Bosnia’s Islamic Infusion

In a nondescript neighborhood of two-story houses outside Sarajevo, Sead Kalabic runs one of this country’s growing number of madrasas--religious schools for young Muslims.

Kalabic is a native of central Bosnia, where his family farmed for generations. His tone is soft and most of his words are gentle. But scattered here and there, like signposts in fog, are signals that his world view is very different from that of most Westerners.

“A real Muslim could not have done that thing to the World Trade Center, and I consider Osama [bin Laden] a true Muslim, and I absolutely do not believe he did that,” said Kalabic, who lost a brother and other male relatives during the 1992-95 Bosnian war among Muslims, Serbs and Croats.

“Radical Muslims are the best because they do all obligations to God,” Kalabic said. “They study all the time, they pray five times a day and do not lie. . . . With liberal Muslims you do not know what they think.”

Kalabic is part of a small but growing number of fundamentalists in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Muslims make up about half the population. He lives in a parallel universe that is largely invisible to most of the Western peacekeepers and international organizations working to rebuild the country--and even to the majority of Bosnians, who are far more secular.

The universe in which Kalabic lives is one of devout prayer--he no longer listens to music because it is too frivolous--of global politics viewed through the prism of the Palestinian uprising and of admiration for Bosnian Muslims who left to fight in Chechnya and Kashmir.

Although Bosnia is a part of Europe and about 20,000 peacekeepers from the United States and other Western nations maintain an uneasy truce between ethnic groups, the growth of Islamic fundamentalism is fueling complex and ambivalent feelings toward the West among Muslims here.

The peace accord that ended the war in 1995 created a single nation with two parts: Republika Srpska, which includes the border with Yugoslavia and is predominantly Serb, and the Muslim-Croat Federation.

The Muslim portion of Bosnia, a bit like Turkey, has an identity torn between East and West. It is at once Muslim and European; religious and secular; grudgingly grateful to Americans for their help in ending the war, in which Muslims suffered many times more casualties than Serbs or Croats, but still angry that so much carnage occurred before the West decided to step in. While the area’s diplomacy and official culture turn west toward Washington, its heart turns east to Mecca.

Bosnia has become a place where extremists from Arab nations can blend in without attracting attention. According to recent reports by U.S. intelligence, the country has been used as a base for Islamic activists associated with terrorist groups and perhaps with Bin Laden.

Since Sept. 11, police and the NATO-led peacekeepers of the Stabilization Force, or SFOR, have detained at least 10 people in Bosnia for possible links to terrorist groups. Most are Egyptians or Algerians, but at least a couple have Bosnian passports. Officials with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced last month that they believe the alliance disrupted an attack on a U.S. installation in Bosnia. In mid-October, the British and U.S. embassies closed for several days because of security threats.

In the Muslim majority areas of Bosnia--even more than in Germany or France, where terrorist cells have also thrived--the cultural and social environments foster a certain tolerance of Islamic extremism, allowing those who plot violence to move freely.

Muslim Faith Is Tool for ‘Far Better World Order’

“Islam is deeply rooted in us; it is our culture, our way of life, our faith,” said Dzemaludin Latic, a professor of Islamic studies at the Faculty for Islamic Arts and Sciences in Sarajevo. “We know our faith is a faith of peace and the international world order is unjust and that Islam would make a far better and far more humane world order.”

Latic, an urbane scholar who was imprisoned for his views during the Communist era, makes his points with quotes from the Muslim holy book, the Koran, and the works of the Polish exile Czeslaw Milosz. But Latic’s divided view of the world, in which Islam unequivocally comes first, is typical of Bosnian Muslims.

“I believe that Islam is perfect and the best way of organizing life,” he said. “And after that American democracy is the best way of organizing life.”

This commitment to Islam was cemented in many Bosnian minds during the war, which--more than any other factor--forged a political link and diplomatic allegiance to the Islamic world that barely existed here in the past.

“The effect of the war . . . in Bosnia was to make more and more people who were Muslim by nationality and tradition Muslim by faith,” said Mark Wheeler, director of the International Crisis Group’s office in Bosnia.

Henri Barkey, a former State Department official who dealt with terrorism and now teaches at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, sees Bosnia today as “clearly a very different animal from what it was in 1992-3,” before the worst of the war.

“We may end up with a cluster of countries in that region that are very unstable and with people roaming around them who are dangerous or who have sympathies with those who are, and with governments that are too weak to control them,” Barkey said.

While Americans tend to view themselves as having saved Muslims here from worse atrocities at the hands of Serbs and Croats, from virtually every Bosnian Muslim’s point of view the action came too late to save many lives.

“Bosnians expected more from the West,” said Mehmedalija Dedajic, 43, the imam at a new Sarajevo mosque that was built with contributions from Indonesia. “I am talking about helping us and preventing violence during the war. The fact that 200,000 people have been killed, completely innocent people, that speaks for itself.”

“We have a saying: ‘He who has a full stomach cannot understand one who suffers from hunger,’ ” said Dedajic, who considers himself a moderate, dresses like a Westerner and allows schoolgirls to do homework at the mosque when prayers aren’t going on.

It irks him that outside the Muslim world, people connect the words “radical,” “fundamentalist” and “terrorist” with Islam. In his mind, the influence of the more extreme elements in Bosnian society is relatively limited--little comfort because terrorism relies on small numbers of highly motivated people capable of killing large numbers of civilians. He estimates that only about 2% of the 2,000 who attend Friday prayers in his mosque are radicals.

“If there is radicalism here,” he said, “it must be viewed as a consequence of the war.”

In 1995, the most horrifying slaughter of the war took place in and near the town of Srebrenica, which was under the protection of U.N. soldiers who were powerless to stop a Bosnian Serb takeover. At least 7,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in less than a week in an area designated a “safe haven.”

For the tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, the sense of powerlessness, fear and abandonment of those days is impossible to forget.

The siege of Sarajevo by the Serbs, which lasted for three years, left a similarly indelible mark.

“There is only so much people can take. . . . We were treated like dead here,” said Haris Silajdzic, a former member of the Bosnian Muslim leadership and now a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., though he still lives much of the time in Sarajevo.

“Imagine being without water for three years. Electricity is fine, but water? Imagine mothers with small children without water,” Silajdzic said. “When that state terrorism [by the Serbs] struck Bosnia, do you know what the U.N. did? It imposed an arms embargo on Bosnia.”

At the time the rationale was to forestall an all-out war, but the effect was to force desperate Bosnian Muslims to turn to the only people willing to help them: fighters and covert arms suppliers from Islamic countries.

War Kindled Greater Devotion to Islam

Along with weapons donated by Iranians, more than a thousand fighters from the Arab world came and formed one of the bravest and most ruthless units in the Bosnian Muslim army. “In their brigade their commanders always were the first ones in the battle, and in our brigade our commander stood behind us,” recalled Kalabic, the madrasa director.

Those dire days made people more receptive to Islamic devotion, a state of mind that Muslim political leaders exploited. They promoted the view that the Serbian offensive was driven by a hatred of Islam, though it was probably far more an attempt to create a greater Serbia.

“During and after the war, it was difficult to say where politics left off and religion began,” said Senad Avdic, editor in chief of Slobodna Bosna, a weekly investigative magazine in Sarajevo.

While many people returned to more secular ways after the war, there was a religious backbeat supplied by the Arab world. Even the skyline of Sarajevo, the capital, reflects the changes: It is redefined by the minarets of large new mosques funded by Saudis, Indonesians, Kuwaitis and Qataris.

The countries--especially Saudi Arabia, where the conservative Wahhabi school of Islam is based--sent money to build and rebuild mosques and to educate a new generation of young Muslims. The Saudis, for instance, offered women who lost their husbands during the war about $50 a month if they came to get the money in traditional Arab attire and sent their children to religious school, said Senad Pecanin, a writer at the newsmagazine Dani.

While it remains something of a Sarajevo joke that many women would pick up the money and then promptly shed the traditional clothing, it also was true that they could hardly afford to denounce the generosity just because it came with religious strings attached.

One legacy of the donations from the Arab world is that Bosnian Muslims are reluctant to probe too deeply into Arab activities in the country. And that in turn leaves law enforcement officials with a sense of shifting shadows and little hard information about possible terrorist activities. Nijo Anic, defense minister of the Muslim-Croat Federation, said he used to give little credence to reports of activities by foreign fighters in Bosnia, but now he’s not sure what to make of them.

Another reason for concern, according to senior Western officials, is that there are still a large number of internally displaced people in Bosnia, an area that in many respects is a country in name only. Six years after the war’s end, there are still more than 500,000 displaced people out of a population estimated at 3.7 million. At least an additional 263,000 are living outside the country.

“That frustration creates a breeding ground for extremism, and kids especially are very susceptible,” said a senior Western diplomat.

A further insult to Muslims is that the SFOR peacekeepers have failed to capture those accused of war crimes, such as the Bosnian Serbs’ wartime leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic. The two men, who have been indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, are believed to be hiding in the wild country of southeastern Bosnia.

To Muslims, the two men are terrorists at least as ruthless as Bin Laden because of the Bosnian Serbs’ policy of “ethnic cleansing,” which included the systematic killing of tens of thousands of civilians.

In fact, many Muslims here feel some sympathy for the U.S., having known terrorism first hand. But they also wonder when justice will be done for Bosnian Muslims. Indeed, Western diplomats say privately that to gain full support from Bosnian Muslims it is essential that the two men be arrested and sent to The Hague.

Such inconsistency in Western policies toward terrorism--those who bombed the World Trade Center must be brought to justice immediately but those who killed tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims can be allowed to roam free--provides more motivation for anti-U.S. feeling.

War Crimes Suspects on Loose a Sore Point

“The very fact that Karadzic and Mladic are still at large more than six years after the end of the war is incomprehensible to us,” said Haris Pasovic, a film and theater director.

“What’s surprising is that the vast majority of Bosnians didn’t become more radical,” he said. “It’s not an excuse, but with these kinds of injustices, it’s to be expected that some [Muslims] turn more radical.”