{"id":1799,"date":"2020-10-05T11:13:55","date_gmt":"2020-10-05T10:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.balkan-conflicts-research.com\/archive\/?page_id=1799"},"modified":"2020-10-05T11:13:55","modified_gmt":"2020-10-05T10:13:55","slug":"you-are-only-allowed-to-see-bosnia-in-black-and-white-brendan-oneill-january-2004","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.balkan-conflicts-research.com\/archive\/you-are-only-allowed-to-see-bosnia-in-black-and-white-brendan-oneill-january-2004\/","title":{"rendered":"‘You are only allowed to see Bosnia in black and white’ – Brendan O’Neill, January 2004"},"content":{"rendered":"

23 January 2004\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

‘You are only allowed to see Bosnia in black and white’<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

by Brendan O’Neill\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

‘Some people seem pissed off that I did not take sides over the war in\u00a0Bosnia. I suppose I was more interested in reporting all of the facts.’<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Professor Cees Wiebes, a senior lecturer in the Department ofInternational Relations at Amsterdam University, caused a storm with\u00a0<\/span>his\u00a0book Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995. As part of the\u00a0official Dutch inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 – when\u00a0Bosnian Muslims were killed by Serbs in a United Nations-designated\u00a0<\/span>safe\u00a0haven towards the end of the Bosnian war – he was charged with\u00a0<\/span>analysing\u00a0the role of Western intelligence and security services in Bosnia,\u00a0including secret arms supplies and ‘other covert actions’.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Wiebes, in the words of one report, ‘stalked the corridors of secret\u00a0service headquarters in Western capitals’ for five years, asking\u00a0<\/span>awkward\u00a0questions and gathering info. The end product is a dense, 500-page\u00a0<\/span>book,\u00a0first published in April 2002 and reissued this month, described by one\u00a0British professor as ‘one of the most sensational reports on Western\u00a0intelligence ever published’ (1).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Wiebes had unrestricted access to Dutch intelligence files; he\u00a0interviewed high-level Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs who were\u00a0involved in the war; he studied intelligence documents from, among\u00a0others, the Canadian Department of National Defence, the army\u00a0headquarters of the Bosnian Federation, the US National Archives and\u00a0<\/span>the\u00a0George Bush Library; and he interviewed some of the leading Western\u00a0officials involved in the war, including then president Bill Clinton’s\u00a0secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former British Labour foreign\u00a0secretary Lord Owen, who played a negotiating role in Bosnia. After\u00a0<\/span>five\u00a0years of investigation, Wiebes paints a thorough picture of the role\u00a0played by Western intelligence services, including which states helped\u00a0to arm which faction, why, and what the consequences were.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>One of the most sensational sections of the book – and the bit which\u00a0grabbed the headlines (‘temporarily’ says Wiebes) when it first came\u00a0<\/span>out\u00a0in 2002 – details the role of the Clinton administration in giving the\u00a0‘green light’ to Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims. Wiebes catalogues\u00a0<\/span>how,\u00a0from 1992 to January 1996, there was an influx of Iranian weapons and\u00a0advisers into Bosnia. He describes how Iran, and other Muslim states,\u00a0helped to bring Mujihadeen fighters into Bosnia to fight with the\u00a0Muslims against the Serbs, ‘holy warriors’ from Afghanistan, Chechnya,\u00a0Yemen and Algeria, some of whom had suspected links with Osama bin\u00a0Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan. And all of this took place under\u00a0the watchful eye of a Clintonian policy of ‘no instruction’ – that is,\u00a0that US officials should do nothing to prevent such movements into\u00a0Bosnia; that, in fact, they should covertly give them the ‘green\u00a0<\/span>light’.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet this is also the bit of the book that seems to have won Wiebes few\u00a0friends. He says that some of his findings and conclusions, especially\u00a0on the arming of the Bosnian Muslims, have been ignored. ‘If you do not\u00a0have a black and white picture of the Bosnian war, then something is\u00a0apparently wrong with you’, he says. ‘I found there was much sympathy\u00a0for the Bosnian Muslims, especially among journalists; and sometimes I\u00a0think there is an inclination to silence things that do not fit withtheir view of the war.’<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Wiebes was surprised when his book didn’t receive that much press\u00a0attention in Britain and the USA. He insists this isn’t a case of sourgrapes, as the ‘reviews I am getting in scholarly journals are very\u00a0good’ – but in a world obsessed with ‘bin Laden and the Mujihadeen and\u00a0where they came from’, he thought his findings about America’s role in\u00a0allowing the Mujihadeen into Bosnia during the 1990s would make a\u00a0splash. He has a point.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>The USA threw itself into the Bosnian war after the inauguration of\u00a0President Clinton in January 1993. During his election campaign in\u00a0<\/span>1992,\u00a0Clinton made the lifting of the UN arms embargo against the Bosnian\u00a0Muslims a central policy platform. UN Resolution 713, adopted on 25\u00a0September 1991, ruled that all member states must suspend ‘the delivery\u00a0of all weapons and military equipment to Yugoslavia’ (2). In spring\u00a01993, Clinton’s national security adviser Anthony Lake outlined the\u00a0USA’s preferred policy on Bosnia: the ‘lifting [of] the arms embargo\u00a0with arms going to Bosnian Croats and Muslims and air power to stop\u00a0Serbian interference with these shipments.’ (3)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>The Yugoslav tragedy is often understood to have been caused by too\u00a0little Western intervention, offered too late in the conflict. In fact,\u00a0Western intervention in the Balkans exacerbated tensions and helped to\u00a0sustain hostilities. By recognising the claims of separatist republics\u00a0and groups in 1990\/1991, Western elites – the American, British, French\u00a0and German – undermined government structures in Yugoslavia, increased\u00a0insecurities, inflamed conflict and heightened ethnic tensions. And by\u00a0offering logistical support to various sides during the war, Western\u00a0intervention sustained the conflict into the mid-1990s. Clinton’s\u00a0<\/span>choice\u00a0of the Bosnian Muslims as a cause to champion on the international\u00a0stage, and his administration’s demands that the UN arms embargo be\u00a0lifted so that the Muslims and Croats could be armed against the Serbs,\u00a0should be viewed in this light.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Wiebes documents how in 1992 and 1993, Iran had started secretly arming\u00a0the Bosnian Muslims. On 4 September 1992, the CIA discovered an Iran\u00a0<\/span>Air\u00a0Boeing 747 at Zagreb airport in Croatia; it contained weapons,\u00a0ammunition, anti-tank rockets, communication equipment, uniforms and\u00a0helmets destined for the Army of Bosnia Herzegovina (ABiH). In October\u00a01992, then Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic (now deceased) visited\u00a0Tehran and ‘entered into an agreement according to which Iran would\u00a0again attempt to supply necessary goods via Zagreb’. On 1 November\u00a0<\/span>1992,\u00a0an Iranian Boeing 747 arrived in Zagreb with 60 tons of ‘humanitarian\u00a0goods’ (suspected to be a massive consignment of weapons). In a three\u00a0<\/span>to\u00a0five-month period in late 1993, around 30,000 ABiH soldiers were armed\u00a0and equipped by Iran and also Turkey (4). The Croats also benefited\u00a0<\/span>fromthe Iranian weapons-smuggling, often creaming off around 30 to 50 per\u00a0cent of the imports as payment for the use of Zagreb territory.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

During this first stage of Iran’s arming of the Bosnian Muslims and\u00a0Croats, the Americans were aware of what was happening but adopted a\u00a0‘blind eye’ policy. Wiebes’ book quotes then Croatian minister of\u00a0defence, the late Gojko Susak, who said that in 1992 and 1993 ‘the\u00a0Americans never protested. When they asked, we would say that our\u00a0original weapons were simply hatching babies’ (5). The imports from\u00a0<\/span>Iran\u00a0via Croatia ceased towards the end of 1993, when there was heightened\u00a0conflict between Bosnian Muslims and Croats. But with the suspension of\u00a0hostilities on 23 February 1994, and the American-backed formation of\u00a0the federation of Croatia and Bosnia on 13 March 1994, the Iranian\u00a0supplies could be kickstarted again – and during this second round of\u00a0weapons-smuggling, the Americans were much more ‘actively’ supportive.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Wiebes records that on 27 April 1994, Croatian officials visited then\u00a0<\/span>US\u00a0ambassador to Zagreb Peter Galbraith, to ask him how the Clinton\u00a0administration would respond to the reopening of the Iranian weapons\u00a0pipeline. Galbraith passed the issue on to US deputy secretary of state\u00a0Strobe Talbott and national security adviser Anthony Lake, who weighed\u00a0up the advantages of arming the Bosnian Muslims against allowing Iran\u00a0greater influence in the Balkans; they told Galbraith that he had no\u00a0instructions, a ‘deft way of saying that the United States would not\u00a0actively object’ (6). As Wiebes documents in his book, Talbott and Lake\u00a0then discussed the issue with President Clinton on board Air Force One\u00a0on 27 April 1994 – and ‘it was then decided to give a green light to\u00a0<\/span>the\u00a0arms supplies from Iran to Croatia’ (7).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>This was a period when the Clinton administration was publicly hostile\u00a0to Iran. Indeed, Clinton officials often criticised Iran for\u00a0<\/span>‘sponsoring\u00a0radical political groups and terrorists around the world’, and for\u00a0arming Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the West Bank (8). Yet at the\u00a0same time the Clinton administration effectively granted permission to\u00a0Iran to ship arms to the Bosnian Muslims; as Wiebes points out, by\u00a0<\/span>early\u00a01995 ‘Iranian cargo landed in Zagreb three times a week’ (9). Wiebes\u00a0tells me that America’s green-lighting of arms deliveries from Iran\u00a0could have pushed President Izetbegovic and his party further towards\u00a0Islamic fundamentalism. ‘What I discovered is that Turkey and Saudi\u00a0Arabia were very willing to deliver weapons and to lure Izetbegovic\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>away\u00a0from Iran, but the orientation of the Bosnian government was far more\u00a0towards Iran.’<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>This US-backed pipeline between Iran and the Bosnian Muslims – the way\u00a0in which Muslim states were allowed to strengthen their influence over\u00a0Bosnia often at the expense of Turkish influence – also opened the\u00a0<\/span>gates\u00a0to the arrival of Mujihadeen forces. According to US Lieutenant Colonel\u00a0John Sray, an intelligence officer in Sarajevo from April to August\u00a01994, ‘Approximately 4,000 Mujihadeen, supported by Iranian special\u00a0operations forces, have been continually intensifying their activities\u00a0in central Bosnian for more than two years’ (10). In his book, however,\u00a0Wiebes says that the numbers remain uncertain: ‘There are no reliable\u00a0figures on the number of mercenaries or volunteers in Bosnian, Srpska\u00a0and Croatia.’ (11) Where Sray estimated that there were 4,000\u00a0Mujihadeen, the UN put the number at about 600 and the USA later\u00a0claimed, after 1995, that there were about 1,200 to 1,400.<\/p>\n

‘I discovered that the role of the Mujihadeen in Bosnia probably wasn’t\u00a0that big’, Wiebes tells me. ‘But the fact that they could set up\u00a0training camps there, possibly for hundreds of volunteers, I thought\u00a0that was quite amazing.’ Wiebes says the Mujihadeen came from Yemen,\u00a0Algeria, Chechnya, the Middle East and of course Afghanistan. This is\u00a0where the Reagan administration first helped to found and fund the\u00a0Mujihadeen, including Osama bin Laden’s Office of Services set up to\u00a0recruit volunteers from overseas, to fight against the Soviet invasion.<\/p>\n

Between 1985 and 1992, US officials estimate that 12,500 foreign\u00a0fighters were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and guerrilla warfare\u00a0tactics in Afghan camps that the CIA helped to set up (12). Some of the\u00a0Mujihadeen then took these skills to Bosnia.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Wiebes says that the Mujihadeen played a small but important role in\u00a0<\/span>the\u00a0Bosnian war. ‘They were mainly concentrated around Zenica in central\u00a0Bosnia. They weren’t much liked by the local population, who found them\u00a0arrogant and extreme in their views. They were usually kept away from\u00a0the front. But they were seen as good fighters; they were used as shock\u00a0troops, for surprise attacks and so on.’ Wiebes says that ‘everyone was\u00a0aware’ that the Mujihadeen were in Bosnia; after all, ‘they killed a\u00a0British soldier early on, so Britain and others were certainly aware of\u00a0their arrival’. Yet it was not until the signing of the US-backed\u00a0<\/span>Dayton\u00a0Accord in late 1995 that US forces sought to remove the Mujihadeen from\u00a0Bosnia.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>‘As soon as the war was over, the first assignment of the various CIA\u00a0station chiefs in the region was to get them out’, says Wiebes. ‘This\u00a0was also the task of MI6 in the region. Great pressure was put on\u00a0Izetbegovic’s government to force the Mujihadeen out of Bosnia, which\u00a0<\/span>he\u00a0started to do very reluctantly. I also discovered that some nasty\u00a0<\/span>things\u00a0were done to the Mujihadeen when it was decided they had to go. There\u00a0were SAS raids on training camps where many Mujihadeen were killed;\u00a0<\/span>some\u00a0were forced to leave across the Croatian border where they were then\u00a0shot by Croatian guards; there were also car accidents and hit-and-run\u00a0incidents, covert operations to get rid of some Mujihadeen.’<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Despite these attempts to get the Mujihadeen out of Bosnia, throughout\u00a0the late 1990s the Clinton administration discovered that it is one\u00a0thing to give the green light to the movement of Islamic groups across\u00a0territories, but quite another to rein them back in again. In 2000, the\u00a0State Department raised concerns about the ‘hundreds of foreign Islamic\u00a0extremists’ who became Bosnian citizens after fighting against the\u00a0Serbs, and who pose a potential terror threat to Europe and the United\u00a0States. US officials claimed that one of bin Laden’s top lieutenants\u00a0<\/span>had\u00a0sent operatives to Bosnia, and that during the 1990s Bosnia had served\u00a0as a ‘staging area and safe haven’ for al-Qa’eda and others.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Indeed, in the run-up to Clinton’s and Blair’s Kosovo war of 1999, the\u00a0USA backed the Kosovo Liberation Army against Serbia – and according to\u00a0a report in the Jerusalem Post in 1998, KLA members, like the Bosnian\u00a0Muslims before them, had been ‘provided with financial and military\u00a0support from Islamic countries’, and had been ‘bolstered by hundreds of\u00a0Iranian fighters or Mujihadeen …[some of whom] were trained in Osama\u00a0bin Laden’s terrorist camps in Afghanistan’ (13).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>As Wiebes says, the Mujihadeens’ venture into Bosnia is a fascinating\u00a0story – but it remains little reported. After 9\/11, many journalists in\u00a0the West explained in detail how the Mujihadeen had its origins in\u00a0Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War, in America’s last stand against\u00a0the Soviet Union. Yet few have explored America’s role in the\u00a0Mujihadeens’ second outing in the early to mid-1990s – when Mujihadeen\u00a0were transported from the ghettos of Afghanistan and the Middle East\u00a0into Europe, from an outdated battleground of the Cold War to the major\u00a0world conflict of the day. This is a process that must surely have\u00a0impacted on the globalisation of Mujihadeen forces, on their\u00a0<\/span>development\u00a0from an Afghan-based guerrilla army in the late 1980s to the roving,\u00a0borderless terrorists that some of them have become today.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Wiebes has noted an unwillingness on the part of journalists to delve\u00a0into the role of Iran and the Mujihadeen in Bosnia. ‘Some journalists\u00a0spotted these developments, but what I found quite strange is that some\u00a0of them didn’t want to report it. One Dutch journalist discovered the\u00a0arms shipments in Zagreb airport but chose not to report it because he\u00a0felt very warmly towards the Bosnian Muslims. There is a certain bias.’<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>What Wiebes has encountered is the moral correctness that still\u00a0surrounds discussions of the Bosnian war. For many Western liberal\u00a0journalists, Bosnia became much more than a conflict to be reported –\u00a0<\/span>it\u00a0became a mission, a campaign, a battle between Good (the Bosnian\u00a0Muslims) and Evil (the Serbs). Many journalists played a central role\u00a0<\/span>in\u00a0calling for the arming of the Bosnian Muslims and for Western\u00a0intervention on the side of the Muslims against the Serbs; indeed,\u00a0Wiebes notes in his book that the pressure from the media, and\u00a0Republicans, in the early 1990s to lift the arms embargo against theBosnian Muslims ‘should certainly not be underestimated’ in influencing\u00a0the Clinton administration’s policy (14).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>In such a climate, Western intervention in aid of the Bosnian Muslims\u00a0has come to be seen as an unquestionably positive thing, beyond\u00a0interrogation and debate – except that there was apparently too little\u00a0of it, offered too late in the day. That the arming of the Muslims\u00a0allowed Iran a greater influence over the Balkans is often overlooked;\u00a0that it appears to have given rise to a Bosnian state that is far from\u00a0liberal is downplayed; and that it allowed the Mujihadeen a mission and\u00a0a focus during the 1990s remains underreported. The Bosnian war, it\u00a0seems, has been looked at in black and white for too long.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 by Cees Wiebes can be\u00a0bought at the Lit Verlag website\u00a0[ http:\/\/www.lit-verlag.de\/isbn\/3-8258-6347-6 ].<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

(1) America used Islamists to arm the Bosnian Muslims, Richard J\u00a0Aldrich, Guardian, 22 April 2002<\/p>\n

(2) UN Security Council Resolution 713, 25 September 1991<\/p>\n

(3) Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, Cees Wiebes, Lit\u00a0Verlag, 2003, p161<\/p>\n

(4) Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, Cees Wiebes, Lit\u00a0Verlag, 2003, p159-162<\/p>\n

(5) Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, Cees Wiebes, Lit\u00a0Verlag, 2003, p166<\/p>\n

(6) Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, Cees Wiebes, Lit\u00a0Verlag, 2003, p167<\/p>\n

(7) Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, Cees Wiebes, Lit\u00a0Verlag, 2003, p167<\/p>\n

(8) See The Clinton administration’s ‘wink and nod’ to allow Iran into\u00a0Bosnia, House Republican Policy Committee, 26 April 1996<\/p>\n

(9) Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, Cees Wiebes, Lit\u00a0Verlag, 2003, p176<\/p>\n

(10) Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, Cees Wiebes, Lit\u00a0Verlag, 2003, p207<\/p>\n

(11) Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, Cees Wiebes, Lit\u00a0Verlag, 2003, p207<\/p>\n

(12) See Cross-border terrorism: a mess made by the West, by Brendan\u00a0O’Neill<\/p>\n

(13) See Cross-border terrorism: a mess made by the West, by Brendan\u00a0O’Neill<\/p>\n

(14) Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, Cees Wiebes, Lit\u00a0Verlag, 2003, p161<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Brendan O’Neill is a British columnist. He is the editor of Spiked and has been a\u00a0columnist for The Australian and The Big Issue. He also blogs for the Daily Telegraph<\/i> and has written for a variety of publications in both Europe and America.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

23 January 2004\u00a0 ‘You are only allowed to see Bosnia in black and white’ \u00a0 by Brendan O’Neill\u00a0 \u00a0 ‘Some people seem pissed off that I did not take sides over the war in\u00a0Bosnia. I suppose I was more interested in reporting all of the facts.’ \u00a0 Professor Cees Wiebes, a senior lecturer in the … <\/p>\n

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