From: draskovi@usc.edu (Zoran Draskovic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.europe
Subject: The Observer
Date: 8 Nov 1992 02:40:27 -0800
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: aludra.usc.edu

Without permission, for fair use only.

The Observer(London)      
Sunday, October 18, 1992.

ISLAM'S LEGION SEEKS BLOOD IN BOSNIA

Colin Smith finds an Afghan-style fanaticism on the road from Split

"Why is the West taking Muslim children from Sarajevo to Rome, Germany,
even to England?"
My questioner was  a young man with a full, long beard and darker-ski-
nned than is the norm for the Bosnian mountains.He was squatting with 
toes and heels on the ground in the manner that most European men, from
Balkans to Scandinavia, find painful to emulate.
One of his two companions had the African hair and features not unco-
mmon in the old slave-raiding states of the Gulf, who introduced  the
word 'kaffir', meaning unbeliever, to Africa.The other was an older man,
a bit roly-poly, with a fuller, friendlier-looking face.
We met on a dirt road in the mountains of western Herzegovina waiting
for a Croat bulldozer to clear a pile of newly blasted rock and earth 
from the bend ahead.This is a new route from Split on the Dalmatian coast
to the hills west of Sarajevo that avoids pockets of hostile Serbs.
They turned out to be Saudi Arabian volunteers working for the Ibrahim
bin Abdul Aziz al Ibrahim foundation, a Saudi charity which now has an
office with a brass plate on the door on the second floor of the Inter-
Continental Hotel in Zagreb.
Behind them, in a line of vehicles held up by the bulldozer, were the 
lorries in which, they said, they had delivered food and blankets to 
Travnik, frontline town swamped with Muslim refugees.
The older man was from Dhahran where he had an administrative job in the
oil-fields.He said he had been in Bosnia for a month and was looking fo-
rward to going home to his family.
Surely it was better children were taken out of Sarajevo whenever possible?
"No", he said, with vehemance."They must stay.They all must stay!They must
not go away to become Christians."
But what if they were killed?
"It doesn't matter. What this land needs is more blood!"
By now, a fair-haired militia-men with the HVO flashes of Bosnia's Croatian
militia was crouched beside us, taking the weight on his Kalashnikov.To my
amazement he nodded in agreement at his lunacy.
"How many died in Afghanistan?" demanded the oil worker, warming to his 
theme."One million?Two million?It doesn't matter.If we die, we go to para-
dise.If they die, they go to hell."
The younger Saudi wanted to know why America, Britain and France had failed
to come to the aid of the Bosnian Muslims.After all, they had helped Kuwait,
They had not hesitated to massacre those Iraqi soldiers when they were run-
ning away.Could it be, he suggested, that you do not feel able to kill Chri-
stian Serbs in the same fashion, even when they are murdering Muslim Women 
and children?
The Saudis encountered on the way down to Split appeared to be unarmed.Near
Travnik, a Reuter reporter met an Islamic warrior with a hennaed beard who
called himself Abu Abdul Aziz and said he was a veteran of the wars in Afg-
hanistan and Kashmir.He would not say where he was from, but he appeared to
be an Arab, possibly a Palestinian or Saudi.
Abdul Aziz is said to command between 400 and 500men, most of them Arabs,
who drift in and out of Bosnia as the mood takes them."Some come for a week"
he admitted."Others say they are here until victory or shaheed(martyrdom)."
All this is music to the ears of men like Dr Radovan Karadzic, who has led 
the Bosnian Serbs into his vision of an `ethnically cleansed' state.For mo-
nths, he has been telling anybody who would listen that his Orthodox Chri-
stians are engaged in a crusade against Islamic fundamentalists who have
launched a jihad to carve out their firsy European colony.
For anybody who has ever met the Slav Muslims of Bosnia, this has always
appeared ludicrous.It is true that Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic is a
devout man who was imprisoned by Tito, but he has never been a fundamentalist
in the accepted sense.Most Muslims in Bosnia are descendants of Christians
who converted to Islam during 500 years of Ottoman occupation.During the 40
years of Communist rule, they became as secular as most Yugoslavs.Their women
are usually as emancipated as any other Western women.Six months ago, they
seemed unlikely material for a jihad.
But the growing clamour in the Islamic world about the state of Bosnia's 
Muslims seem to indicate that Karadzic's wild slanders might yet turn out
to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
To date the only nation caught breaking the UN arms embargo on all of former
Yugoslavia is Iran.UN officials at Zagreb airport found weapons in an Iranian
aircraft that was supposed to be bringing relief supplies.
A few days after the Iranian arms find I met Ajup Ganic, Izetbegovic's deputy
in Sarajevo."When you are drowning," he said, "you don't ask the name of the
man who puts out his hand."

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