The attitude of the Bosnian Muslim political elite during the violent reshaping of the Yugoslav space cannot be understood without taking their ties with the outside world into consideration. Faced with an extremely unfavorable balance of powers, the SDA’s leaders attempted to overcome this handicap by seeking protection from outside powers and by pushing for an internationalization of the Yugoslav crisis. This essential place held by foreign policy in the SDA’s strategies was already obvious in 1990, when key positions in the Bosnian government were being distributed among nationalist parties. At that time, the SDA took control of the main foreign policy levers: Alija Izetbegović became Chairman of the Bosnian Collegial Presidency, while Haris Silajdžić (then the Reis-ul-ulema’s assistant for international matters) became Bosnian Minister of Foreign Affairs. In the following months, without consulting the other members of the Collegial Presidency, Izetbegović made a series of official visits to Libya (February 1991), Iran (April 1991), Turkey (July 1991), Sudan (November 1991), and Saudi Arabia (March 1992). As Yugoslavia began to disintegrate more quickly, the SDA’s leaders turned to Muslim countries for political, financial and, most likely, military support. During this diplomatic offensive aimed at the Muslim world, the SDA’s leaders endeavored to capitalize on the legacy of Yugoslavia’s non-alignment policy. Thus, Silajdžić asked for Yugoslav embassies in Muslim countries to be led by Bosnian Muslim diplomats, and in August 1991, he attended the Twentieth Summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, alongside Budimir Lončar, the then Yugoslav Minister of Foreign Affairs and Secretary of the Non-Aligned Movement. At the same time, the SDA’s leaders could rely on the Islamic Community, which sent a memorandum to international Islamic organizations in August 1991, requesting their help in the resolution of the Yugoslav crisis, denouncing “the ideologues and nationalist politicians [who] call for the Crusades to continue against the Muslims,” and stressing that in the event of an armed conflict, “defending the faith, lives, honour and goods [of the Bosnian Muslims] will become a religious obligation, and the Muslim Umma altogether will be responsible for our destiny.”1
This appeal to the Umma’s solidarity must not obscure the fact that after war broke out in Croatia in June 1991, the SDA’s leaders mainly addressed their appeal for protection to the major Western powers, expecting diplomatic action and, if necessary, military intervention to resolve the Yugoslav crisis. From this standpoint, Haris Silajdžić’s speech about the “new world order” announced by US President George H.W. Bush is significant: during the military intervention against Iraq in January 1991, Silajdžić stated that the international coalition’s aim was to “control rebellious Islam through submissive Islam,”2 and he viewed this “new world order” as an “unfair order that will lead sooner or later to a new conflict.”3 Yet six months later, he praised the universal triumph of the Western values of democracy, free market, and human rights. He emphasized that in this new context, “accepting interdependence as a universal value is the first condition for progress of individuals, the nation and the state,” and that “absolute sovereignty in the classic sense is being reduced by acceptance of direct powers for international institutions.”4 Therefore, while reaffirming that Bosnia-Herzegovina was a sovereign state within the Yugoslav federation, the Muslim political elites were considering abandoning a portion of that sovereignty to supranational bodies that were not yet clearly defined. Concretely, after definitively opting for independence in August 1991, they brought their stance into line with that of the European Community, which intended to make the Yugoslav crisis a test case for its common foreign policy.
By declaring that Yugoslavia was in a process of dissolution, encouraging its constituent republics to request international recognition, and making the intangibility of their borders the main axiom for resolving the Yugoslav crisis, the European institutions largely fulfilled the expectations of the SDA’s leaders. Thus, the latter approved of the main directions of European policy, asked for international recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina in December 1991, and agreed to organize a referendum on its independence in March 1992. As the Yugoslav federation was falling apart, the Muslim elite’s political allegiance shifted to the European Community, which appeared as the emerging supranational power in Europe and therefore a possible substitute for the community of Yugoslav nations. However, this allegiance was far from unconditional. Already at this early period, the SDA’s leaders showed an interest in obtaining protection from the United States. In July 1991, Izetbegović made an official visit to the United States, and three months later, he stated: “we had some illusions about Europe’s moral and political strength, but [the European Community] is not a superpower of the same rank as America.”5 Furthermore, certain high-ranking SDA officials had spent several years in the United States and made no mystery of their sympathies for American multiculturalism. These officials notably included: Ejub Ganić (a member of the Bosnian Collegial Presidency), Haris Silajdžić (Minister of Foreign Affairs), Mustafa Cerić (the head imam of the Zagreb Mosque and future Reis-ul-ulema), and Muhamed Šaćirbegović (the Ambassador of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the United Nations, and the son of the Young Muslim Nedžib Šaćirbegović, who had sought refuge in the United States after 1945). However, the United States’ refusal to become involved in resolving the Yugoslav crisis in 1991 forced the SDA’s leaders to remain focused on the European Community and the United Nations. Yet in the weeks leading up to the war, the European Community supported Jose Cutilheiro’s plan to cantonize Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the United Nations refused to expand the mandate of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Croatia to include Bosnia-Herzegovina. In both cases, the Muslim elite’s internationalization strategies appeared to have reached their limits—a fact that became painfully clear when war broke out in April 1992.
On May 22, 1992, Bosnia-Herzegovina was admitted to the United Nations as an independent state. At the same time, Serb forces were laying siege to Sarajevo, while carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign that caused hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats to flee. The Bosnian authorities denounced the aggression by neighboring Serbia and requested military intervention under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. It also asked for Bosnia-Herzegovina to be exempted from the UN arms embargo enforced against all the states of the former Yugoslav federation. However, the Bosnian war became internationalized in ways that were very different from these demands. Admittedly, in May, the UN Security Council—with Russia’s consent—implemented economic sanctions against the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia created by Serbia and Montenegro. On the ground, UNPROFOR’s mandate was expanded to include Bosnia-Herzegovina: its mission was to guarantee that the Sarajevo airport could operate, to enable humanitarian aid to arrive by land, and to protect the six “safe areas” that were created in May 1993. In so doing, UNPROFOR helped the civilian populations survive and blunted the Serb military superiority, thus giving the ARBiH the respite it needed to organize itself.
However, UNPROFOR’s humanitarian agenda made direct military intervention more unlikely, and thus ran counter to the Muslim elite’s internationalization strategies. Thus, the SDA’s leaders denounced the inaction of the major Western powers, which they accused of being accomplices of Serb aggression, just like Russia. At the same time, the peace plans put forward by UN and EU mediators formally supported the territorial integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina, while proposing its de facto partition into ten ethnic provinces (under the Vance–Owen Plan in January 1993), then into three ethnic republics (under the Owen–Stoltenberg Plan of August 1993). The SDA’s leaders accused the international mediators of ratifying the outcome of ethnic cleansing. The demand for protection addressed to the major Western powers thus appeared to have gone unheard: France, Great Britain, and Russia were opposed to military intervention, and the United States denounced the peace plans as being unfair, but remained on the sidelines. In January 1993, Bill Clinton’s inauguration as president signaled a more interventionist approach, but this failed to materialize due to the outbreak of fighting between Croats and Muslims and a hardening of Russia’s stance. As a sign of these harsh times, the Bosnian authorities accepted the Vance–Owen Plan in March 1993 in the hopes that the Serbs would reject it, triggering Western military intervention, but they rejected the Owen–Stoltenberg Plan in September 1993, opposing the international community for the first and only time in the name of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s sovereignty.
As a result, it is hardly surprising that in the first years of the war, appealing to the solidarity of the Muslim world was a key element of Bosnian foreign policy. Whereas representatives of the civic parties were appointed as ambassadors to the main Western countries (including Bosnian Ambassador to the United States Sven Alkalaj, a Jew, and the Ambassador to France Nikola Kovač, a Serb), ambassadors to Muslim countries had backgrounds in the Islamic Community or the pan-Islamist current. First of all, Omer Behmen, a former Young Muslim and a co-defendant at the 1983 trial, was appointed as Ambassador to Iran. In September 1992 in Zagreb, an international conference chaired by Mustafa Cerić (then the main imam of the Zagreb Mosque), was attended by important figures of the international Islamist movement such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Mohammad al-Ghazali, expressed its “full support for the struggle for freedom (jihad) in Bosnia-Herzegovina” and called “for all the Muslim world to support this struggle.”6 Three months later, in Jeddah, the Organization of the Islamic Conference held a summit dedicated to the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In his introductory speech, Izetbegović stated:
If the tragedy of my people has a good side, a modicum of meaning and goodness—and every sufferance does—then it lies in the fact that this suffering has awakened the Muslim world’s consciousness. We have been waiting for this day for a long time!7
In reality, however, the apparent unity of the Muslim countries covered numerous dissensions and rivalries. Some Muslim countries, such as Indonesia, Iraq, and Libya, remained attached to non-aligned Yugoslavia and viewed with suspicion a Bosnian Muslim nation formed on a confessional basis. Other countries, such as Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, expressed their solidarity with Bosnian Muslims, but this often remained mere words. Iran, for example, offered to send thousands of Iranian “blue helmets,” while obviously aware that the UN Security Council would reject this proposal. Turkey—which is not an oil-producing country—called for an oil embargo against Serbia’s allies. Lastly, the Bosnian conflict became a domestic policy issue in some Muslim countries, as Islamist movements such as Turkey’s Prosperity Party (Refah partisi) and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood accused their governments of inaction and launched their own solidarity campaigns. However, in 1992, the first deliveries of weapons from Iran and Sudan arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina via Croatia, and the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), directed by Fatih al-Hassanein and Hasan Čengić in Vienna, organized fundraising in the Muslim world. The funds raised played a crucial role, as we have seen, in the SDA’s gradual takeover of the ARBiH and the formation of a new one-party state in the territories under ARBiH control. However, the main effect of Muslim solidarity was indirect: just as the mobilization of Islamist movements forced the governments of Muslim countries to act, so these governments exerted considerable pressure on the major Western powers and international organizations. From this standpoint, the demand for protection addressed to the major Western powers and the appeal for the Umma’s solidarity were complementary actions, not opposing ones. Izetbegović was aware of this when he reminded the United Nations General Assembly in October 1993:
One billion [Muslim] individuals are waiting for you to decide to act. Are you ready to let Bosnia and its people be totally annihilated? This billion individuals—and many others—would never forgive you.8
While aid from the Muslim world was important, the real turning point in the internationalization of the Bosnian conflict came in late 1993, when the United States decided to intervene directly to shift the military balance of power and to reorient the peace talks. Taking advantage of the fact that the Bosniak community was gathering new strength at the same time as the Croat community fell into crisis, US diplomats began separate talks with these two parties in January 1994, thus short-circuiting the peace talks backed by the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia. Two months later, the Washington Agreement ended the Croat-Bosniak fighting and created the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which caused a radical change in the political and military situation. Concurrently, with the Clinton Administration’s discreet approval, Croatia reauthorized arms deliveries to the ARBiH. The country most involved in breaking the arms embargo was Iran, which also sent several hundred military instructors, supervised certain Muslim units of the ARBiH, and even headed the Foundation for the families of šehids (martyrs of the faith) and war invalids. Other Muslim countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia helped arm the ARBiH as well, and Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI), a private company with ties to the Pentagon, was in charge of officer training for the Croatian and Bosnian Armies. This simultaneous involvement of the United States and some Muslim-majority countries helped shift the balance of powers between the ARBiH and VRS, and the Bosniak elite’s internationalization strategies finally began to pay off. The newspaper Ljiljan even started to dream of a lasting convergence between American protection and Muslim solidarity:
If the Muslim world had not provided not only moral support but also material aid, we could not have remained standing. This pan-Islamism will be useful if we succeed in reconciling it with American democracy and interests, which is possible, realistic, and this is our big chance. For America is committed to the principle of ethnic pluralism that made possible the development of its society, and even though it has no particular interests in Bosnia, it has [interests] in the Muslim world. Bosnia has the possibility to reconcile the interests and strategies of the American and Islamic democracies.9
During the same period, Bosnia-Herzegovina announced that it was joining the Organization of the Islamic Conference with observer status. But although benefiting from the simultaneous support of the United States and Iran was a feat (a feat already achieved a few years earlier by the Nicaraguan contras), it was not enough to control the international dynamics of the Bosnian conflict. In 1994 and 1995, UNPROFOR’s failure in its mission, along with the increasingly direct intervention of NATO air forces against the VRS, appeared to serve the strategies of the SDA leadership. However, in autumn 1995, the shift in the military balance of powers and Russian pressure on Slobodan Milošević enabled American diplomacy to impose a peace agreement in a few weeks, which, by legalizing the existence of the Republika Srpska and awarding it certain Bosniak-majority territories, was very far from the war goals of the Bosniak leadership. Their “search for empire”—a search aimed simultaneously at Europe, the United States and the Muslim world—had undoubtedly saved the Bosniak nation from utter military defeat, and perhaps from physical annihilation. But it had not liberated that nation from its own political contradictions.
By looking at the actual ways in which the Bosnian war was internationalized, we can see how the interpretations of this conflict as a “shock of civilizations” are inaccurate. Not only did the policies of the United States and Iran discreetly converge beginning in 1993, but the major Western powers were also divided. Russia’s stance was hesitant, and several Muslim countries remained close to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which they viewed as the legitimate heir of non-aligned Yugoslavia. Moreover, in the Yugoslav space, solidarity between Muslim populations was virtually inexistent. Admittedly, a few hundred Albanians from Kosovo joined the ARBiH’s ranks, but the Kosovar Albanian political leaders refused to open a second front against Serbia and supported the principle of self-determination of peoples over the principle of territorial integrity of states, whereas the Bosniak leaders did exactly the opposite. Nevertheless, the Bosniak leaders continuously interpreted the international dimensions of the Bosnian war in cultural and civilizational terms. Regularly, Izetbegović spoke of the Bosniaks as a nation situated on the “Great Frontier” (“Velika granica”) between East and West. In October 1994, Irfan Ljubijankić, the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, presented his vision of the “new world order” to the Congress of Bosniak Intellectuals. He distinguished three major cultural areas: the “Judeo-Christian civilization,” grouping together Western Europe and North America; the “Communist-Orthodox ideological and civilizational complex,” dominated by Russia; and Islam, “an authentic system of values founded on a book, on divine Revelation—the Qur’an,” but which is weakened by “the inability of Muslim societies to translate this idea into reality.” In this context, Ljubijankić intended to base his foreign policy on both the Western world and the Muslim world, “by gaining greater political and material influence in Muslim countries, and by imposing our society as a model of peaceful coexistence with the Western system of values, without neglecting our own religious and cultural identities.”10
Hence we must distinguish between the SDA leadership’s pragmatic, multidimensional foreign policy (aimed at shifting the military balance of powers in favor of the Muslim/Bosniak community) and their culturalist representation of the world (which helped drive the ongoing transformations of the Muslim/Bosniak national identity). It is telling, from this point of view, that the civic parties and the intellectuals with ties to them supported the SDA leaders in their internationalization strategies, but rejected their worldview. While the SDA’s press outlets compared the fate of Bosnian Muslims to that of Muslims expelled from Spain during the Reconquista, newspapers with ties to the civic parties preferred to identify with the anti-fascists of the Spanish Civil War. More generally, the civic press accused Europe of betraying its own values, whereas the SDA’s press considered that Europe was revealing its true face. In August 1992, at the opening of the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia, Izetbegović himself stated:
The evil that has reached us did not come from Asia, it has European origins. The aggressor has brought together two poisons: Fascism (racism and extreme nationalism) and Bolshevism (a complete disrespect for rights and law). Both are European products.11
Moreover, the SDA’s leaders had widely changing views of the relationship between Europe and Islam, between the West and the East, over the course of the conflict. In May 1990, enthusiastic about the fall of communism, Izetbegović declared: “we are aware of these wild ideas [in Serbia] of launching a new Crusade to defend Europe from the Islamic and Muslim threat. I have been to Europe, and the only thing that I noticed on this topic is that Europe itself is wondering how to protect itself from these backwards Crusaders of the late twentieth century.”12 The same idea appeared a year later in the pages of Muslimanski glas, as the SDA’s expectations towards the European Community were at their peak. Indeed, for Mersada Zubović, “Europe, as it is forming a unified space … is freeing itself from the shadow of the Crusades which has for so long hung over the West and the Muslim world, and was rooted in the Western mentality.”13 Yet in March 1992, the plan presented by Jose Cutilheiro to cantonize Bosnia-Herzegovina awoke old demons, and Džemaludin Latić exclaimed:
The citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina are increasingly less afraid of the Chetniks. The danger comes … from Europe. At any moment, [Europe] could create a new Palestine here, because in this “f… Europe”, certain groups are at work, convinced that “Islamic fundamentalism” is proliferating, and [they] cannot get used to the fact that on a “Christian continent”, a Muslim population could have a state.14
The idea of a persistent European hostility toward Islam was dominant throughout the war, and was expressed by Haris Silajdžić, who believed that “the international community has opted for a path leading to a shock of civilizations,”15 by Mustafa Cerić, for whom the West “values a gram of oil more than a liter of Muslim blood,”16 and even by some intellectuals with ties to the “national affirmation” of the communist period. In 1994, for instance, Mustafa Imamović wrote: “the indifference of a good portion of the world, which passively watched and even supported the nationalist outburst and genocide against the Bosnian Muslims shows that Europe is still affected by the barbarism of the Crusades and national egoisms.”17
Why did the SDA’s leaders give priority to this culturalist representation of the world, while they were at the heart of an internationalization process that paid little attention to cultural divides? They did so because this representation of the world helped mobilize outside support while at the same time helped consolidate the new Bosniak national identity. By emphasizing the special civilizational features of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Bosniak leaders endeavored to offset its geopolitical insignificance, to bring it out of the sidelines and into the spotlight. In July 1991, Silajdžić called for “highlighting our main asset, namely, our experience of multiple civilizations,” while believing that, due to the Yugoslav crisis, “Bosnia-Herzegovina does not have the possibility to benefit fully from its intermediary position within Yugoslavia as well as its position as an historical, geographical and cultural link between the East and the West.”18 Three years later, his successor Irfan Ljubijankić stated, along the same lines, that “we are still far from being able to use Islam’s strength to improve our standing, but we will have enormous competitive advantages in the future, because we may have the best conditions in the world to … situate Islam in today’s era and world, in a way that does not frighten the Western world.”19 After the conflict broke out, the culturalist representation of the world favored by the Bosniak leaders also enabled them to accentuate the divide with Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats and to strengthen a new Bosniak national identity focused on Islam. But here again, the message of the SDA’s leaders varied significantly over time. In January 1994, speaking to the local SDA committee in Sarajevo, Izetbegović stated:
We represent here a European Islam, a moderate Islam as far as the image of Islam is concerned. On this point, we can do a lot for the East and for the West—us in particular. Perhaps our mission is precisely to show Islam in a new, fairer light.20
A few months later, speaking to the combatants of the 7th Muslim Brigade, he explained:
We carry the amanet [legacy] of faith, the amanet of Islam, and we have a duty to preserve it in these countries. For here is the most Western part of Islam. There is also Islam in France, Germany and England, but there is no autochthonous Muslim population, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The task has fallen to us to make sure that the Muslims can remain and survive here.21
Lastly, the day after the Dayton Agreement was signed, Džemaludin Latić expressed satisfaction in Ljiljan that the Bosniaks had become the first European Muslims to defend themselves successfully, unlike the Muslims of Andalusia, Sicily, or Hungary, and proclaimed Sarajevo to be “the capital of the Bosniaks and of all European Muslims.”22 Thus, for the leaders of the SDA and the Islamic Community, the relationship between Europe and Islam was viewed differently depending on the circumstances, and Bosnia-Herzegovina stood alternately as a bridge or as a wall between these two sides. But in this worldview, the Bosniak nation constantly occupied center stage.
Alongside these culturalist interpretations of the Bosnian war, another view of the conflict developed, based on a certain number of universal legal and moral categories. Even as they described the international dimensions of the Bosnian war as a shock of civilizations, the SDA’s leaders refused any classification of this conflict in terms of “civil war” or “religious war,” describing it instead as an outside aggression in order to request the enforcement of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. Yet the legal category most often emphatically used by the SDA’s leaders, the Islamic Community and the civic parties was “genocide.” Use of the term “genocide” by some Muslim intellectuals to describe mass violence suffered by Bosnian Muslims over the centuries actually goes back to the 1980s, and was partly inspired by the rhetoric developed by Serb nationalists over the same period, with reference to the Second World War. Beginning in 1990, the notion of genocide was emphasized by the SDA, the Islamic Community, and likeminded intellectuals: this notion was also supposed to help strengthen the Muslim national identity. Evidence includes the fact that they often extended the concept to describe the 1919 land reform as “economic genocide” and the communist period’s anti-religious policy as “cultural genocide.” Above all, the intellectuals close to the SDA continuously presented genocide against Muslims as a recurring phenomenon, and insisted on its religious dimension. In November 1991, during a conference entitled Genocide against Muslims organized by the cultural society Preporod, historian Mustafa Imamović presented various massacres and forced migrations of Slavophone Muslims in the Yugoslav space between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries as genocides; this list was later included in a report published by the Islamic Community.23 At the same conference, Mehmedalija Hadžić and Džemaludin Latić asserted that “behind every genocide against Muslims lies a religious hatred of them,” and thus attributed a religious dimension to the violence committed against Bosnian Muslims.24
Beginning in 1992, the widespread use of the term “genocide” was mainly attributable to the extreme and well-planned nature of violence committed by Serb forces and to the shock that these acts caused within the Muslim population and among its elites, stretching across partisan boundaries. Use of the term also reflected a strong urge for justice: during the war’s early months, the Bosnian authorities were already calling for creation of an international tribunal to try war criminals. These appeals were answered in February 1993 with the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Soon thereafter, in March 1993, Bosnia-Herzegovina filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice, accusing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia of genocide. Resorting to international justice was an integral part of the Bosniak elites’ internationalization strategies, but the emphasis on genocide against the Bosniak nation also fueled the transformations of its national identity. Hence some peculiar features of the message of Bosniak leaders and intellectuals. On the one hand, they insisted on the fact that the Bosniak nation had endured “ten genocides,” a number that could vary or feed into the idea of an interrupted genocide since the eighteenth century. On the other hand, the genocide underway was, in their view, attributable to the Serbs’ hatred of Islam, with the Muslims being the victims “only because we are Muslims” (“samo zato što smo muslimani”). During another conference about genocide organized in August 1992 in besieged Sarajevo, Mustafa Imamović declared:
The Muslims have paid with their blood as victims of genocide, over nearly regular cycles of two or three decades. It is typical that, in recent history, they have mainly suffered in their place of residence, and most often as victims of their closest neighbors. This means that the torturer and the victim knew each other in most cases and perhaps socialized.25
Imamović’s insistence on the guilt of ordinary Serbs aimed at further deepening the divide between the Bosniak and Serb communities, without openly contradicting the official stance in favor of a multiethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina. Three years later, an ARBiH brochure proclaimed that the genocidal violence against the Bosniaks represented “a continuity which, in various combinations depending on the political and military circumstances, goes back 120 years,” i.e. back to the beginning of the Austro-Hungarian occupation.26 With this view of the Bosniaks’ history, their past coexistence with the Serbs and Croats could be presented as an illusion, and their mobilization could be encouraged. As Izetbegović told the combatants of the 7th Muslim Brigade:
They say that, over the past two hundred years, some seven, eight or even twelve genocides have been launched against us… Those of us who are older remember three genocides. I say that this will be the last one. Why the last? Because for the first time, we have decided to defend ourselves. For the first time, we have said that we do not want to die.27
Inevitably, the emphasis on the notion of genocide led the Bosniak leaders and intellectuals to draw a parallel with the Holocaust. In September 1992, on the five hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Spanish Jews in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Izetbegović stated that “today the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina are enduring a genocide just like the one committed against the Jews during the Second World War.”28 The Bosniak leaders and intellectuals drew such parallels with the Holocaust on a recurring basis. Sometimes, they went further and presented the genocide perpetrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina as unique in history. Hence Izetbegović spoke of a “genocide of a dimension never before seen,”29 and philosopher Muhamed Filipović noted:
When the Germans committed genocide against the Jews, it was carried out by a specialized service of the army and the police, whereas for the Serbs, it is being committed by the entire local population.30
Once again, the reference to the Holocaust reflected at the same time the shock caused by the Serb violence, the deliberate strategies to internationalize the conflict, and attempts to strengthen the Bosniak national identity. Throughout the war, the Bosniak leaders and intellectuals endeavored to win the support of the main Jewish organizations, often deluding themselves about the cohesion of the Jewish community and its influence on world politics. Moreover, some of them identified the Bosniaks’ historical fate with that of the Jews. Thus, Mustafa Cerić proclaimed that “we are, from an historical cultural standpoint, the Jews of the Balkans,”31 and Enes Karić expressed his view that:
The Bosniaks share, to a large extent, the fate of the European Jews, not only with the camps, the pogroms and massive emigration that is several times larger than the number of people remaining in the country [32] but also with the existence of a “Muslim Israel” (in other words, a reservation for Bosniaks) in the small country of Bosnia.33
Conversely, some other Muslim leaders and intellectuals were frightened by the risk of becoming the “Palestinians of Europe,” confined to vulnerable and dispersed enclaves; hence they dreamed of building a “Muslim Israel” at the heart of the Balkans. This “Muslim Israel” would be superior to its neighbors in military terms and would benefit from American protection. In the newspaper Ljiljan, Mustafa Imamović noted that the Jews—just like the Bosniaks—had been victims of genocide, and that “if the Jews managed to create Israel thanks to their attachment to their religion, then the Muslims can be victorious if they embrace their own religion.”34 It means that the parallel with the Jewish situation was used not only to support the SDA’s internationalization strategies, but also to justify some Bosniaks in their aspirations for their own nation-state.
Lastly, denouncing aggression and genocide and referring to the Holocaust were ways to turn the Bosnian war into a moral issue, with the world no longer divided into civilizational areas, but into two sides: Good and Evil. This emphasis on the war’s moral dimensions contributed likewise to the SDA’s internationalization strategies and the strengthening of the Bosniak national identity. Indeed, the SDA’s leaders, the Islamic Community, and likeminded intellectuals were trying to free the Bosniaks from their “Turkish complex,” the complex of inferiority from which they allegedly suffered due to their religion. Thus, it was important to show that the Bosniaks were morally superior to their adversaries because they were committing no war crime; moreover, they abstained from committing crime precisely because they were Muslims. This preoccupation was especially noticeable with Izetbegović, who stated:
For [Westerners], we were half-savages, originating in the Orient, Asians. And why not? But in fact it turned out that those whom [the Europeans] expected to behave in a civilized manner, people with European roots, have killed the weak, destroyed mosques and bridges. We did not do that.35
Continuing this observation, Izetbegović also explained:
When we respect and we say that we will respect the churches and the beliefs of others, we are acting not only according to the best traditions of a European democracy, to which the world has arrived at by trial and error throughout history but we are directly and literarily respecting the injunction of our Holy Book [the Qur’an].36
Thus reaffirming Islam’s moral superiority, Izetbegović called on the Bosniaks to build on this new self-esteem by refusing to commit any criminal acts:
We have tried and succeeded in being and remaining human. But—I insist on this—we have not tried for them [for the benefit of our enemies]. We have tried to remain human for our own sake, not for them. We owe them nothing.37
This new feeling of moral superiority was visible in the resolutions of the Congress of Bosnian Muslim Intellectuals, which asserted that the Muslim nation was “the only nation that has entered Europe in a civilized manner,”38 and even more passionately, in a fiery speech that Mustafa Cerić made to the officers of the Gračanica region:
Do not be ashamed of Islam, do not be ashamed to belong to such a great civilization. Yes, we are in Europe, and Europe has things to learn from us… For after what has happened to us and after the complicity of a lying, hypocritical Europe and a lying, hypocritical world, we Bosniaks will not let anyone give us lessons in morals or ethics. From them, we can learn how to kill, to destroy towns, destroy bridges, rape women, burn archives, we can learn that from them, but in terms of morals and ethics, we have nothing to learn from Europe. As a result, it’s up to them to learn from us what is moral and ethical, and you Bosniaks should be proud of who you are… We Bosniaks are going to save Europe from its own Evil.39
Bosniak leaders promoted a worldview that brought the Bosniak nation out of its marginal geopolitical position to place it at the heart of a global confrontation between Good and Evil, hoisting it up as the redeemer for all Europe. Thus, this worldview significantly strengthened the Bosniak national identity and bolstered the central place held by Islam within that identity. Until the day when the promoters of this national identity were faced with various Islamic actors from other countries, who had come to Bosnia-Herzegovina to show their solidarity in the name of the Umma.
During the war, the SDA and its parallel networks channeled material support from Muslim-majority countries and, as we have seen, this greatly facilitated the establishment of a new one-party state in the territories under ARBiH control. From this standpoint, Muslims around the globe may have contributed less to shifting the balance of power between the belligerent parties, and more to changing the Bosniak community’s internal political and religious configurations. This is even truer for the various transnational Islamic actors who arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war, namely Islamic NGOs and foreign mujahidin. As early as 1992, numerous Islamic NGOs set up operations in refugee camps in Croatia and in some parts of central Bosnia. The largest such organizations were the Saudi Arabia-based International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), Islamic Relief (based in the United Kingdom), and the foundations Muwafaq, al-Haramain, and Benevolence International. These organizations viewed charity (igatha) and missionary work (da‘wa) as interconnected. While distributing humanitarian aid and opening medical dispensaries, they also distributed religious literature and organized religious classes. Often, they were accused of resorting to coercion, by giving humanitarian aid only to women wearing a headscarf or to parents who sent their children to religious classes. Albeit small in scale compared to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or the major Western NGOs, these Islamic NGOs nevertheless helped spread neo-Salafist ideas and religious practices. They also had an impact on some local political and religious configurations, as shown by their close ties with Halil Mehtić, the mufti of Zenica, who was also close to neo-Salafist ideas.
As for the mujahidin, the first appeal to foreign fighters was launched at the international conference organized in Zagreb in September 1992 and chaired by Mustafa Cerić. Support for this appeal was far from unanimous: for example, the ARBiH General Staff retorted that there was “no need for any sort of jihad.”40 Even Izetbegović’s support seemed half-hearted, and in one of his rare statements on this topic, he explained:
We do not need men because we have them. We need weapons because we don’t have any. However, we do not have the right to refuse, and we will not refuse the friends who arrive to fight with us. Everyone has the right to fight for justice, including volunteers from Muslim countries.41
In fact, the Bosnian authorities tolerated the arrival of the mujahidin because some donors made it a prerequisite for their financial support and because the glorification of the mujahidin’s feats helped mobilize Muslim public opinions worldwide. However, on the ground, the relations between the mujahidin and the local population were far from easy. Between 1992 and 1995, several thousand mujahidin from Afghanistan, the Gulf countries, North Africa, and Western Europe arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina; the length of time they would stay varied from weeks to years. They played only a marginal role in the war, despite a few military feats against the Serb and Croat forces. However, in the regions where they were stationed, the mujahidin attacked cafés selling alcohol and harassed couples holding hands. They also had violent disagreements with the combatants of the 7th Muslim Brigade due to the latter’s Sufi practices. In central Bosnia, they were guilty of serious war crimes and became a major threat to public order. As a result, in August 1993, they were grouped together into the el-Mudžahid unit and attached to the 3rd Corps of the ARBiH. This reorganization halted the mujahidin’s exactions, but also transformed the el-Mudžahid unit into a major breeding ground for neo-Salafist ideas. The foreign mujahidin incorporated several hundred young Bosniaks attracted by the jihadist ideology, and organized religious classes in which these young Bosniaks were subjected to intensive religious resocialization.
The forays into local religious life by Islamic humanitarians and mujahidin soon sparked indignation among the leaders of the Islamic Community and the SDA. In their view, the most serious matter was the spread of religious practices that did not comply with the Hanafi madhhab, the legal school that the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina were traditionally affiliated with.42 Indeed, because of the foreign neo-Salafists, the correct ways to pray, to wear a beard or a headscarf became subject to heated debate, or even physical confrontation between believers. In 1993, the Islamic Community published a fatwa on “the obligation to respect the Hanafi madhhab in carrying out religious rituals in mosques, prayer rooms, tekkes [Sufi lodges] and Islamic gatherings of any kind.”43 More generally, the Islamic humanitarians and mujahidin disputed the Bosnian Muslims’ own religious traditions, often influenced by Sufism, and the Islamic Community itself, which they accused of tolerating these heterodox practices. The most blatant example of such protest was a brochure written by Imad al-Misri, an Egyptian and one of the religious leaders of the el-Mudžahid unit. The Society of the Revival of Islamic Heritage, a Kuwaiti NGO, disseminated this brochure, which was entitled Some Conceptions that We Must Correct. In it, al-Misri writes:
I arrived in Bosnia and I found strange conceptions of Islam, things that [local] Muslims think are part of religion, whereas they are most certainly not. I was stunned that some of the ‘ulama’ who know that certain things are not Islamic tolerate them rather than doing the necessary work to correct them.44
Then, al-Misri denounces various local traditions, such as the presence of cemeteries inside mosques, visits to saints’ tombs, the Sufi ceremonies, and mevluds honoring the Prophet, the use of amulets and other magical practices. In parallel, he calls on Bosnian Muslims to distance themselves from Christians, Jews, communists, and “all those who say that they are Muslims but do not pray and do not live according to the faith but are Muslim only in name and origin.” Lastly, al-Misri violently attacks communism, democracy, and nationalism as ideologies that turn people away from true Islam. In particular, he denies that nationalism has any value, as the sole criterion for judging the value of a state lies in how well it conforms to Islam: “In every country, we must look at who is ruling. If Shari‘a reigns, then it is an Islamic country, and if Shari‘a does not reign, then it is a country of infidels [kafirska zemlja].” Implicitly calling for an Islamic state to be established in Bosnia-Herzegovina, al-Misri ends by urging Bosnian imams to order Good and eradicate Evil, to fight the “Turkish innovations” that have taken root in the population, and to take a direct part in jihad.45
This criticism of local religious practices by foreign neo-Salafists did not fail to spark passionate reactions from Bosniak intellectuals and ‘ulama’. The first to react was Enes Karić, professor of tefsir (Qur’an commentary) at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences of Sarajevo. In an article published in 1993, he denounced the “pseudo-missionaries” who consider Bosnia-Herzegovina to be an “empty space” and “think that we, Bosniaks, have no ties with Islam and that we must learn how to pray, to wear a beard, to trim and curl our moustaches, etc.” Karić viewed this as an “epidemic of anathemas to know who is a better or lesser Muslim,” and he cautions about the conflicts that such behavior could create. Then, he joked about those who would debate the size of their beards while the Chetniks are beheading them; recalling sterile debates about the introduction of the fez in the nineteenth century, he concluded by exclaiming: “we must not trade our Bosnian dimije [harem pants] and šamije [coloured headscarves] for dark chadors!”46 Thus, Karić referred again to his definition of Islam as the Bosniaks’ common culture to more effectively oppose the globalized, strict Islam of the neo-Salafists. In 1995, Džemaludin Latić decried the neo-Salafists’ treatment of women, defended the Hanafi madhhab from “Wahhabi radicalism” and reasserted the importance of the local traditions and adaptations of Islam, before crying out: “communism is more appealing than al-Misri!”47
So, whereas abstract references to solidarity with the Umma favored re-Islamization of the Bosniak national identity, the actual attitude of transnational Islamic actors jeopardized the Islamic Community’s monopoly on interpreting Islam in Bosnia-Herzegovina, denied that local religious traditions had any value, and thus threatened the ties that had been carefully woven between Islam and the Bosniak national identity. In addition to these divergences on religious matters, political disagreements became apparent in 1994. When the Washington Agreement was signed in March 1994, the mujahidin who had come to Bosnia-Herzegovina to fight for an Islamic state viewed this as an act of treason by the Bosnian authorities. They viewed the signing of the Dayton Agreement in December 1995 in the same light. So it is unsurprising that Izetbegović became involved in these debates. In April 1995, speaking to the governing bodies of the Islamic Community, he stated:
Here we need Islam and faith, not new madhhabs. But as always, there are some demagogues who want to emphasize form over substance, matters of gymnastics and mechanics ahead of morals and true teachings. In the midst of a battle for life and death, while our “to be or not to be” is being played out, they are forcing “scholarly” debates on us about the length of beards or the position of hands and legs during prayers… People are thirsty for real faith, for its religious and moral messages, and not for hollow and sterile debates. Such things dishearten young people and cause considerable damage. So take care of these phenomena and prevent such nonsense from being spread in the name of faith.48
The confrontation with the globalized Islam of the neo-Salafists thus forced the leaders of the SDA and the Islamic Community to rediscover the complexity of the Umma, and to clarify their position in it. Then, despite the criticism levied at Europe, these leaders started reaffirming the European identity of Bosnian Muslims, and the anchoring of Islam (as they practiced it) within the European geopolitical and civilizational framework. Thus, in a 1994 interview with the weekly paper Dani (“The Days”), Izetbegović stated:
Through our faith we are Oriental, through our education we are European. Through our hearts, we belong to one world, and through our minds, to another… Each of us, if he is sincere, must acknowledge that he often asks himself the question [of] who he is, to which world does he belong. As far as I am concerned, I answered myself that I was a European Muslim, and I am just as comfortable with this definition as in a good pair of shoes.49
However, this reaffirmation of a European Muslim identity was not devoid of ambiguity. Faced with secular intellectuals who presented the local form of Islam as a model for a tolerant and European Islam, the Islamic Community denounced the idea of a distinct “Bosnian Islam,” stating that this would lead to “the violation of certain Islamic standards and rules, such as [the prohibition of] alcohol, prostitution, pornography, etc., under the pretense that this is the only way that the Muslims can enter Europe.”50
Izetbegović returned to this theme at the end of the war, when he responded to those who defended the celebration of the New Year:
We are indeed a European country, but that does not mean that we must open our doors to all the European vices: alcohol, pornography, drugs and debauchery of every variety. We will take as a model Europe’s punctuality, hard work and sense of organization, but we will not follow Europe and America in all their traditions, without criteria or measure.51
For the SDA’s leaders and the Islamic Community, the emphasis on the European nature of Islam practiced in Bosnia-Herzegovina thus did not mean that European culture would be accepted without reservation, and especially not the secularization of European societies—including the Bosnian one.
In any case, by signing the Dayton Agreement, the Bosniak leaders placed themselves under the protection of the United States and NATO troops, and consented to the departure of all other foreign combatants. Despite all the tensions that had arisen between the mujahidin and the Bosnian authorities, the Islamic Community and the ARBiH organized ceremonies to thank them and bid them farewell. During one such ceremony, General Rasim Delić, the commander-in-chief of the ARBiH, told the mujahidin leaders:
This was just the first round, and we do not know when the next round (or rounds) will come. That is why your help and that of the Muslim world remains indispensable for this nation, which is located at the border between Islam and Christendom, and it will be indispensable so long as Islam has not been victorious in the world.52
Thus, Delić returned to the idea of a never-ending confrontation between the West and Islam, with the Bosniak nation standing on the outpost. So from the first day of the war until the last day, the Bosniak leaders constantly oscillated between universal values and shock of civilizations, between Western protection and Muslim solidarity. And they mobilized these different worldviews in order to bring the Bosniak nation out of the geopolitical sidelines and give it a place in the world.