10/10/2008

Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each weekday, extracts from the memoirs of Scottish war correspondent, Paul Harris. ‘More Thrills than Skills: A Half-life in Journalism’, is being scheduled for publication next year.

In 1992-3, we knew very little about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Operatives had, in fact, started to fan out into Europe during 1992 and Albania, Bosnia and Chechnya were the first countries to merit their attention.

All were undergoing seismic political change: Chechnya was seeking to break away from an overbearing Moscow, Bosnia from the domination of Belgrade and Albania was, quite simply, in a mess with an exploitable political vacuum evident. All three had large Muslim populations and seemed ripe for the attentions of Al Qaeda. The struggles of their peoples could easily be interpreted as the struggles of Muslim peoples against the infidel.

In 1993-4, Islamic fighters from Algeria, Iran, North Africa and Lebanon arrived in Bosnia at a time when the country seemed likely to fall to the Serbs and Croats. After all, the West seemed to have forgotten that 19th century Bosnian immigrants to Algeria had built possibly the finest mosque in Algiers overlooking the Mediterranean . . .  but the Algerians had not.

Following the effective military takeover in Algeria in 1991, fundamentalist Muslim groups had intensified their struggle in the North African state. Elements from these groups also travelled to Bosnia, although they were not associated with Al Qaeda at this point. But they stiffened resolve amongst the Muslims of Bosnia and assisted in its defence.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, later to become the head of Al Qaeda’s military committee, went to Bosnia as a 19 year-old and tried to join the mujahaddin. Ironically, he was rejected. Instead, he went on to plan the 9/11 attacks less than half a decade later  . . . not for nothing did Martin Bell describe, in his book, In Harm’s Way, the Bosnian war as "the most consequential conflict of our time."

In his view: "It is at least possible, if the Western democracies had reacted earlier and more effectively to the blood-letting in Bosnia, the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon nearly ten years later, might never have occurred at all."

However, these disparate elements became an embarrassment: they were concentrated in late 1994 in the El Mujaheed unit of the Bosnian Army’s 3rd Corps. It was no coincidence that the UN national group assigned to the area north of Zenica was the Turkish battalion. However, as one of their officers observed to me: “We don’t like these people because we are still the secular army created by Kemal Ataturk. These people are fundamentalists and we find them very difficult.”



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