http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5232
by Brendan O’Neill
Since he was http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5212; his bouffant; his limp handshake; his transformation from war leader to bearded hippy therapist. Yet perhaps the most interesting article – or at least the most unwittingly revealing – was a 374-word piece that appeared on the website of the UK Guardian on 25 July.
It was written by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2993) and bête noire of Britain’s left-leaning “humanitarian militarists.” Pro-war commentators despise Bunglawala because he supports Hamas, sympathizes with Iraqi suicide bombers, and, just prior to 9/11, he was disseminating the writings of Osama bin Laden, whom he described as a “freedom fighter.”In the ever-shrinking world of British dinner-party spats between humanitarian militarism on one hand and Islamism on the other, Bunglawala is considered the arch enemy of Britain’s laptop bombardiers, who believe you can liberate Third World countries by writing a few outraged newspaper columns and dropping a few hundred bombs.
Yet in his Guardian comment on Karadzic, Bunglawala found himself siding with one of his staunchest critics amongst Britain’s “muscular left.” Under the headline “Lessons from the past,” Bunglawala wrote: “I [have finally managed to find something written by Martin Bright that I wholeheartedly agree with.” Bright is the political editor of the New Statesman and is associated with Britain’s liberal interventionist writers; he is also the author of a pamphlet titled “When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries,” which attacked the British government for having links with Bunglawala’s apparently “extreme” organization, the MCB.
What could Bunglawala and Bright possibly agree on? In Bunglawala’s words, they agree that British schoolchildren should be taught about Srebrenica “in the same way that they are taught about Auschwitz,” that Karadzic is evil, and that the Bosnian war was a lethal explosion of the Bosnian Serbs’ “deadly hatred.”
In short? Both Bunglawala, the anti-Western political Islamist, and Bright, the leftish sympathizer with Western military intervention, see the Bosnian conflict in precisely the same way: not as a bloody civil war in which all sides committed atrocities, but as an episode of Nazi-style Serbian rampaging against vilified communities, which was comparable in its horror to Auschwitz.
Bunglawala’s article was a fleeting but powerful reminder of a truth that is too often brushed under the carpet these days: namely, that both contemporary Western interventionism and contemporary radical Islamism have their origins in the Bosnian war. But back then, the “arch enemies” of the interventionism-vs-Islamism debate were allies. They took the same side (that of the Bosnian Muslims), propagandized wildly against the Serbs (whom they denounced as thugs, gangsters, dogs and even monkeys), demanded Western military assaults on Serb positions, and described the actions of the Serbs as uniquely barbaric, even Nazi-esque.
And both the Western militarists and radical Islamists were re-energized and moralized by their joint crusade against the Serbs in Bosnia. One might even argue that both of the major curses in international affairs today – the militaristic meddling of Western governments that pose as humanitarian and the occasional bloody attacks launched by al-Qaeda and others – spring from the anti-Serb hysteria of 1992-1995.
This goes way beyond a rare and polite agreement between Bunglawala and Bright. The capture of Karadzic is something that everyone from Bush to bin Laden will celebrate. Pretty much the only consensus that exists between the American military machine and the al-Qaeda network is that the Serbs are evil and deserving of punishment.
Following Karadzic’s arrest, Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomat who negotiated the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, described him as “one of the worst men in the world, the Osama bin Laden of Europe.” This is darkly ironic, since in the early and mid-1990s Holbrooke and bin Laden were on the same side, united in a violent campaign against Karadzic and the rest of the Bosnian Serbs. Holbrooke must remember this; in an interview in 2001 he said the Bosnian Muslims “wouldn’t have survived” without the help of al-Qaeda militants.
Today’s humanitarian militarists and Islamic radicals are cut from the same cloth. In Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, they were close allies – propagandistic, moralistic and militaristic allies. During the Bosnian war, anywhere between 1,200 and 3,000 Arab Mujahideen, many of them veterans of the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s, descended on Bosnia to fight alongside the Bosnian Muslims. And their movement into Bosnia was facilitated by the new “humanitarians” in Washington.
In 1993 and 1994, the Clinton administration gave a green light to Iran, Saudi Arabia and various highly dubious radical Islamic charities to arm the Bosnian Muslims. Despite having denounced Iran as “the worst sponsor of terrorism in the world,” the Clinton administration told both Croat and Bosnian Muslim leaders that they should accept shipments of weapons, ammunition, antitank rockets, communications equipment and uniforms and helmets from Iran.
Washington also allowed “Islamic charities,” which really were radical Mujahideen-based organizations, to supply money and arms to the Bosnian Muslims. As the Washington Post reported in September 1996, US officials on the ground in Bosnia, who were motivated by “sympathy for the Muslim government and ambivalence about maintaining the arms embargo,” instructed other Western officials to “back off” and “not interfere” with these shipments from radical Islamists. One of the “charities” whose provision of funds and arms to the Bosnian Muslims was protected by American diplomats was run by Osama bin Laden.
The US-protected supply line between the Middle East and Bosnia, through which both Iranian elements and radicals sent money and guns, also encouraged Mujahideen to make their way into the Balkans. Along with the flow of radical Islamist weaponry, there followed the movement of radical Islamist warriors.
Once inside Bosnia, these Mujahideen, many of them fresh from the bloody battlefields of Afghanistan, fought with the Bosnian Muslim Army at a time when it was being supported politically and militarily by Washington and vast numbers of Western liberal commentators. In 1994 and 1995, Washington surreptitiously supplied the Bosnian Muslim Army with weapons and training, even though it had hundreds of Mujahideen in its ranks. The Mujahideen formed a battalion of holy warriors which was, according to Evan Kohlmann, author of Al-Qaeda’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network, directly answerable to then Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/oneill.php?articleid=13222