Bosnia-Herzegovina should offer little toehold for terrorists

By Colin Woodard
The Christian Science Monitor

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SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Just four years ago, the scene on the way into town from the airport was littered with bullet-riddled terminals and neighborhoods of burned-out and collapsed buildings. The skeletal remains of 22-story office towers presided over the city center.

Today, travelers pass through an airport of glass and polished marble, neighborhoods of new and rebuilt houses, apartment blocks and commercial buildings, including the rehabilitated office towers, sheathed in mirrored glass. With each passing month, fewer physical reminders of the 1992-95 war remain, and, on the surface at least, Sarajevo again resembles a normal peacetime city.

The eight-year international reconstruction effort in Bosnia shows both how long it can take to rebuild a fractured nation — and how eventual success can help fight the war on terror.

As the country's infrastructure, border-patrol services and national governing institutions have been rebuilt, experts say, it has become a less attractive potential host for global terrorist networks like al-Qaida, which seek out "weak states" with porous borders, ineffective governments and sympathetic locals.

"If I were a terrorist group member I would think twice about coming to this country," says Senad Slatina, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution organization based in Brussels, Belgium, noting the presence of 10,000 NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia. "On top of that, Bosnian Muslims are so European that the radical form of Islam has absolutely no chance of spreading here."

During Bosnia's long war — in which ethnic Serbs and, later, Croats attempted to seize large portions of the country and cleanse it of Muslims — hundreds of mujahedeen, or Muslim militants, from the Middle East and north Africa trained and fought alongside Bosnian Muslim forces. About 200 stayed in Bosnia, as did a number of questionable Islamic charities that U.S. officials say are linked to international terrorist networks.

U.S. concern over these groups increased after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In October 2001, Bosnian officials arrested six Algerian humanitarian workers and turned them over to the United States, which is holding them in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Police raids on suspicious Islamic charity groups here in 2002 reportedly turned up weapons, explosives, forged passports, and, in one case, letters from Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida's leader.

But Western officials here say that Bosnian officials — including Muslims — have been extremely cooperative in monitoring and investigating individuals and groups suspected of terrorist links. Most of the suspicious charities have been shut down, they say, while Bosnian authorities and NATO peacekeepers keep close tabs on militants, many of whom have married Bosnian women and settled in rural areas.

"There is no evidence that there are or were al-Qaida camps in Bosnia," says a Western diplomatic source here. "Al-Qaida is not here now, but it certainly could be here if we don't keep our eyes on it."
 
Seated in his audience chamber at the 16th-century Sultan's mosque, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia, Mustafa Ceric, says the West has nothing to fear from Bosnia's Islamic community. "I want to assure each and every American that as far as Bosnia is concerned, they can sleep safely," says Ceric, whom foreign diplomats praise for his efforts to promote tolerance and reconciliation.

But there has been unease here that Wahhabism, the more-radical version of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, might take root among Bosnian Muslims, who follow the tolerant Hanafi tradition of Turkey and the Balkans. Saudi money built the enormous King Fahd Mosque on the edge of Sarajevo, and there has been a noticeable increase in the number of young people wearing long beards or head scarves since the war's end.

But Ceric plays down concerns that Wahhabism will spread among Bosnian Muslims, who have lived among a Christian majority for centuries. "Some young people have been influenced by this way of thinking or interpretation of Islam, but the mainstream of Muslims here remains loyal to our traditions," he says. "I have never doubted that my people will stay the way they are."

Most important, over the past few years large numbers of victims of ethnic cleansing have been able to return to their former homes. Of the approximately 2.2 million people forcibly displaced in the conflict, about 1 million have returned to their prewar homes, almost half of them to places where their ethnic group was a minority, according to the United Nations' refugee agency. Forty percent of the country's 4 million people are Muslim.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company