Friends in Need

The afternoon after terrorists attacked the U.S. last month, more than 10,000 Kosovo Albanians turned out on the bustling main streets of their capital Pristina to hold a candlelight vigil for the American dead. Kindergarten children, recalling their own wartime trauma, posted a packet of drawings to their counterparts in U.S. schools. One depicts a glowering figure treading on a flag that is part American, part Albanian. In shaky letters, another reads, "We love America."

Sympathy for the victims of the mass murder in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania has, of course, been widespread. But Kosovars are predominantly Muslim, and though much of the Islamic world is at least divided in its response to the attacks — mingling condemnation of the tactics with criticism of U.S. policy — the reaction in Pristina has been undiluted.

Elsewhere in the Balkans, Muslims have been vociferous in their support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism, never mind that fundamentalists and even mujahedin have been struggling for years to gain a foothold in the region. The reasoning is simple: in a region that prizes nationalism above religious identity the U.S. intervened forcefully, albeit belatedly, on the side of the Muslim population. Now that the fight against terrorism has shifted to the top of foreign policy agendas, that Balkan experience is emerging as a prime example of how to get things right.

After the terror attacks, Interior Minister Muhamed Besic of the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia announced that "trustworthy intelligence sources" had revealed that 70 extremists from Afghanistan might be headed to the region in search of refuge. "You may think you are going to find heaven in Bosnia," he told his would-be guests, "[But] what in fact awaits you is hell." Muslims in southeastern Europe have for some time recognized where their interests lie. This is due partly to a secular tradition dating back to Ottoman times, and partly to a concerted U.S.-led policy of engagement with moderate Muslims, which began with the nato bombing of Serb positions outside Sarajevo in 1995.

Things looked very different a decade ago. For three years during the Bosnian war, Iran was the only country providing material support to Bosnian Muslims in their fight against the Serbs. The U.S. and others agreed to look the other way. Top aides to Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic "were in the pocket of Iranian intelligence services," recalls Ivo Daalder, coordinator of Balkan policy at the U.S. National Security Council in 1995-96 and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Hundreds of mujahedin were invited to fight, and terrorist training camps, including one discovered by nato troops in 1995, were set up in the mountains of eastern Bosnia. In neighboring Albania, Saudi and Kuwaiti money bankrolled the construction of mosques and, according to some reports, Osama bin Laden recruited volunteers. Fears that Western ambivalence was producing a "cauldron of extremism" became a preoccupation at the highest levels of the U.S. government, says Daalder.

The turning point came with the Dayton peace accords, signed in 1995, in which the U.S. insisted that Izetbegovic expel "foreign combatant forces" within 30 days. "We told the Bosnian government to choose between us and them," says Daalder, "and they chose us because we had more money and we had the troops."

Three years later, as the Kosovo conflict intensified, mujahedin offered their services to the Kosovo Liberation Army in Albania. But the k.l.a. rebuffed their advances, according to Veton Surroi, publisher of the Pristina daily Koha Ditore and a key figure in Kosovo’s liberation struggle. "There was a refusal from the beginning to have anything to do with the Islamics," he says. More recently in Macedonia, ethnic Albanian rebels also spurned offers from mujahedin volunteers for fear of alienating the West.

Even so, at least some extremists are still believed to be operating in the region, taking advantage of notoriously porous borders and weak governments to avoid detection. Since Sept. 11, authorities in Albania and Bosnia, relying on Western intelligence, have arrested a handful of foreign nationals suspected of terrorist leanings. Last week in the Bosnian town of Zenica, a mujahedin stronghold during the war, police arrested a man holding both Yemeni and Algerian identity papers whose telephone logs showed that he had spoken with a senior aide of Osama bin Laden about procuring foreign passports.

With strikes against Afghanistan under way, the international community would do well to recall the lessons of the Balkans: targeted military action must be accompanied by engagement with moderate political forces. As a senior Bosnian official put it: "This is not a war between civilizations. It is a war between civilization and terrorists — and we are on the side of civilization."