected. Turning to FYROM, the National Liberation Army’s (NLA) connection to terrorism will be assessed in a similar manner. It will emerge that although mujahedin fighters did participate in both the KLA and NLA, these organizations were primarily nationalist and irredentist in character lacking any significant jihadi dimension. This article will conclude by arguing that contemporary scholarship is largely in agreement that al-Qaeda and similar minded organizations and groups have probably managed to establish a foothold of sorts in the Western Balkans possibly utilizing the region as a ‘springboard’ for further attacks. However, at the same time, the states of the Western Balkans are actively striving to join the major Euro-Atlantic structures and not create some kind of Balkan Caliphate. Bosnia: Afghanistan redux? Bosnia constitutes one of the two major cases in the Balkans (the other being Albania) where during Ottoman times there were mass conversions to Islam by the local Christian population. The process by which eventually more than a third 3In this review article the name FYROM is used. This approach has the advantage of conforming to the 1993 United Nations Security Council Resolution 813, according to which ‘This state [will be] referred to for all purposes within the United Nations “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” pending settlement of the difference that has arisen over the name of the state.’ For the text of the resolution, see ,http://www.hri.org/docs/fyrom/S.RES.817.html.. A series of states (including the USA, Russia and China) have recognized FYROM with its constitutional name which is the ‘Republic of Macedonia’ and use the term for their bilateral relations. Currently, negotiations are taking place under the aegis of the UN so that a final settlement on the name dispute is reached that will replace the interim FYROM. Assessing Islamic terrorism in the Western Balkans 211 of the population espoused Islam was slow and lasted over 150 years. By the time the Ottomans left in the 19th century the Muslims of Bosnia (although no more first-class citizens and rulers by virtue of their religion) exhibited signs of religious moderation. In addition, since the end of the 19th century Bosnia was being secularized—a process that was inevitably reinforced during communist rule. Revealingly, ‘between the Second World War and 1991 roughly 40 per cent of urban marriages were mixed [in terms of religious and ethnic background]’, while only 37 per cent of the republic’s Muslims declared themselves religious in 1990.4 The scholarly conclusion is that there was no mass, popular Islamic fundamentalist movement in Bosnia. However, not everything was idyllic or harmonious in Bosnia’s post-Ottoman Islamic history. Of particular importance was the creation of the predominantly Muslim Waffen-SS Handschar division amidst the Second World War in 1943. The division was Heinrich Himmler’s brainchild who was head of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and apparently entertained romantic notions about Muslim fighters. A prominent role in recruitment and propaganda was played by Haj Amin al-Huseini, the former grand mufti of Jerusalem, a close ally of Hitler and an extreme anti-Semite. The Handschar was originally comprised of 8000 Bosnian Muslims and 2800 Catholic volunteers, most of whom were impoverished and uneducated. Their training took place in occupied France and involved one serious mutiny. Imams espousing a fundamentalist Muslim theology were assigned to each battalion. The division returned to Bosnia in early 1944 and took part in nine major anti-partisan operations. It was also responsible for the slaughter of ‘90 percent—12,600—of Bosnia’s 14,000 Jews’. The Handschar eventually disintegrated, many of its soldiers being shot or changing sides and joining the partisans. Also of importance was the existence of the Young Muslims, an Islamist group that operated in Bosnia. One of its members was Alija Izetbegovic who was arrested in 1946 by the communist authorities for his (peaceful) anti-regime activities and sentenced to a three-year prison term. He subsequently kept low but held to his views, publishing in 1970 a contentious book titled Islamic Declaration. Although his manifesto never referred specifically to Bosnia, it concluded that ‘there can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic religion and non-Islamic social and political institutions’.5 Izetbegovic was 4See J. V. A. Fine, ‘The various faiths in the history of Bosnia: Middle Ages to the present’, in M. Shatzmiller (ed.), Islam and Bosnia: Conflict Resolution and Foreign Policy in Multi-Ethnic States, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2002, p. 13 and Schindler, op. cit., Note 1, p. 50. For an argument of why the mass conversions to Islam occurred in Albania and Bosnia, see N. Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History, New York University Press, New York, 1996, p. 57. For analyses of various other aspects of Islam in Bosnia, see Schindler, op. cit., Note 1, p. 21 and Malcolm, op. cit., pp. 54 and 166. Islam’s role in the Balkans in general should not be discounted or ignored. For important studies that cover various aspects and regions, see in particular H.
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