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There Were No Taliban in Bosnia
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More in Forward ForumThe little most Americans know about Bosnia is that it was the scene of murderous orgies and ethnic cleansing during the 1990s. There is far more to the land where I was born, of course, but at least this simplistic view is accurate — which is more than can be said for the revisionist history of the war now being peddled by some of those who helped bring it to an end.
Democratic presidential candidate and former first lady Hillary Clinton, as is well known by now, “misremembered” coming under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996, after the war had already ended. Less attention, however, has been paid to a far more pernicious reinterpretation of events by the man who brokered the Dayton Peace Accords.
In a Washington Post opinion article last month, Richard Holbrooke argued that, “Without Dayton, Al Qaeda would probably have planned the September 11 attacks from Bosnia, not Afghanistan.” This statement is unfounded and careless — and what’s worse, it is a resort to stereotypes to rationalize past and current policy and moral failures.
Such a revision of history does an injustice to both the Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks, who suffered during the war and the American Jews who were so instrumental in bringing our tragedy to the world’s attention.
While mujahideen undoubtedly drifted into Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war, I never saw any indication of an Al Qaeda presence. Bosnians and Herzegovinians, in particular Bosniaks, would not have allowed the establishment of a base for targeting Western interests.
Bosniaks have long seen themselves as members of the Western family. Like Jews, Bosniaks do not see any contradiction between their European identity and the religious beliefs that distinguish them from their Christian neighbors.
To the contrary, those who defended Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war perceived themselves as custodians of the shared values of pluralism and multiculturalism. That is why our leaders appealed to the United States for support, and that is why we gratefully welcomed the engagement of the American Jewish community.
With Holbrooke leading the attempt to reconstruct history through the lens of the war on terrorism, it is worth recalling just how engaged the American Jewish community was. I traveled all across America during those tragic years in an effort to rally support for my beleaguered country, and time and again the vision of a pluralistic, multicultural Bosnia was embraced at synagogues, yeshivas and JCCs.
On campuses around the country, the Bosnian and Herzegovinan cause became common ground for Jewish and Muslim students, who advocated together for confronting the perpetrators of genocide. The precedent set during the 1990s is playing out again today, in the overwhelming public outcry against the genocide in Darfur.
Motivated by the vow of “never again,” the American Jewish community was in no small measure responsible for getting Washington engaged in Bosnia. When the United States finally led NATO to confront the genocide and ethnic cleansing, the American Jewish community was justly given much of the credit.
Now, however, both the intervention itself and the motivations behind it are being called into question. This is more than just a question of rewriting the historical record: Holbrooke’s suggestion that Bosnia would likely have become a safe haven for Al Qaeda can only be seen as a slur by Bosniaks, and in general by citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Indeed, if Holbrooke’s assertion is taken at face value, the objective of intervening in Bosnia was not to prevent further genocide or to defend shared values, but rather to put Muslims in check. However it was intended, such an explanation for American intervention in the Balkans paints Bosniaks — regardless of their specific ideological, cultural or ethnic identity — as a latent threat to Western values, as a people who can never be fully trusted their fellow Europeans.
And the reality is that today, the agreement that Holbrooke helped broker has cemented into place a feudalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina that has shattered whatever multiculturalism survived the war. Political authority is now apportioned by ethnicity. Bosnia now has a Jewish foreign minister, Sven Alkalaj, but he and the rest of the country’s small Jewish population are barred from running for president because they do not belong to one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s three officially recognized ethnicities, Bosniak, Serb and Croat.
To gauge the regressive effect of the Dayton Peace Accords, one need only note that Serbia has beaten Bosnia and Herzegovina to signing an association agreement with the European Union — even as Belgrade continues to ignore demands to hand over indicted war criminals and suffer spasms of unchecked nationalism. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s other neighbors, meanwhile, have moved much quicker toward integration into the community of Western nations — a rather ironic development, given that Western officials have effectively administered postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The people of Bosnia and Herzegovina are perhaps at fault for their country’s lack of progress. But so, too, are those American and European leaders who have clung to the belief that the Dayton Peace Accords still bear fruit today. The peace agreement was a political and moral failure, and no amount of misguided efforts to write the war in Bosnia into the war on terrorism will change that.
Muhamed Sacirbey, a signatory to the Dayton Peace Accords, is a former Bosnian foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations.
Comments
Jon,
You do not know what you are talking about, and it is sad that the Forward even dignified your vitriol on the Comments section. Bosnia was always the land of the Bosniaks, from the time of the Illyrians. The fact that Serbs and Vlachs were brought in to Bosnia by the Ottoman Turks is a whole other discussion, but does not in any way diminish their presence and importance to Bosnia's history as well as their rights to coexist in present day Bosnia with other ethnic groups.
What is very saddening though, but conveniently omitted from your bilge, that there is only one other country in the world other than Israel, that has a Jewish foreign minister, and that is Bosnia!
Sven Alkalaj was Bosnia's first ambassador to the United States, in 1993. Unfortunately Nikola Spiric, Bosnia's Serb prime minister has been making repeated demands that Mr Alkalaj is a minority, and that he has no right to represent Bosnia, and should step down. This, in addition to Bosnia's Serb President, Milorad Dodik's recent anti Semitic comments.
But Jon, go ahead, disinform the public!
Fortunately the readers of the Forward know that there are Muslim populations in the world that have lived and coexisted in harmony with Jews for centuries, to this day.
Do not forget, that Turkey happens to be Israel's key military ally in the region
Jon,
You do not know what you are talking about, and it is sad that the Forward even dignified your vitriol on the Comments section. Bosnia was always the land of the Bosniaks, from the time of the Illyrians. The fact that Serbs and Vlachs were brought in to Bosnia by the Ottoman Turks is a whole other discussion, but does not in any way diminish their presence and importance to Bosnia's history as well as their rights to coexist in present day Bosnia with other ethnic groups.
What is very saddening though, but conveniently omitted from your bilge, that there is only one other country in the world other than Israel, that has a Jewish foreign minister, and that is Bosnia!
Sven Alkalaj was Bosnia's first ambassador to the United States, in 1993. Unfortunately Nikola Spiric, Bosnia's Serb prime minister has been making repeated demands that Mr Alkalaj is a minority, and that he has no right to represent Bosnia, and should step down. This, in addition to Bosnia's Serb President, Milorad Dodik's recent anti Semitic comments.
But Jon, go ahead, disinform the public!
Fortunately the readers of the Forward know that there are Muslim populations in the world that have lived and coexisted in harmony with Jews for centuries, to this day.
Do not forget, that Turkey happens to be Israel's key military ally in the region
Who is this uneducated person Jon? Jon, as first step you should attend an anger management course and afterwards please take some History lesson course. And in the end, don't believe in everything you read in the media-read some good ol' books and then you'll get to know more about Mr. Alija Izetbegovic (i've noticed that you misspelled His name).
The Dayton Peace Accords are a living proof that appeasement of dictators don't work in most of the times. The West thought in 1995 that Slobodan Milosevic had the keys of the peace in the Balkans, but in fact it was the opposite -- he hold the keys of war until he was defeated in Kosovo in 1999 and deposed by the people in 2000.
Bosnia division is largely disfunctional since, as the same way that happens in Lebanon, power is allocated by sectarism, not political and democratic competence. And is exactly this kind of division that has largely prevented the return of Bosnian Muslims expelled from the west side of the Drina river, today occupied by Republika Srpska.
Bosnia could be internally federalized, like Germany with its Bundeslander, but should function at the national level as a unified state with one president, one premier, one supreme court, one army, one parliament with effective powers over all subdivisions of the country. To give independence to the Bosnian territory of Republika Srpska or to annex it to Serbia would be an absurd reward for the "works" of people like Mladic, Arkan and Karadzic.
That's it.
PS: the worst religious radicals in the Balkans were not the Muslims, but the Orthodox nationalist people who dreamed of a "Greater Serbia" that would eat all of Bosnia and most of Croatia, with the Muslim Bosnians killed or expelled to Albania and Turkey.
PS2: To talk about historic battles and revenges from events that happened in the Middle Ages takes nowhere.
This is all well and good, but it is still important to remember that many foreign Islamic fighters, many of whom hold radical views about the role of Islam of political life, still call Bosnia home. It is also important to know that Bosnian Muslims played a role as an Islamically inspired SS during World War II. While I absolutely adore Bosnia, after spending a year traveling between there and Israel, I have no allusions that, like every society, it has its fundamentalists.
The problem is that Serbia is still teaching their own separate versions of history. Republika Srpska is also teaching their own separate version of history. To them Serbs are the victims and everyone else is the evil-doer whether it be the Americans, or the Bosnian Muslims (and their so-called evil religion that is Islam). It is too easy to contort history to make oneself seem like the victim especially when you fail and are punished as severely as Serbia/Republika Srpska was. Milosevic was as beloved a leader as Hitler. I know it's a blameful accusation but as far as Ultra-nationalism goes they are no different. Both see themselves as the superior race. Milosevic's Ultra-nationalism was seen by even the previous president of Serbia as a false way to gain power. The fact that Serbian Ultra-nationalism still exists is the same as if the Allies in World War 2 only bombed the Nazi's a little and then left them alone WITHOUT taking away some of the lands/countries that they forcefully occupied. I only hope that one day the shadows of this Ultra-nationalism will pass and the important aspects such as government can be taken care of by people who have the interests of the country at heart instead of of their specific ethnic group.
The problem is that Serbia is still teaching their own separate versions of history. Republika Srpska is also teaching their own separate version of history. To them Serbs are the victims and everyone else is the evil-doer whether it be the Americans, or the Bosnian Muslims (and their so-called evil religion that is Islam). It is too easy to contort history to make oneself seem like the victim especially when you fail and are punished as severely as Serbia/Republika Srpska was. Milosevic was as beloved a leader as Hitler. I know it's a blameful accusation but as far as Ultra-nationalism goes they are no different. Both see themselves as the superior race. Milosevic's Ultra-nationalism was seen by even the previous president of Serbia as a false way to gain power. The fact that Serbian Ultra-nationalism still exists is the same as if the Allies in World War 2 only bombed the Nazi's a little and then left them alone WITHOUT taking away some of the lands/countries that they forcefully occupied. I only hope that one day the shadows of this Ultra-nationalism will pass and the important aspects such as government can be taken care of by people who have the interests of the country at heart instead of of their specific ethnic group.
Mr. Sacirbey,
Your article is a very significant because, yourself as a first hand witness of many diplomatic machinations and some historical events regarding Bosnia aggression in 90’s and refreshing at the same time for the very simple reason ;we are finally getting some true facts about intentions and motivations of some key diplomatic players at the time.
Mr. Holbrooke’s allegation in Washington Post about Bosniaks is a real slap in the face that needs a vigorous denunciation. But if he is convinced, believe in the statement he made, that would be sad.
The Bosnians (Bosniaks) suffered horribly as victims of a genocide that came exclusively from their nationalist- Serb neighbors. The ethnic cleansing and genocide that occurred is well documented. In my experience, Bosniaks are the most religiously tolerant ethnic group in the Balkans. They proved that in the Nineties during the aggression and war against them, preserving the temples and churches, refusing to play the same games of religious baiting that was being played by their oppressors. Being surrounded for so long by people of different religious and ethic backgrounds, we learned that harmony and tolerance was the only way to survive as a society. A lesson that has been learned the world over by the best societies, and ignored by the worst. In fact in Bosnia even now there is still huge tolerance and a deep understanding (by most of Bosniaks and other ethnic group’s members) that the bad events of the past were born out of nationalist fervor and have little to do with religion (whatever the religion). Why can't Mr. Holbrooke talk about the amazing openness of spirit of a society that has faced so much evil and is not fundamentalist as a result? It is such a positive example for how humanistic resilience can exist in so much chaos. Of course in any society there are always some extremists, wherever you go. But in the case of Bosnia they truly do not represent that society. To use several very isolated examples of extremism that you have clearly sought out to paint the society negatively is wrong and imbalanced reporting.
Nowadays is very trendy by some Serbian nationalist media and revisionist ‘historians’ to use several isolated examples and generalize and vilify an entire society that is largely secular (in the sense that Ireland say, though Catholic identified, is broadly secular, Bosnia, though predominantly Islamic identified, is broadly secular) and European in its perspective.
It goes without saying that Dayton Peace Accords need updates. At that time the Peace Agreement was a ‘tool’ to stop the war and was beneficial (to some more to some less)- to some individuals it was a promotional as well!! Mr. Sacirbey is so right when he said that Bosniaks were in ‘debts’ to the Jewish –American Community and their political activisms during the trying times for us, Bosniaks. They made a stand against ‘evil’ as a responsible political force.
Finally I would like to thank to Mr. Sacirbey on his selfless, noble service to Bosnia, to be part of good and just humanistic cause, to be on right side of history and truth. Let us hope that justice will join soon.
And to the editors of the Forward –THANKS!
Mesha M. Dzinovic New York City
Thank you Muhamed for shedding some light on the Dayton 'peace' agreement. I hope that we will learn more what really happened behind closed doors at this very unfortunate historical bargaining on the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Yes, Dayton stopped the bloodshed in Bosnia, stopped the Bosnian Army in unifying the country, and gave Bosnia a blueprint of a "state" that represents a textbook of how a state should function with a 100% probability for failure.
Bosnia and Herzegovina after Dayton is a total mess. No functioning government, constant blockage of any moves that would bring the country together at the highest level of power, a non-functioning presidency, world record in number of nonfunctioning ministries and ministers at various levels, etc., etc.
Bosnians (Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs) should take a good lessen in how to survive and build a cohesive and functioning country. You can have a country only if its citizens feel it as their homeland. It seems that the Bosniaks are the only ones of the three that feel (but still not completely) that Bosnia is their homeland. This is sad and very discouraging. May be, when BH join the European Union there will be a governable country - if a new war does not disrupt this. The three major Ultra-nationals in Bosnia are leading to a new confrontation through their own children who, in separate confronting schools are constantly taught intolerance and animosity. Tito propagated "bratstvo i jedinstvo", and see what happened. What is to expect next as the opposite is practiced and propagated?
God help us all! Enkay
we don't know who bosniaks are ethnically. they are slavs. but we don't how many of them are serbs and how many croats. still, new nations rise. so, bosniaks do have the right to think of themselves as a new nation. they have lost their original ethnicity and gained a new one in which a religion (antihuman tho, just like judaism and christianity) plays a significant role in dividing peoples. as in ireland, so in jugoslavia, religions have played a negative role. both the croats and serbs were strongly imperialisitc. muslims haven't been imperialistic because they couldn't be and not because they may have thought differently. or they may have? so, the two factors, religion and imperialism brought us paroxism and ab. 1 mn deaths. for croats, serbs, and musims to get along they need to discard their fathers' thinking. it seems neither the croats nor serbs can at this time repudiate people who thought them to feel/think wrongly. thinking can be discarded. swiss have shown that it can be done. thank u
The RS (smaller of the two entities in Bosnia created as a result of the Dayton Peace Agreement) has been employing a number of strategies to change the historical and current image of Serbs. The primary strategy is the hiring of Quinn and Gillespie LLC to try and clean up the tarnished image of the RS in the United States and to cement the current situation in Bosnia with the de-facto divided country, with two separate entities. This is one of the top lobby firms in Washington D.C. The current president is Jack Quinn, former White House counsel during Bill Clinton (while Richard Holbrooke was President Clinton’s main envoy to former Yugoslavia ). The Serbs are paying $125,000 USD per month to Quinn Gilespie to inform the American government, the Bush Administration, and Congress about the importance of the cohesion of the RS as an entity and the image of the RS in front of the American public. The secondary related strategy is the use of various fictions which seek to draw correlations between Al-Qaeda and Bosnia. Some claim that Al-Qaeda attempted or desired to plan the September 11th attacks from Bosnia. While others claim that there were and are still today Al-Qaeda training camps in Bosnia . Holbrooke’s speculation is damaging to history. Marko Hoare, in his book How Bosnia Armed, clarifies that Western personnel have not been the objects of attacks in Bosnia “nor have any al-Qa’ida training camps been discovered.”
Bosnia needs more centralized power, it needs to be admitted to EU, and NATO to be rewarded for support of democracy at home and abroad including support of the US efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The greatest success is that Bosniaks have defended democracy and freedom, and survived in order to remind the world that Bosniaks can administer a democratic government if support of the world community exists.
Bosnia got 2/3rds of its wartime military hardware from Iran. Two western journalists, Eve-Ann Prentice from the London Guardian and Renate Flotau from the German newspaper Der Spiegel personally saw Osama bin Laden enter Alija Izetbegovic's office in Sarajevo during the war. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef personally fought in the Bosnian military and raised funds for the Muslim war effort there. Bosnia's ambassador to Iran, Senahid Bristric, was in Tehran last week saying, "We hope that expansion of cultural and religious cooperation with Iran will help revive our Islamic identity."
I fervently hope that Muhamed Sacirbey's disingenuous appeals to the Jewish community will fall on deaf ears. I can not immagine that the Jewish community would want to support a Bosnian government that is striving for an Iranian style "Islamic revival".
Muhamad, you are such a great liar, it comes so naturally ot you. Your leader and mentor Alija Izetgegovic wrote a book which is available that said the Bosnia should be a Islamic state with no room for Christians or any other religion, that is why civil war broke out in Bosnia. By the way there is no such nationality or language as Bosnian, you are either Serbs or Croats that were converted from Christianity to Islam. You can trace your family tree like other muslims have in Bosnia and find out that your great grandfathers had names such as Radovan! Even your buddy/bed pal Holbrooke is suggesting your in bed with Al Qaeda!