A Bosnian Village's Terrorist Ties

[celtic]

The Committee for National Solidarity

Tolstojeva 34, 11000 Belgrade, YU



The Washington Post, March 11, 2000



A Bosnian Village's Terrorist Ties

Links to U.S. Bomb Plot Arouse Concern About Enclave of Islamic

Guerrillas



By R. Jeffrey Smith

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, March 11, 2000; Page A01



BOCINJA DONJA, Bosnia-A sign along the road into town warns visitors

to "be afraid of Allah." It is a message worth taking to heart: Two

NATO generals who ventured here in the past year were assaulted or

threatened by residents. Last August, the windshield of a visiting

relief worker was shattered by an ax.



The village's 600 residents include 60 to 100 former mujaheddin,

Islamic guerrillas from the Middle East and elsewhere who came to help

Bosnia's Muslims during the 1992-95 war. Since the conflict ended,

they and their families have organized a community that stands apart

from the rest of Bosnia, whose Muslim majority largely follows a

relaxed version of Islam. Bocinja Donja's affairs, in contrast, are

governed by strict Islamic law. Women wear veils and long black robes;

men have long beards. They do not smoke or drink--or speak to

visitors.



Washington and its allies have complained periodically about the

mujaheddin, who were technically obligated by international treaty to

leave the country in 1995. But Western complaints lacked urgency until

two months ago, when U.S. law enforcement authorities discovered that

a handful of the men who have visited or lived in this area were

associated with a suspected terrorist plot to bomb targets in the

United States on New Year's Day.



Among them was Karim Said Atmani, whom authorities have named as the

document forger for a group of Algerians accused of plotting the

bombings. He is a former roommate of Ahmed Ressam, the man arrested at

the Canadian-U.S. border in mid-December with a carload of explosives,

according to authoritative Western sources. Atmani has been a frequent

visitor to Bosnia, most recently a few days after Ressam's arrest.



A recent Bosnian government search of passport and residency

records--conducted at the urging of the United States--revealed other

former mujaheddin who are linked to the same Algerian group or to

other suspected terrorist groups and who have lived in this area 60

miles north of Sarajevo, the capital, in the past few years.



One man, a Palestinian named Khalil Deek, was arrested in Jordan in

late December on suspicion of involvement in a plot to blow up tourist

sites; a second man with Bosnian citizenship, Hamid Aich, lived in

Canada at the same time as Atmani and worked for a charity associated

with Osama bin Laden, the fugitive Saudi financier Washington has

blamed for masterminding the bomb plan.



A third suspect, an Algerian named Abu Mali who was regarded as a

community leader in Bocinja, was asked to leave the country with his

family last spring after Washington accumulated evidence that he

worked for what it described as a terrorist organization, U.S. and

Bosnian officials say. Another former resident, Mehrez Amdouni, was

arrested by Turkish police last September in Istanbul, where he

arrived on a Bosnian passport, and charged with counterfeiting and

possessing stolen goods.



"We have been concerned about this community for years," said a senior

U.S. official in Washington, who spoke by telephone and asked not to

be named. "We flushed out a lot of them [after the end of the war].

Bosnia's not becoming the crossroads of terrorists. [But] we find the

whole group of them a threat, and we want them out of there."



Atmani, for example, obtained his first Bosnian passport in 1995,

using a false address in Sarajevo. After being deported by Canada in

October 1998 and escorted to Sarajevo, he was allowed to stay without

a valid passport. He obtained a new passport last June in Zenica, 35

miles northwest of Sarajevo. He traveled to Istanbul, then returned to

Sarajevo in late December before dropping out of sight.



So far, complaints about the town by Western diplomats and

international officials charged with resettling displaced Serbs have

largely fallen on deaf ears in the Bosnian government, which is run by

the same Muslim leaders who welcomed Islamic fighters during the war.



Bosnian officials have said the former mujaheddin--who came here from

Tunisia, Sudan, Algeria and Afghanistan, as well as Egypt and other

Middle Eastern countries--obtained citizenship by marrying Bosnian

women, many of them war widows. That made it hard to enforce the

Dayton peace accord's December 1995 requirement that foreign fighters

leave within 30 days.



"They should have been gone long ago, but now we're stuck with them,"

said a senior Western official in the area. He said NATO soldiers, who

are charged with policing implementation of the Dayton accord, have

been reluctant to act against them, in part for fear of retaliation.



"There is absolutely no reason why Muslims can't be here," said

British Lt. Gen. Michael Willcocks, the deputy chief of NATO

operations in Bosnia. "We can't singularize people over beards and

veils. . . . They are not engaged in overt acts of terrorism, nor do

we have evidence of them sitting around and indoctrinating people. We

investigate and carry out surveillance, and there is no evidence of .

. . ranges [for weapons or military training] of the kind most people

have in mind."



But the real reason the former fighters have stayed, Western officials

complain, is that Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim member and chairman of

Bosnia's three-member presidency, wants them to stay. They say that

Izetbegovic turned Bocinja Donja over to 100 members of the "7th

Muslim Brigade" after the Bosnian army organized a massive sweep

during the last months of the war and forced Serbian residents to

flee.



The sweep ended a long and bitter artillery siege of several Muslim

enclaves in the area by Serbs and Croats, making the village a

hard-fought prize. Moreover, Western officials say, the town's

location at the head of the Bosna River Valley makes it easy for its

residents to block Serbs traveling south from returning to seven

villages in the valley. As a result, ethnic resettlement--a major goal

of the Dayton accords--has been stunted in the region, with up to

10,000 people thought to be hesitating to return home because of the

situation.



Mirza Hajric, senior foreign policy adviser to Izetbegovic, said he

understands the community is creating a problem. "We've raised the

attention of police. We have been approaching everyone and saying, 'Do

you want to go back home?' " He said the government recently

formulated "an ambitious plan to displace all of the residents--to

make them go back to their own countries or move elsewhere."



A local official of Bosnia's ruling Muslim political party--which

dominates decision-making in the area--said there is no reason for

concern, even though residents of other towns say they resent

Bocinja's efforts to close bars and punish public displays of

affection. "We have no problems" with the people there, said Redzic

Ismet, the party chairman in nearby Zavidovici. "I don't think the

other people have any problem with them. There are no kind of

incidents with them."



Efforts to obtain comment from Bocinja residents were unsuccessful.

Contacted by telephone and on the street here, a community leader

named Abu Hamza asked three times for $60,000 to give an interview.

When the request was refused, he said residents do not speak with

foreign reporters.



But in 1998, in the group's sole published interview, Hamza told

reporters for a Bosnian magazine called Dani that "our president is

Alija Izetbegovic. It will be as he says. If he will say that we have

to leave this place, we will do it. If he says stay, we will stay."



Branko Jovanovic, 67, an ethnic Serb who says he owns the two-story,

eight-bedroom house that Hamza occupies, said at least 150 families

from the village would like to return but "there is no possibility . .

. while there is one mujaheddin in that area. They did bad things to

us. We cannot live with them." He cited the vandalization of Serbian

graveyards by former mujaheddin, an act witnessed by Western officials

who have driven through the town.



Three local men beat and tortured two Serbs who strayed nearby 16

months ago, only to be given suspended sentences by a local judge.



During an inspection visit last year by Willcocks, the British

general, one resident tried to pull open the door of his guard vehicle

and made slashing motions across his throat. "It was a very

threatening atmosphere," Willcocks said. "They do not like

[peacekeeping] troops patrolling there. But any suggestion we're

terrified to go in is absolutely nonsense."



Local officials say that several U.S. military officers who visited in

January 1999 received even rougher treatment. More recently, the

Norwegian commander of the NATO brigade responsible for peacekeeping

in the town was assaulted when he attempted to escort an ethnic Serb

home.



"We were approached by two residents, both of foreign origin, who

physically tried to attack the Serb and pushed me away," said retired

Brig. Gen. Kjell Grandhagen, who left Bosnia at the end of January and

now runs the Norwegian war college in Oslo. "We decided immediately to

return to our armored vehicle, where a third foreigner flashed a

knife. It was quite tense. There were verbal threats" by a man from

Sudan.



Secretary General

Mrs. Jela Jovanovic

Art historian



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