Travelers Slip Into Bosnia, Causing Alarm

The Jordanian military cargo jet, flying from Turkey, landed at this city’s NATO-controlled airport in the middle of the day. Off came the supplies and equipment destined for the international peacekeeping force.

Then off came more than two dozen Middle Eastern nationals, mostly men in their 20s. They did not appear on any manifest. No one checked their passports or identification papers. Quickly they filed onto a government bus and disappeared into the city.

Most of the travelers, it would turn out, were Iraqis. Their mysterious arrival Sept. 29 might have remained a secret were it not for a lone U.N. police officer at the airport. He watched and alerted his superiors to the “high potential for criminal activity” if such lax procedures become the norm.

Alarm bells went off from Sarajevo to NATO headquarters in Brussels to the Jordanian capital of Amman and all the way to Washington, where officials were already worried about the continuing presence in Bosnia of Iranian moujahedeen, or Islamic warriors, and the threat they might pose to U.S. troops on the ground.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Bosnia mission controls the airport so tightly that it must clear all flights, cargo manifests and passenger lists. For a large group of unidentified travelers to get off a military flight and pass unchecked through the airport has proven to be not only a major embarrassment but also a serious security lapse.

“The security implications are enormous,” one NATO source in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, acknowledged. “Who knows how many others have already come in?”

The mystery gave one more glimpse into the nether world of intrigue and deal-making that characterized Bosnia-Herzegovina throughout its recent war and perhaps typifies it more so now.

Bosnia has been a crossroads for clandestine arms brokers, spies, corrupt gangs and similar shady figures involved in shady goings-on.

So who were the people who got off the plane? The truth may never be made public: As the scandal grew, the government rounded them up and deported them, under Bosnian army guard, on a charter flight to Jordan on Sunday, scarcely a week after they had arrived.

NATO officials suspect the Muslim-led Bosnian government, at least at the level of its consular office in Amman, of operating an international alien-smuggling ring with some Jordanian involvement. Some of the Iraqi travelers may have been refugees, others aspiring guest workers. Four are believed to have been Kurds seeking asylum.

Government officials, who declined to discuss the case in full, described the group variously as refugees, illegal aliens and business people invited to a trade fair in the central city of Zenica.

The group--24 Iraqis and four Jordanians, plus one woman of undisclosed nationality--possessed valid passports and valid Bosnian visas. NATO officials said the Bosnian Embassy in Amman received $850 for each member of the group, which covered the visa and other unspecified “fees.”

The exact role played by the Jordanian air force crew that operated the flight is being examined, said French Col. Francois Serveille, a spokesman for the division that runs the airport.

At best, they were duped; at worst, they, and perhaps their commanders, were accomplices.

The visitors’ sponsors were able to sneak them into Sarajevo in part because NATO in August relinquished to Bosnian authorities the handling of civilian passengers and limited commercial air traffic.

The reopening of the airport was seen as an important step in postwar recovery.

Defending their handling of the arrivals, NATO officers said that processing the travelers was the responsibility of the Bosnian authorities who failed to submit the passengers to immigration and customs controls.

A review is underway now to determine whether NATO should reimpose controls over the Bosnian civilian authorities.

“Given the concern we have about moujahedeen, it is incumbent on the Bosnian government that they have proper immigration controls [at the airport] to make sure people are not coming to Bosnia for this purpose,” NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said in a telephone interview from Brussels.

U.S. intelligence officials apparently conducted their own checks on the travelers and concluded that they were probably not Islamic mercenaries, Western sources said.

An embarrassed Bosnian government, meanwhile, sought initially to shift the blame onto NATO, accusing it of smuggling illegal aliens.

Then, panicked that the episode would endanger the $400-million U.S. program to arm and train the Bosnian army, the government confessed its “stupidity” to American officials, sources said, then rounded up the visitors and dispatched them back to Jordan.

And in a final twist, the United Nations’ refugee agency was outraged that the government rushed to deport the travelers and refused to allow any of them to be interviewed by refugee officials, in violation of international accords on the treatment of potential asylum seekers.

“Everybody wanted this to disappear,” a U.N. official said. “It was embarrassing to the Bosnian government, which had issued phony visas for a phony event; [NATO] was embarrassed for not even noticing the arrival. And the Americans have got to be embarrassed by any planes landing with unauthorized people. It shows the airport is a sieve.”