Bosnian Muslims See U.S. as an Ally

Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2001
Alija Izetbegovic was President of Bosnia during the Bosnian war. He retired last year, after suffering a heart attack. A Bosnian Muslim, he was in office when hundreds of mujahedin volunteers arrived in the country to fight alongside their Muslim brothers against the Serbs in a war that Osama bin Laden later claimed was proof of the West's disregard for Islam.

After the war, several hundred mujahedin stayed in Bosnia, marrying Bosnian women and working at local aid agencies. Some have been linked to terrorist attacks, most recently this month when a handful of Algerian-born men with ties to the Armed Islamic Group and other organizations were arrested in connection with foiled plots on the U.S. and U.K. embassies in the capital, Sarajevo, as well as on the U.S. military base in Tuzla. One in particular had contacts with top aides to Osama bin Laden in the days after Sept. 11.

Reports have long circulated - actively fuelled by Izetbegovic's former enemies in Belgrade and the Serb Republic of Bosnia - that he met with bin Laden and openly courted potential terrorists during the war.

TIME met with him last week and asked him about those allegations. Excerpts:

TIME: According to several reports, you met with Osama bin Laden or his chief deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri during the war. Is that true?
Izetbegovic: During and after the war I met with thousands of people coming from the Islamic world but I can remember the faces and names of only a few. Neither of the two you mentioned are among them. And if, by some chance, I have met them, then they could not have talked with me about terrorism.

TIME: Do you believe there is an al-Qaeda cell in Bosnia?
Izetbegovic: There are suspicions but no proof. Personally I do not believe that al-Qaeda has cells in Bosnia.

TIME: Abu el Ma'ali, a former leader of the mujahedin, was accused by U.S. investigators of helping to plan attacks on U.S. military bases in Germany. Was there any indication of this involvement while you were President?
Izetbegovic: I hadn't heard of anything linking him to terrorism until the U.S. required that he leave Bosnia. We asked him to leave, and he did. He was here for four years after the war and no one had anything to say against him.

TIME: Why were the mujahedin invited to Bosnia?
Izetbegovic: We never invited them. We didn't, in fact, need them. We had 200,000 people ready to fight. What we needed was arms. And we specifically didn't need people whose origins we didn't know. A great number came with the best intentions to help us in our struggle. They heard of Muslims being slaughtered, women being raped, so they came to help. We really did not know who they were. Now it appears that a group among them were criminals or spies.

TIME: Since the war, have you suspected the mujahedin in Bosnia of terrorist activities?
Izetbegovic: They might have served as a base for such activities. But I don't know. Still, only 0.3% of Bosnian soldiers were mujahedin and we had200,000 soldiers. The Serbs are enjoying making these accusations about terrorists in Bosnia to justify their own crimes.

TIME: What do you think of bin Laden?
Izetbegovic: Nobody can use the Koran to cover what has been done in N.Y. and Washington.

TIME: Is he, in your opinion, twisting the Koran?
Izetbegovic: Let me give you an example. Christianity is very clearly based on love and tolerance. Yet the Inquisition led to the murder of non-believers. Were the people in the Inquisition sincere believers or not? I believe they were sincere. But they understood the Bible in a certain way. Now we have these Muslim terrorists who are doing the same thing.

TIME: Are the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan justified?
Izetbegovic: If it is reliably found that bin Laden and the Taliban are behind the Sept. 11th attacks, then the U.S. response is a justified one - with, of course, scrupulous efforts to avoid civilian victims.

TIME: Is U.S. foreign policy, specifically in Israel, partly to blame?
Izetbegovic: It is not necessary nor is it realistic to expect the U.S. to withdraw its support from Israel. But the U.S. has almost exclusively supported only one side of the conflict until now. It is fair to expect the U.S. to provide equal support to the justifiable requests of the Palestinian people as well. Both peoples have a right to have states within safe borders. Palestinians are desperate, and injustice and the desperate produce terrorism. I am here touching on the causes of terrorism, yet it seems that it is not desired - or even allowed - to speak about the causes at this moment. It is immediately read as an excuse for terrorism. But I still think that we will, once the anger has calmed down, have to deal with those causes. If you want to uproot malaria, then you can kill the mosquitoes or you can drain the swamps. It is more efficient to drain the swamps.

TIME: Why in your view have most Bosnian Muslims opposed the attacks on Washington and New York, while most of the rest of the Islamic world has remained at best divided on the question?
Izetbegovic: We see the U.S. as an ally. The Americans stopped the war in Bosnian and they gave a big contribution to reconstruction of the country. In Kosovo, they also stopped the brutal ethnic cleansing. One important fact is often overlooked: the U.S. has been in Bosnia for almost six years now and there hasn't been a single negative gesture by the Bosnian people towards U.S. soldiers. This is not by chance. It is a reflection of the positive stance of our public towards the U.S. presence here.