Special Report: Militancy in the Former Yugoslavia



Summary

The recent arrest of three suspected Bosniak radical Islamist militants in Bosnia-Herzegovina demonstrates the lingering potential for militant violence in the former Yugoslavia. The region’s mountainous terrain is conducive to smuggling, raiding and insurgency, which has led its rulers to crack down harshly in reaction to (or in anticipation of) threats. This, in turn, created an environment rife with militant resistance, particularly during the past 100 years. The nature of terrorism in the former Yugoslavia has changed, but the threat of more attacks — mostly from radical Islamist militants — remains.

Analysis

Three suspected Bosniak Islamist militants were arrested after a recent raid on a house in Brcko, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Police searched the home of Adnan Recica and reportedly seized explosives, mobile phone-activated trigger mechanisms, firearms, ammunition, body armor and Arabic-language Islamist propaganda. Authorities seized other military and communication equipment and equipment used in the production of both drugs and explosives. Two other suspects, including Recica’s mother, were also apprehended. Police and media claimed that Recica was planning an attack and had ties to a Wahhabist group in the Brcko district town of Donja Maoca.



The area comprising the former Yugoslavia has been a breeding ground for militant groups and state violence for more than 100 years. Over the centuries, the Balkan Peninsula’s mountainous terrain has been conducive to hit-and-run tactics by insurgents and raiders, and to smuggling. The mountains also allow the region’s population to live in isolated pockets, making a lasting consolidation of the region nearly impossible and encouraging the growth of numerous potential threats to whatever government might be in charge, leading to crackdowns. The Recica arrest shows that even with the (albeit quite limited) presence of international forces and a relative peace in the region, militancy and the potential for violence remain a concern in the Balkans.

The Legacy of Militancy and Government Violence

The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization

The first modern militant group in the former Yugoslavia was the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO), which was active from 1893 to 1945. The organization formed to liberate Macedonia first from the Ottomans and then from the Serbs. During World War II, most VMRO members were absorbed into the Communist-led Partisans of Yugoslavia, led by Josip Broz Tito.

Government Violence During the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes

In 1918, after the declaration of the founding of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Serbian King Aleksandar Karadjordjevic and the Serbian government aimed to consolidate control over Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro. The non-Serbian minorities, however, wanted self-rule. Belgrade used force to achieve its goal and, by the middle of 1928, had carried out at least 600 assassinations (including the killing of the Croatian Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radic on the floor of the parliament in Belgrade) and 30,000 politically-motivated arrests. In January 1929, the king declared a royal dictatorship, and state violence against the primarily Croatian (and pro-democratic) opposition increased.

The Ustasha Croatian Revolutionary Organization

The Ustasha Croatian Revolutionary Organization formed weeks after King Aleksandar’s declaration of a royal dictatorship and soon began collaborating with the VMRO against Belgrade. Ustasha’s goal was to destroy the Yugoslav state and create an independent Croatian state consisting of the territory of modern-day Croatia and all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as Sandjak in Serbia and roughly half of Vojvodina — not just the Croat-majority areas. It carried out sporadic bombings, attacks and a failed uprising. Ustasha also planned and organized the assassination of King Aleksandar, who was killed in Marseilles, France, in 1934 by a VMRO gunman cooperating with Ustasha.



After Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Nazis installed a puppet regime in Croatia with Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic as its head. Pavelic subsequently adopted Germany’s policy regarding Jews, Roma and Serbs and extended that policy to Croatians opposed to the new regime, eventually using a concentration camp system. Ustasha tried to woo the Bosnian Muslims, whom Ustasha saw as “pure” Croats who had converted to Islam under the Ottomans. In Serbia, Germany installed another puppet ruler, Milan Nedic, who used the fascist pro-German Yugoslav National Movement (also known as ZBOR) to carry out the Nazis’ policies against Jews and Roma in Serbia.

Serbian and Albanian Nationalist Militants

World War II also saw the rise of the Serbian Chetniks, who traced their roots to the Balkan Wars of 1912. The ultra-nationalist Chetniks saw all non-Serbs as a threat to their own security and to the creation of a greater Serbia. In 1941, the Chetniks adopted a plan to eliminate non-Serbs from areas they saw as integral to a greater Serbia. During World War II, the Chetniks initially fought the Axis but ended up collaborating with Axis powers, including the Independent State of Croatia, as early as 1942 to fight Tito’s Partisans. In Kosovo, meanwhile, the nationalist Albanian Balli Kombetar organization sided with the Italians. The group wanted to maintain the new Albanian borders drawn by Italy, which made Kosovo Albanian territory, and eliminate Serbs from Kosovo.

Tito’s Partisans

The first Partisan uprising took place in Croatia in June 1941, when Croatian communists heeded Russian leader Josef Stalin’s call to rise against fascism. Further uprisings occurred across the region and across ethnic lines. The Partisans’ propaganda campaign promised the communists revolution, the Croats liberation from Italy, the Serbs a German defeat and the intellectual classes a defeat of the region’s puppet regimes. The Partisan forces prevailed in the end, largely because of their use of geography and propaganda and because they began receiving support from the Allies in 1943.



After the Partisans’ victory in 1945, spontaneous and planned reprisal killings took place against those who collaborated with the wartime puppet regimes and those simply accused of collaborating. The post-war state use of violence was overseen by the Department for the Protection of the People (OZNA), which was formed in May 1944 as the intelligence and counterintelligence apparatus of Tito’s Partisans.

In 1946, OZNA was divided and internal security responsibilities went to the Uprava Drzavne Bezbednosti (UDBa), or the Department of State Security, part of the Interior Ministry. It began to consolidate control as Tito’s regime looked to eliminate opposition. Yugoslav Interior Minister Aleksandar Rankovic (a Serb) told fellow senior government and party members on Feb. 1, 1951, that since 1945, the state had processed more than 3.7 million prisoners and executed 686,000. From 1960 to 1990, UDBa carried out at least 80 assassinations in the Yugoslav diaspora communities in the West. Some victims were suspected World War II war criminals or militants, but many were political dissidents. Sixty victims were Croats, as the Croats made up the largest emigre group of the Yugoslav diaspora and were very active in calling for an independent and Western-allied Croatia. These small emigre groups occasionally attacked embassy personnel and regime interests abroad. However, the extent of emigre violence and regime violence against emigres — as well as “false flag” operations, like the UDBa’s framing of six Croats for terrorism in Australia in 1979 — will never be known, since UDBa archives either were burned or are maintained as state secrets.

Yugoslavia’s Fall and the New Militants

After Tito’s death in 1980 and the Soviet collapse at the end of the Cold War, Croatia and Slovenia wanted more autonomy and capitalist economic reforms. With the Yugoslav government essentially powerless, Serbia took it upon itself to defend the Serbs’ vision of a centralized, Belgrade-dominated Yugoslavia and a state-centered economy. Instrumental in defending this vision was UDBa’s successor, the State Security Service (SDB), which saw Serbian Communist Party leader Slobodan Milosevic as key to maintaining the security-military apparatuses’ control of state resources. The SDB monitored and threatened opposition members inside Serbia and armed Serbian minorities in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, who were swept into a nationalist frenzy after Milosevic consolidated the Yugoslav state and took over Serbian media.

During the resulting wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the SDB not only controlled radical Serbian politicians in Croatia but also formed, trained and financed a unit called the “Red Berets” in Croatia. The group was a special operations unit of the rebel Serbs’ so-called Autonomous Serbian Republic of Krajina. Some of the SDB’s original members would eventually form the Special Operations Unit of the Republic of Serbia.

Kosovo Liberation Army

Formed in Kosovo seven years after Milosevic purged Albanians from Kosovo’s civil and security institutions (as well as its legal economy), the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was originally a small militant group bent on defeating Serbia’s military forces in Kosovo and ending Serbia’s rule over Kosovo. The group’s funding came from the very large Albanian diaspora and small emigre groups profiting from drug trafficking and other criminal activities in Western Europe. The KLA began with small attacks targeting Serbian civilians, law enforcement officials and security forces, but escalated its campaign into an outright insurgency. The group was nearly destroyed, but NATO intervention saved the KLA from extinction and allowed Kosovo to unilaterally declare independence in 2008.

Islamists in Bosnia-Herzegovina

The Yugoslav National Army and Serbian paramilitary campaign against Croatia was redirected against Bosnia-Herzegovina. The U.N. embargo on Yugoslavia left Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Muslim-dominated government less armed than the Serbian-backed paramilitaries, who effectively absorbed much of the Yugoslav National Army’s arsenal in Bosnia-Herzegovina by 1992. Bosnia-Herzegovina’s wartime government encouraged Islamist fighters to help defend the outmanned and outgunned Bosniak community from 1992 to 1995. At least 1,000 foreign Islamist fighters — mostly jihadist Wahhabis looking for a new call to arms — volunteered to fight for the Bosnian army, bringing funding and arms — as well as their radical ideas. Hundreds of those volunteers reportedly stayed in Bosnia after the war. These radicals were (and still are) primarily concentrated in the city of Zenica and in the surrounding areas of Central Bosnia.

The Future of Militancy in the Balkans

Serbia

Serbia faces the potential of greater tensions with Albanians in the southern Serbian regions of Presevo, Medvjed and Bujanovac. Albanian militants there laid down arms in 2001 after being granted amnesty and broader minority rights. However, if the Serbian government’s requests to the international community to divide Kosovo along ethnic lines are given consideration, those militants could become active again and demand that Serbia be divided along ethnic lines as well.

One unpredictable factor is the ultra-nationalist Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and its leader Tomislav Nikolic, which are in the running for the January 2012 parliamentary elections. An SNS victory could prompt reactions from both the Bosniak and Albanian communities in Serbia. The nature and severity of the reactions would depend on steps taken by the SNS (which mostly comprises former members of the Serbian Radical Party, which had paramilitaries that were quite active in the wars against Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo). For now, it seems that the risk of violence is low because of the SNS’s campaign to legitimize itself and become known as a pro-European Union center-right party.

Serbia’s Sandjak region has a high concentration of Muslims and borders Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo. Tensions have been escalating between the more religious and less religious Muslims. The moderates favor compromise and integration with Serbia and the acceptance of limited local autonomy. They are also currently in the majority among the region’s Muslims and have representation in the Serbian government. The radicals, however, want closer ties with Bosnia and Kosovo. Continued high unemployment and increasing poverty, coupled with an SNS victory, could lead more Muslims to join the radicals.

Kosovo

The main threat in Kosovo is ethnic violence. Kosovar Foreign Minister Enver Hoxhaj said July 1 that dividing Kosovo along ethnic lines would create a “domino effect” of violence. Serbian government recognition of a unified, independent Kosovo would cause a backlash among the Serbian minority in Kosovo. Kosovar government recognition of its Serbian-majority northern regions’ right to join Serbia would spark an Albanian backlash in Kosovo and possibly in the Albanian-majority areas in southern Serbia, Albanians in western Macedonia (where a delicate power-sharing arrangement between ethnic Macedonians and Albanians is in place) could even get drawn in to the reaction, as they did after the war in Kosovo.



Even without a division of Kosovo, the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) has seen has seen a steady increase in hostility from Albanians — not just because of anger over Kosovo’s lack of independence or constant EULEX monitoring of Kosovo’s government, but also because of EULEX’s efforts to clamp down on illegal trafficking. Kosovo is a transit point for black market, human, drug and weapons trafficking. Such activities constitute a significant portion of the local economy and often involve former KLA fighters. Former members of the KLA also have considerable influence in Kosovar politics. The harder EULEX pushes to remove criminal organizations from Kosovo, the more likely a backlash (possibly including violence) becomes.

Bosnia-Herzegovina

Bosnia-Herzegovina still faces political instability. The central government in Sarajevo and the Office of the High Representative view Republika Srpska (RS) Prime Minister Milorad Dodik as an obstacle to a centralized state, as Dodik has publicly stated that he hopes RS achieves as much self-rule and autonomy as possible. There is also rising Croat discontent and political boycotts over perceived electoral gerrymandering and competing political visions — one minority and Islamist and one secular and nationalist — among the Bosniaks, both of which clash with the Croat and Serbian visions of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

However, there seems to be a consensus that despite the political bickering and competing ideas about the state’s organizational structure, violence — especially organized violence — is not to be used, at least for now. The governments in Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb all would prefer increasing foreign investments and eventual membership in the European Union. Although Bosnia’s three main groups are far from achieving their geopolitical goals, the peripheral powers — Zagreb and Belgrade — are keeping their cousins in check so as to not spoil their own main goal: EU membership. Sarajevo is attempting to contain Islamists by using continual vigilance, but it is impossible to root out the problem of Islamist militancy as long as the economy is poor and the political situation is unresolved.

The Region As a Whole

Islamist militancy is the most viable threat facing states in the former Yugoslavia. Islamist militants do not consider Bosniak geopolitical goals, but religious and ideological ones. Sometimes small numbers of radicalized individuals enter European countries and carry out attacks. Alternately, as the Frankfurt airport shooting of U.S. Air Force personnel by a German-born ethnic Albanian Islamist with dual Kosovo-German citizenship demonstrated, some are radicalized by Islamist communities in Europe and become grassroots jihadists. The Recica arrest in Bosnia-Herzegovina revealed the latest in a string of radical Islamist plots and attacks over the past 10 years. During that time, authorities in the region have arrested at least 20 people on charges of plotting to take part in terrorist activities, actually participating in such activities or committing murder.

Tensions among the Balkans’ ethnic and religious groups will ebb and flow as they have done throughout history. However, the main threat to the region’s fragile security is transnational Islamist militancy. Though the nature of terrorism in the Balkans has changed, the 100-year-old threat of militant violence will remain.

Fala qrcu da su Ameri konačno shvatili suštinsku razliku između SDA i SDP, tj. frakciju islamista i frakciju sekularnih nacionalista. Socijaldemokracije ni za lijeka.