Bosnia Muslims’ Plight Spurs Arab Calls to Action

From Saudi Arabia to Libya, militaristic calls to action are echoing across the Arab world. But in a dramatic departure from tradition, they are not directed against Israel. This time the target is Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Muslims are under siege.

It is rare for Arabs to concern themselves militarily and publicly with events that have no direct bearing on the Middle East, and rarer still for the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia to speak of breaking a U.N. embargo and shipping arms to Europe.

It is unheard of for a Cairo newspaper to demand that Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the U.N. secretary general, be stripped of his Egyptian citizenship, especially in light of the abiding faith Arabs have historically had in the United Nations.

But the TV images and newspaper accounts of Bosnian Muslims being driven from U.N. “safe areas,” the stories of rape, looting and “ethnic cleansing,” have raised in Arabs, in addition to humanitarian concerns, old feelings of guilt and failure.

Some editorials have described the tragedy as a holocaust--a word seldom heard here, even to describe the extermination of Jews in World War II.

In Saudi Arabia last week, after King Fahd chaired his weekly Cabinet meeting, the government called on the Islamic world to provide military support for the beleaguered Bosnian Muslims so they can defend themselves against the Serbs.

Thousands of Sudanese marched through the streets of Khartoum to demand action, and doctors and lawyers held protest rallies in the streets of Cairo.

In a rare Arab official criticism of Russian policy, Egyptian Foreign Minister Amir Moussa asked: “What does Russia mean by solving the problem by diplomatic means? Have diplomatic means stopped the advance of the Serbs?”

The United Arab Emirates raised $43 million for Bosnia’s Muslims in a radio and television fund-raising blitz that ended Saturday.

Jordan also held a telethon that raised $6 million, and King Hussein said he himself would be willing to serve in an Arab force to save the Muslims. And the 52-member Organization of Islamic Conference met in Geneva and declared the U.N. arms embargo on Bosnia “invalid.”

Many analysts see this as the prelude to Islamic countries openly defying the arms ban and supporting Bosnia’s Muslim-led, though non-sectarian, government with weapons.

In the extreme, Arab fundamentalists see European and American unwillingness to confront the Bosnian Serbs as part of a Western conspiracy against the Islamic world. It is another step, they believe, toward the ultimate showdown between Christianity and Islam.

From this perspective, the arms embargo seems aimed at ensuring that no independent Muslim state finds a home in the heart of Europe.

More moderate Arabs--and thus the vast majority--see the West’s indecisiveness as part of a double standard.

“Would the West have reacted the same if this was happening in Italy or Spain?” asked an Egyptian Foreign Ministry official. The Arabs, this reasoning goes, have supported the West, with words or action, time and again, but when Muslims request Western backing for matters they consider crucial, they are, as often as not, ignored.

Much of the Arabs’ frustration has roots in their own inaction. Past instances of timidity meant that, whether the issue was Palestine or the security of the Persian Gulf, the Arabs became beholden to Western outsiders to solve their problems.

For many Arab leaders, words counted more than deeds, style more than substance. When, for instance, the Arabs went to war to destroy Israel in 1948, thinking the conquest would be easy, Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia promised to send 40,000 soldiers to the front. Instead, he committed 700.

The Arabs’ defeat in 1967’s Six-Day War against Israel did not lead to a reappraisal of purpose and strategy. Rather, the Arabs attributed the military disaster to a belief that they had drifted away from Islam. God, they believed, was punishing them, and in that assessment took hold the roots of the Islamic revival that continues to gather strength in the Arab world.

In Bosnia, the Arabs have shown an uncharacteristic willingness to stand and be counted, even though the Bosnian government has not specifically requested their assistance.

The U.N. presence in Bosnia includes an Egyptian battalion and 3,000 Jordanian troops. Saudi Arabia is believed to have provided clandestine financial support to the Muslims, and the Lebanese press reported that 17 Arabs were killed fighting in Bosnia last week but provided no details on the incident or the fighters’ nationalities.

Arms shipments from Kuwait and non-Arab Iran, Malaysia and Pakistan are also said to flow into Bosnia. And on Saturday, foreign ministers of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations called for an end to what one described as the “unjustified and illegal” arms embargo against Bosnia.

While applauding the U.S. Senate vote last week to lift the arms embargo, Moussa, the Egyptian foreign minister, met with Edward Walker, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, on Thursday and reiterated his country’s position: The United States got Egypt’s crucial support in the Persian Gulf War, and it’s time to call in the chits.