Prosecutor looks at Bosnia Wahhabi group's financing - Feature

Sarajevo - The police raid on a radical Islamic stronghold in Bosnia and the arrest of seven suspected extremists was a "success," but the question of who finances the group remains open, a state prosecutor said in an interview published Friday. "The first and basic question is who finances those people, because nobody works there," Bosnia's chief prosecutor, Milorad Barasanin, told the weekly magazine Dani. "In the fight against crime, all you have to do is to follow the money flow."

Until the question of financing can be answered, it will remain unclear what the motives are of those who support the promotion of fundamentalist Islam in the largely secular Bosnian Muslim community.

Asked about reports that Islamic fundamentalists, living in a deeply isolated village in north-eastern Bosnia, were financed by the Wahhabis seated in the Vienna mosque Al-Tawhid, he said that he "will not answer now, but will also not deny it.

Hundreds of Bosnian police on February 2 raided the Gornja Maoca village, 120 kilometers north-east of Sarajevo, arresting seven people and seizing 17 handguns, a dozen hunting rifles and some computers.

Suspicions that terrorism-related threats were developing in the village, home to some 30 fundamentalist Islamic families, had spurred the operation, the prosecutor's office said at the time.

Media reports said that villagers, members of the radical Wahhabi branch of Islam, applied Sharia laws were hostile to outsiders, turning away reporters.

Prosecutors got an extended 30-day detention for the suspects, saying they needed the time to study evidence collected in the raid. Now they have until early March to indict or release the seven.

Though Bosnian authorities denied speculation that the raid was a result of Western pressure, it did occur shortly before the scheduled visit of European Union security experts and may have been intended to influence Brussels' decision on whether to scrap the strict visa regime that is applied toward Bosnia.

There are long-standing concerns that terrorists have burrowed into Bosnia's Islamic community during and since the bloody ethnic fighting in the 1990s.

During the 1992-95 Bosnian war, some 1,500 Muslims, mostly from Arab nations, joined the Bosnian Muslims in the fight against the Christian Orthodox Serbs.

Though a clause in the US-brokered peace deal at the end of 1995 said all foreign fighters had to leave Bosnia within a month, most of the foreigners swiftly got citizenship and were allowed to remain.

Concerns about the foreigners were renewed after September 11, 2001, and Bosnia, acting under strong US pressure, began reviewing its adopted nationals from Arab countries.

According to figures from a commission in charge of vetting these new citizens, of the 1,255 people who received Bosnian citizenship, 661 were stripped of it by 2007. But a strong Wahhabi presence, with one of their strongholds in Gornja Maoca, was already in place by then.

The Wahhabi community developed thanks to with funds from Arab nations, mostly Saudi Arabia. According to Radio Free Europe, Saudi Arabia provided some 600 million dollars in "support for Islamic activities" in Bosnia between 1992 and 2002.

With the large chunk of that money going to the mainstream Muslim community, the Islamic leadership in Sarajevo has apparently been reluctant to criticize Riyadh for also helping the Wahhabis.

The Bosnian Muslim community leader, Mustafa Ceric, in an interview three years ago, described the Wahhabis as a "phenomenon that sometimes makes our head hurt."

He also said at that time that the Wahhabis were financed from Austria: "The root...is not in Bosnia, but in Vienna, where a center operates in ways incompatible with the Bosnian tradition."

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/308937,prosecutor-looks-at-bosnia-wahhabi-groups-financing--feature.html.