Wednesday, June 24, 2009
LALGARH : ULTRA LEFT TAKES ON LEFT
SECURING LALGARH
Lalgarh – There is so much information that I do not think I can add anything substantive to the ongoing debate. However, I have been told to write a small piece, after all, the blog was originally “BENGAL UNDER ATTACK”.
A little history:
Bengal was a feudal society run by a few zamindars (landlords who owned villages) and they subjugated the villagers (subjects under them) and treated them worse than slaves. There were a few exceptions, but very few. When zamindari system was abolished post independence, the rich landlords continued their sway over the vast many by manipulating the political process and using police to brutalize the masses.
(Well, I belong to one such "zamindar" family and I will like to believe that my ancestors were an exception - though I cannot be sure).
Out of desperation, poverty and hunger, the mass movement started in a small village in Bengal – Naxalbari – hence the Naxal movement gets its name from this village – Bengal’s contribution to India.
FRONTLINE article : THE ROAD FROM NAXALBARI - THE organ of the Communist Party of China (CPC) seemed to be consumed by a sense of euphoria as it used these words to describe the Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal in May 1967. It went on to add that the "revolutionary group of the Indian Communist Party has done the absolutely correct thing" by adopting the revolutionary line advanced by Chinese leader Mao Zedong, which involved "relying on the peasants, establishing base area in the countryside, persisting in protracted armed struggle and using the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities".
The editorial concluded that "a single spark can start a prairie fire" and that "a great storm of revolutionary armed struggle will eventually sweep across the length and breadth of India". This optimism, was obviously motivated by similar hopes expressed by the leadership of the Naxalbari uprising - Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal. Charu Mazumdar, the principal ideologue of the "first authentic Maoist phenomenon" in India, held that "there was an excellent revolutionary situation in the country with all the classical symptoms" and that organisations such as the Communist Party of India (Marxist), to which Mazumdar originally belonged, had "betrayed the cause of Indian revolution by choosing the path of parliamentarism and class collaboration".
The CPI(M) swept to power and immediately went about taking land from wealthy zamindars and assorted "landlords" and distributed it amongst the peasants and landless villagers. This was done in “people’s courts” - and was hailed and continues to be hailed as best land distribution system India has witnessed.
Logically, land got distributed, and the peasants and tribals should have been a happy lot. They were for some time, till refugees started streaming in from Bangladesh post 1971 and the process continues. Along with Hindus came Muslims too. And thus on finite land holdings there was pressure from excess population from another country.
Here the Left Front (CPIM - note here M = Marxist and not Maoist) leaders played a dirty game. To increase their cadre base, they welcomed any and all refugees from Bangladesh and gave them ration cards under false names – thus giving them de-facto Indian citizenship and a right to vote. Which these “infiltrators” did with great gutso. They formed the CPI(M) cadre base and with this the CPI(M) rural bosses became the new “zamindars”.
Hence started the "new" exploitation of the villagers – specially on the original villagers and tribals from the "infiltrators" under CPI(M) banner and patronage. The infiltrators from Bangladesh became unabashed CPI(M) supporters and ruled the countryside with absolute brute force - some of the local villagers too joined in – as this was the only means to survive the tyranny of CPI(M).
CPI(M), which was at the forefront to abolish the zamindars in Bengal by re-distributing land, ended up themselves as the new zamindars – only worse. With political power and brute cadre force, they rigged elections after elections and ruled Bengal for 30 years – and continue to do so.
However, keeping villages without power and without jobs over such a long period, also provided fodder for revolution. This was now the far-left (Maoist) taking on the Left (CPIM). While there is justification for a retaliation against the corrupt Left Ministers, I will condone violence. But the question to ask – did they have a choice?
NAXAL TO MAOISTS
The other truth is that Mamata Banerjee sniffed an opportunity to break the CPI(M) stranglehold and joined hands with the Maoists – this is a frightening positioning of forces. And in this, walks in Jamaat and sides with Mamata and Trinamool.
What will come out one day – the role of Jamaat in driving away Nano (TATA's small car project) from Bengal. It orchestrated the entire event and played Mamata Banerjee around – showing the number of Muslim votes that she will get and Mamata caved in.
In Kolkata, one of maids in my friends house is a Muslim and she said that she will vote for Mamata as she is a Muslim. And we asked her what does she mean – Mamata is not Muslim. The maid said – Mamata has converted to Islam - see her picture giving namaaz – her cleric has told her and her ilk this story.
After the Maoist insurgency is pushed back, the Jamaat will bare its fangs in Bengal – wait for a few months to a year to see this phenomena. Muslims comprise over 25% of population in Bengal (IB puts the figure at > 40% due to infiltration), in government jobs they get a mere 3% representation – hence the new Jamaat revolution. And Mamata is poised to take the mantle of saviour from CPIM.
Read an earlier article I wrote: Mamata, Purnedu Bose and Siddiqullah : A potent combination
If we leave the villages, the CPIM has turned Kolkata to a “near” dying city. All the big companies that were headquartered in Bengal ran away to other states fearful of lockouts, strikes and militant trade unionism. It has come to such a state today, that Kolkata – one of the four major cities of India, could only notch up an abysmal number 26 on the list of India's rich cities.
For a city Kolkata's size, with an un-updated population of 15 million, drumming up a mere 15,853 millionaires hides a nightmarish horror tale. A comparison with the other three metros makes the city's tragedy quite clear. Comparable to Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore in both size and number of people, Kolkata figures nowhere even remotely near the 137,992, 100,039 and 104,852 millionaires that India's other main cities have to show for themselves. Chandigarh, a city with a population 15 times less, has 33,962 millionaires, twice that of Kolkata!
CPIM failed to generate any employment avenues for its citizens. Far from it, it helped drive away the companies in droves from Bengal. Even today they are playing politics with Prakash Karat dragging his feet on declaring the Maoists as a terrorist organization, though he has no qualms in declaring VHP as one!
The para-military force in Lalgarh are cooped in police quarters that do not have electricity or proper sanitation. They are starving due to the conditions prevailing there – a touch of a dose of reality. The politicians of Bengal should go there with food and employment – sustainable – and this menace will end. Guns will drive the Maoists underground – much like hot geysers.
And Lalgarh is therefore a hot geyser which erupted on the landscape of Bengal. Truth be told, Bengal is ripe for many such “geysers” in the future.
For an excellent perspective - do read this book : RED SUN by Sudeep Chakravarti.
INDRANI ROY MITRA'S INTERVIEW WITH GOUR CHAKRABORTY - spokesman for CPI (MAOIST)
What led to the Lalgarh violence?
Every act of violence has its roots in torture and repression. Be it the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Santhal movement or Tebhaga movement, all uprisings resulted from popular discontent.
Tribals of Lalgarh have suffered for years. They have been tortured and insulted by the ruling Left Front and the police.
What is happening at Lalgarh is nothing but an explosion of tribals' pent-up grievances. Lalgarh, if you remember, has been on the boil since last November when a landmine exploded near Bhadutala on the route of the convoy of West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and then central ministers Ram Vilas Paswan and Jiten Prasada.
The ministers were returning after laying the foundation of a steel plant in Salboni. Soon after, the police launched a massive combing operation and arrested local school students and harassed tribal women. In protest, angry tribals in and around Lalgarh dug up roads, virtually cutting off Lalgarh from the rest of Midnapore. They also demanded a public apology from the police for the alleged excesses against them. The area has witnessed continuous clashes since then.
Hinting at a state within a state, tribal leader Chhatradhar Mahato of the People's Committee Against Police Atrocities said on Thursday his organisation could build infrastructure in just eight months in Lalgarh? Is it true?
Absolutely. Though the PCAPA is an infant organisation, it has a mission to better the lives of the tribals. The PCAPA is fighting for the tribals's cause, it is seeking justice for them. Like the PCAPA, we too are against violence. But what is happening in Lalgarh is the outburst of the people who have been suffering for the last 32 years.
It is being alleged that you are using women and children as shields.
This is utter nonsense. We are not using women and children as shields. Hundreds and thousands of tribal women have come out in the open spontaneously, shouting slogans against the police and the administration. They are walking in tandem with us.
How do you justify the loss of so many innocent lives? Why are you killing policemen? They are just doing their jobs.
We are orchestrating a revolution at Lalgarh. Can you cite an instance where a revolution took place without bloodshed? Our motive is not to take innocent lives. We just want to resist coercion and police atrocities. To counter force, we have to combat and resort to violence. We really feel sorry for those who get martyred in the process, but we can't help it.
The security forces are on their way to free Lalgarh. Are you equipped enough to resist them?
One should not underestimate us. We know our strength and weaknesses. We are also aware how strong our 'enemies' are.
You mean your cache of arms and ammunition is huge enough.
I am not supposed to talk about it. But do remember, we are strong enough to put up a brave fight.
The CPI-M is alleging that the Trinamool Congress is giving you tacit approval. Is it true?
No, not at all. The Trinamool Congress did seek our support in its fight against the CPI-M in Nandigram. But (Trinamool chief) Mamata Banerjee had only wanted to use Nandigram as a tool to win elections. That was her ulterior motive.
Ms Banerjee recently stated that your party is an offshoot of the Communist Party of India-Marxist.
As I told you, Mamata Banerjee used Nandigram as an election plank. She used it as a pawn for her party to win Lok Sabha seats. She claims to be against special economic zones. Then why didn't she stand by us in our movement against the Jindal group's planned SEZ in Salboni area? Also, her demand to the Tatas to free 400 acres of land lacked clarity. She should have demanded the entire 1,000 acres. Therefore, we refuse to give any importance to what she says about us.
As we all know, West Bengal saw a huge political change in the recent Lok Sabha polls. The change occurred through a democratic process. Why don't you tread the same path to bring about the so-called transformation?
The Left Front government has been emerging winner in every election for the last three decades. What has it done for the state of West Bengal? What has it done for the tribals of Lalgarh? Nothing. Which democracy are you talking about?
In a recent press conference, one of your colleagues, Bikash, said that the people of Lalgarh want West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee dead. The landmine blast that narrowly missed the chief minister's car last November was an attempt on his life. Would you like to comment on it?
On August 14, 2004, Dhananjoy Chatterjee, a rapist and a murderer, was hanged to death in Kolkata. The incident brought to an end Chatterjee's 14-year-long legal battle to escape the noose, as human rights groups held protests outside the Alipore Central Jail against the capital punishment. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and his wife Meera had then reasoned why a rapist and a murderer like Chatterjee should be hanged. Bhattacharjee's government has killed hundreds of people, raped countless women during its tenure. Therefore, may I ask why should he escape capital punishment?
You regret that your party missed its target in November?
Of course. Our party wanted to kill Bhattacharjee. It failed in its mission. We have every reason to regret. Think of the French Revolution, it was popular force that had brought down a corrupt monarchy. The kings and the queens were guillotined. History tells us that at times, the crooked and the greedy need to be eliminated.
You are the publicist of your party. Your task is to convey the CPI (Maoist)'s messages to the people. Who are your colleagues who actually carry out these attacks?
The attacks that we plan are carried out by People's Guerilla Army. PGA members act clandestinely. They move in the dark of the night and launch surprise attacks on our enemies. Once PGA members's skills reach the optimum level, their group is rechristened the People's Liberation Army and is considered empowered enough to take on the enemies head on.
Can the Lalgarh incident be compared to the Naxalite movement?
It will be improper to compare the two. The Naxalite movement had a different context. What is happening in Lalgarh is the tribals' way of resisting police atrocities. It's their method of saying, 'Enough is enough'. Those involved with the Naxalite movement had a different motive altogether.
Your party has called a bandh in Bihar, Orissa, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Chattisgarh on June 22 and 23. Could you clearly spell out your party's demands?
We want the entire Lalgarh to be a liberated zone for the tribals. We want them to have a democracy of their own, a democracy that will be guided by a new and free economy. We have three-point demands: Central and state forces must be withdrawn from the entitre jangalmahal; the state government must officially apologise to the tribals for its torture and misbehaviour and it should immediately put an end to police atrocities. Violence in Lalgarh will continue unless our demands are met."
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
KEMAL ATATURK - ONLY PROSTITUTES MUST WEAR VEIL
KEMAL ATATURK
Anyone visiting modern Turkey today finds it hard to believe that just 80 years ago the majority of women hid their faces behind veils. The unveiling of Turkish women was achieved in a few short years through the paradoxical solution of one man — KEMAL ATATURK, Turkey's revolutionary leader. As women were reluctant to show their faces, Ataturk issued an edict that read "prostitutes must wear veils". This problem was solved paradoxically: not by forbidding veils, but by permitting them, albeit for a special group.
Pervez Musharraf sometimes used to get into apoplectic fits in his desire to show his affinity with Ataturk, but in reality most of the Islamic countries and their leaders live in 14th century.
Nicholas Sarkozy has only followed on the traditions of Kemal Ataturk. He said: "The problem of the burka is not a religious problem, it's a problem of liberty and women's dignity. It's not a religious symbol, but a sign of subservience and debasement. I want to say solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France. In our country, we can't accept women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. That's not our idea of freedom."
And he is right !!
DANIEL PIPES in his blog: PROSTITUTES HAD TO WEAR HIJAB 7000 YEARS AGO
Prostitutes dedicated to the fertility Goddess were working at the Temples of the fertility Goddess in Canaan. There were also male priests wearing woman's clothes in these Temples. Priestesses working as prostitutes, and homosexual males were present in the Temples in Sumer. These prostitutes had to cover their heads. It is known also that in the earlier periods there were whores among the Jews who were having sexual intercourse in the name of God. That is why God in Deuteronomy 23:17 orders: "There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel." There is another order from God in Deuteronomy 23:18: "You shall not bring the hire of a whore....into the house of the Lord your God." These Jewish prostitutes used to cover their faces and their bodies with a veil. Veil originated for women in Sumer and it was their compulsory duty to have "sex" to worship the mother goddess. One can see same tradition of prostituting for goddess- in Greeks and Romans and for this the women have to take veil and thus one can understand the use of veil by women.
The veil is thus a symbol of prostitution sanctioned by a religion some 7000 years back.
================
The burqua (hijab /veil) I understand is donned as a means of protection yet comes through as being a symbol of subservience - often raising in the public consciousness questions like :
a) Are these women so ugly that they hide their faces?
or
b) Are these men afraid that their women will run off with other men ? Thus need to shield their faces from the stares of other men!
Are their women so weak that will respond to anyone who makes an overture or an advance?
And the men reveal their insecurity in the low confidence they display in their own ability to "protect their women".
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
GREEN CORRIDOR IN THE BALKANS
This is a seminal piece of research from the Balkans. After finishing reading look back at few points:
1. Kosovo independence, camp BONDSTEEL and oil – interference by US, UK, NATO.
2. Global Islamic Caliphate spewing network are headquartered in UK – Hizbut Tahrir and Tableeghi Jamaat (both aligned to Al Qaeda).
3. The role of Ghazwatul Hind, Khorasan and the march of the Army from South Asia to Europe and beyond.
4. The author misses the crucial part ISI played in Bosnia, though he mentions Khalid Sh Md. Read more of ISI & Bosnia here : ISI & AL - QAEDA.
Already the US has arm twisted India into making two important concessions post 26/11 - and even had the audacity to ask us to trim our consulate in JALALABAD, Afghanistan as it may be creating trouble for the Pakistanis in SWAT, BALCOHCISTAN !!
1. Talk to Pakistan even after they have taken no action against the perpetrators and in fact thumbed their nose by releasing the mastermind Hafeez Saeed.
2. Army presence from Kashmir is thinning down for a sinister plan for greater autonomy and increasing trade across LOC (Line of Control), which will see Pakistan taking greater control of the valley.
The following article by Dr. Srdja Trifkovic (1) was the basis for the author’s presentation and an accompanying discussion at the meeting in Copenhagen on May 17, 2009. It is one of a series of essays collected in the book Kosovo: The Score 1999-2009, which was published earlier this year by the American Council for Kosovo and the Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies. It is reproduced here with permission.
U.S. Policy and Geopolitics of Jihad: The Green Corridor in the Balkans by Srdja Trifkovic
The Green Transverse or “Green Corridor” (in Serbian/Croatian: Zelena transverzala (2) is a geopolitical concept that has been used in two distinct, albeit interconnected meanings:
1. To define the long-term goal of Islamist ideologues, both in the Balkans and in the wider Muslim world, to create a geographically contiguous chain of majority- Muslim or Muslim-dominated polities that will extend from Turkey in the southeast to the northwestern-most point of Bosnia (120 miles from Austria). (3)
2. To denote the ongoing process of increasing ethno-religious self-assertiveness among major traditionally Muslim communities in the Balkans, (4) this has had a fourfold effect:
(a) Expanding the geographic area of their demographic dominance;
(b) Establishing and/or expanding various entities under Muslim political control with actual or potential claim to sovereign statehood;
(c) Enhancing the dominant community’s Islamic character and identity within those entities, with the parallel decrease of presence and power of non-Muslim groups; and
(d) Prompting Muslim communities’ ambitions for ever bolder designs in the future, even at the risk of conflict with their non-Muslim neighbors. Giving some clarity to this concept is essential to a comprehensive understanding of the motives, actions, and emerging expectations of different actors in the Yugoslav wars in general and the ongoing Kosovo crisis in particular.
Reality Denied — Political, cultural, religious and demographic trends among Muslim communities in the Balkans strongly suggest that the Green Corridor is taking shape, either deliberately or spontaneously. (5) Nevertheless, many Western academic experts and media commentators (especially in the English-speaking world) have shown the tendency to be a priori dismissive of any suggestion that a long-term Islamic geopolitical design exists in the Balkans, let alone that it is being deliberately and systematically pursued. The notion of the Green Corridor was thus criticized as a product of Serbian propaganda with “Islamophobic” overtones, although its most authoritative proponents have been institutions and experts with no ethnic or personal axe to grind in the Balkan imbroglio.
The Bosnian war was still raging when Sir Alfred Sherman, former advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of The Lord Byron Foundation, warned that the Muslims’ objective was “to create a ‘Green Corridor’ from Bosnia through the Sanjak to Kosovo” that would separate Serbia from Montenegro. (6) Western powers are “in effect fostering this Islamistan,” Sherman warned, and developing “close working relations with Iran, whose rulers are keen to establish a European base for their politico-religious activities.” In addition, “Washington is keen on involving its NATO ally Turkey, which has been moving away from Ataturk’s secularist and Western stance back to a more Ottomanist, pan-Muslim orientation, and is actively helping the Muslim forces.”
THE GREEN CORRIDOR
Sherman’s diagnosis proved to be prescient. A decade later it was echoed by Col. Shaul Shay of BESA Center at Bar-Ilan University. He noted that “the Balkans serve as a forefront on European soil for Islamic terror organizations, which exploit this area to promote their activities in Western Europe, and other focal points worldwide.” His verdict regarding the Green Corridor is disquieting:
The establishment of an independent Islamic territory including Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania is one of the most prominent achievements of Islam since the siege of Vienna in 1683. Islamic penetration into Europe through the Balkans is one of the main achievements of Islam in the twentieth century. (7)
Shay’s account shows how the Bosnian war provided the historical opportunity for radical Islam to penetrate the Balkans at a time when the Muslim world — headed by Iran and the various Islamic terror organizations, including al-Qaeda — came to the aid of the Muslims. The Jihadist operational-organizational infrastructure was thus established.
John Schindler, professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer, concurs: in his view the Balkans provide the missing piece in the puzzle of al-Qa’ida’s transformation from an isolated fighting force into a lethal global threat. (8) Radical Islam played a key role in the Yugoslav conflict, Schindler says: like Afghanistan in the 1980s, Bosnia in the 1990s became a training ground for the mujahidin, leading to blowback of epic proportions.
The Green Corridor paradigm reflects Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which used the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a paradigmatic case of the so called “fault-line wars” between Islam and the rest. Many years before the first shots were fired in Bosnia in 1992, that paradigm was confirmed by Alija Izetbegovic. In his Islamic Declaration Izetbegovic denied any chance of “peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions”:
“Islam contains the principle of ummet, the tendency to unite all Muslims into a single community — a spiritual, cultural and political community… It is a natural function of the Islamic order to gather all Muslims and Muslim communities throughout the world into one.” (9)
During the Bosnian war (1992-1995) Izetbegovic presented a “pluralist” image to the West, but his followers acted in accordance with his primary message. The fruits of their labor — and that of their coreligionists in another half-dozen countries in the region — are clearly visible along a thousand miles’ trail through the middle of today’s Balkans.
Ottoman Legacy — Unlike other European peninsular regions (Iberia, Italy), the northern boundary of the Balkans is not marked by mountain ranges. That boundary is open and crossed by several key transit corridors connecting Central and Western Europe with the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. This has been the bane of the region’s history, inviting invaders and turning the Balkans for most of the modern era into an object of competing designs and interests of outside powers.
The Ottoman conquest and occupation left an indelible mark on the region. It started in 1354, when Ottoman Turks crossed the Dardanelles from Asia Minor and established a foothold on the northern shore. The subsequent spread of Islam in the Balkans was “by the sword”: it was contingent upon the extent of Ottoman rule and the establishment of political and social institutions based on the teaching of Kuran and the Islamic legal and political practice. The line of the attack went from Thrace via Macedonia to Kosovo; through the Sanjak into Bosnia all the way to the Una River, was finally stopped at the Habsburgs’ Military Frontier created in the 16th century.
It is noteworthy that the geographic thrust of the Ottoman attack and later colonization of Muslims from other parts of the Empire in the Balkans coincided exactly with the “Green Corridor.” From earliest days the Green Corridor has had a geopolitical logic that influences political and military decision-making. Furthermore, Ottoman efforts at Islamization of the local population were more determined, and more successful, along the “Corridor” axis (Thrace-Macedonia-Kosovo-Sanjak-Bosnia) than in other conquered Christian lands (e.g. in mainland Greece, central Serbia, northern Bulgaria, or Wallachia).
The Ottoman conquest destroyed the materially and culturally rich Christian civilization of Byzantium and its dynamic and creative Slavic offspring in Serbia and Bulgaria. The conquered populations became second-class citizens (“dhimmis”), whose physical security was predicated upon their abject obedience to the Muslim masters. (10) They were heavily taxed (jizya, or poll tax, and kharaj) and subjected to the practice of devshirme: the annual “blood levy” (introduced in the 1350s) of a fifth of all Christian boys in the conquered lands. Conversion to Islam, a phenomenon more strongly pronounced along the Green Route than in the central regions of the Empire, was near-universal among northern Albanians, including the settlers in Kosovo. This contributed to a new stratification of the society under Ottoman rule and a new power balance. It favored local converts to Islam, eager to assert their power over their former co-religionists, Christian gaiurs. This resulted in far harsher treatment of their Christian subjects than was mandated from the Porte, and helped ignite uprisings in Serbia (1804) and Greece (1821). The 19th century witnessed a more thorough oppression of the Christian communities under Ottoman rule than at any prior period.
At the same time, some great powers (Great Britain in particular) supported the continued Turkish subjugation of Balkan Christians on the grounds that the Ottoman Empire was a “stabilizing force.” France’s and Britain’s alliance with Turkey against Russia in the Crimean War (1853-1856) reflected a frame of mind and a strategic calculus — the desire to score points in the Muslim world vis-à-vis another, non-Muslim power — that has manifested itself in recent years in the overt or covert support by those same powers for the Muslim side in Bosnia and Kosovo, and somewhat less overtly in the Israeli-Arab conflict. (BuA: NOTE THIS IMPORTANT POINT ABOUT UK, and its continued dalliance with Pan Islamic terror organizations like HIZBUT TAHRIR and TABLEEGHI JAMMAT by giving them headquarters in UK)
Demography — The most enduring, politically and culturally relevant consequence of the Ottoman rule in the Balkans is the presence of large indigenous Muslim communities. The Balkan Peninsula is one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse regions in the world, especially considering its relatively small area (just over 200,000 square miles) and population (around 55 million). (11) Of that number, Eastern Orthodox Christians — mainly Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs and Slavic Macedonians — have the slim majority of around 53 percent; Sunni Muslims (11 million Turks in European Turkey and a similar number of Albanians, Slavic Muslims and ethnic Turks elsewhere) make up 40 percent; and Roman Catholics (mainly Croats) are at around 5 percent. (12)
Those communities do not live in multicultural harmony. Their mutual lack of trust that occasionally turns into violence is a lasting fruit of the Turkish rule. Four salient features of the Ottoman state were institutionalized, religiously justified discrimination of non-Muslims; personal insecurity; tenuous coexistence of ethnicities and creeds without intermixing; and the absence of unifying state ideology or supradenominational source of loyalty. It was a Hobbesian world, and it bred a befitting mindset: the zero-sum-game approach to politics, in which one side’s gain is perceived as another’s loss. That mindset has not changed, almost a century since the disintegration of the Empire.
Most Balkan Muslims live in continuous swathes of territory along the Green Corridor. There are but two major gaps in the chain. One is in northeastern Macedonia, where 80 miles divides easternmost Albanian villages near Kumanovo from the westernmost Bulgarian-Muslim (i.e. Pomak) villages in the Bulgarian southwestern corner at Blagoevgrad. The other is in the region of Raska (northern Sanjak) in southwestern Serbia, along the main road and railway from Belgrade to Montenegro.
The Christian communities all over the Balkans are in a steep, long-term demographic decline. Fertility rate is below replacement level in every majority-Christian country in the region. (13) The Muslims, by contrast, have the highest birth rates in Europe, with the Albanians topping the chart. On current form it is likely that Muslims will reach a simple majority in the Balkans within a generation.
The Role of Modern Turkey — Turkey’s European foothold is populous (over 11 million) and overwhelmingly mono-ethnic (Turkish) and mono-religious (Muslim); the Christian remnant is negligible. A nation-state of 72 million, the Turkish Republic is based on a blend of European-style nationalism and an Islamic ethos that breeds a sense of intense kinship with the Muslim communities further west in the Balkans.
The Kemalist dream had never penetrated beyond the military and a narrow stratum of urban elite. For decades described as the key to U.S. strategy in eastern Mediterranean, in the Middle East, and—more recently—in the oil-rich Caspian region and the sensitive ex-Soviet Central Asia, the country is ruled by the ever more openly Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The AKP “espouses an ideology of cultural divide, tension, and conflict, despite all of the pro-Europe rhetoric in which Islamists in Turkey engage in their pursuit to exploit the European Union for their agenda of Islamization.” (14) That agenda is no longer confined to the borders of the Turkish state. There is a rekindled sense of kinship among the growing ranks of Turkish Islamists with their Balkan co-religionists and with the old Ottoman domains further west. The re-Islamization and assertiveness of Turkey under Erdogan is essential to the revival of Islam and ethnic self-assertiveness all along the Green Corridor:
The [Yugoslav] wars of the 90s opened whole areas where they [Muslims] were in the majority: While the regional realities modified, so did geopolitics between those who remained in their traditional homes in the Balkans and the ever expanding Islam over Europe itself [with] pan-European Islamic clusters from the West southward into the Balkans themselves. Of the utmost importance to Muslims in Western Europe, but especially the Balkans, is the admission of Turkey into the EU, for Ankara will be a voice for all Muslims inside the E.U. itself. (15)
Without a strong, solidly supportive anchor at its southeastern end, no Muslim revival in former Ottoman lands along the Balkan Green Corridor would be possible. The mix of nationalism and Islamism in Turkey aims not only at reversing the process of modernization of the past 85 years; it also aims at reversing the outcome of the preceding period of Ottoman decline. Under the AKP Turkey is becoming increasingly revisionist, potentially irredentist, and detrimental to stability in the Balkans.
Bulgaria — Of the country’s 8 million inhabitants, ethnic Turks account for just under ten percent (750,000). Southern Bulgaria is also home to several hundred thousand Pomaks, Islamized Slavic speakers. Their number is unknown as they are not recognized as a distinct ethnic group: officially they are “Muslim Bulgarians.”
Most Pomaks and Turks live in six districts that connect Turkey with FRY Macedonia: Haskovo, Kardjali, Smolian, Blagoevgrad, and southern parts of Pazardzhik and Plovdiv. The Pomaks are experiencing an intense Islamic religious revival, mainly financed from the Arab world. Hundreds of new mosques have been built in recent years. Middle Eastern “charities” are also establishing Kuranic schools, paying for trips to the Hajj, and offering scholarships to young Pomaks to study Islam in Saudi Arabia. Since religion defines their identity, “these poor, pastoralist Slavic Muslims have become prime targets for Arab proselytizers seeking to make inroads in Bulgaria, the EU country with the largest indigenous Muslim population.” (16)
In addition to the religious revival, the Pomaks are establishing a new form of ethnic identity. (17) Some Pomak activists assert that, far from being “Islamized Bulgarians,” they are descended from ancient Thracians. (18) Others assert Arab descent and an Islamic identity that antedates Turkish conquest. Many Bulgarians see such assertions as the first step in a future call for the establishment of a Pomak state — Islamic in character — in the Rhodope region as the key link to the Western Balkans. Some politicians warn of “unprecedented aggression based on religious and ethnic grounds” and accuse Muslim activists of “contempt for the laws of the Republic of Bulgaria.” (19) Even pro-Western sources in Sofia concede that “it is stretching credibility to imagine” that Bulgaria is not a target of radical Islam. (20)
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia — FYROM is widely considered the weakest state in the Balkans. Macedonian Slavs account for 66 percent (1.3 million) and Albanians for 25 percent (500,000) of the republic’s two million people. The latter, 98 percent Muslim, have had a remarkable rate of growth since 1961, when they accounted for 13 percent of the total. Albanian birthrate is more than twice that of the Slavs. Following the signing of the Ohrid Agreement that ended the 2001 armed rebellion by the “NLA” (a KLA subsidiary); the state itself is effectively becoming bi-national and bilingual. Albanians are de facto the second constituent nation in FYROM. They are guaranteed proportional share of government power and ethnicallybased police force.
Having secured their dominance along the borders of Albania and Kosovo, the current main thrust of the Albanian ethno-religious encroachment has the country’s capital city as its primary objective. It is a little-known fact that today’s Skopje is effectively as divided as Nicosia, or Jerusalem, or Mostar. Once a city quarter becomes majority-Albanian, it is quickly emptied of non-Albanian (i.e. Slavic-Macedonian, non- Muslim) population. The time-tested technique is to construct a mosque in a mixed area, to broadcast prayer calls at full blast five times a day, and to create the visible and audible impression of dominance that intimidates non-Muslims (“sonic cleansing”). In those mosques a Wahhabi-connected imam or administrator is invariably present to keep an eye on the rest. (21) Through their links with Arab donors they can influence the payment of salaries to imams and administrative staff.
During the 2001 Albanian rebellion the NLA was largely financed by the smuggling of narcotics from Turkey and Afghanistan, but in addition to drug money, “the NLA also has another prominent venture capitalist: Osama bin Laden.” (22) French terrorism expert Claude Moniquet estimated in 2006 that up to a hundred fundamentalists, “dangerous and linked to terrorist organizations,” were active or dormant but ready in sleeper-cells in Macedonia. New recruits are offered stipends to study Islam in Saudi Arabia, and they are given regular salaries and free housing to spread the Wahhabi word on their return to Macedonia. (23)
Both demographically and politically, the Republic of Macedonia has a precarious present and an uncertain future. In the aftermath of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence, FYROM’s long term stability and sustainability are open to doubt.
Kosovo — Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton warned in early 2008 that “Kosovo will be a weak state susceptible to radical Islamist influence from outside the region… a potential gate for radicalism to enter Europe,” a stepping stone toward an anti-Christian, anti-American “Eurabia.” (24) His was a rare voice in Washington to warn of the ongoing merger of aggressive greater-Albanian nationalism and transnational Islamism. Bolton’s verdict is shared by former UN commander in Bosnia, Canadian Gen. Lewis McKenzie. In 1999 the West intervened “on the side of an extremist, militant Kosovo-Albanian independence movement,” he says. “The fact that the KLA was universally designated a terrorist organization supported by al- Qaeda was conveniently ignored.” (25)
Since the 1999 US-led NATO intervention, Kosovo has become the crime capital of Europe. (26) Crime is the province’s main economic activity: hard drugs (primarily heroin), followed by human trafficking, associated sex trade, and arms smuggling. (27) But no less significant, from the vantage point of the Green Corridor, has been the symbiosis that has developed between Kosovo’s Albanian crime families and the Jihadist networks abroad. As a result, according to a 252-page report compiled by U.S. intelligence agencies in April 2006, Islamic militants have been freely crisscrossing the Balkans for more than 15 years: “extremists, financed in part with cash from narcotics smuggling operations, were trying to infiltrate Western Europe from Afghanistan and points farther east via a corridor through Turkey, Kosovo and Albania.” (28)
This process started well before the 1999 NATO intervention, but the Clinton Administration ignored the warnings. (29) The relationship was cemented by the zeal of KLA veterans who joined Bin Laden’s network in Afghanistan. (30) Iran also supported the Albanian insurgency in Kosovo, hoping “to turn the region into their main base for Islamic armed activity in Europe.” (31) By the end of 1998 U.S. DEA officials complained that the transformation of the KLA from terrorists into freedom fighters hampered their ability to stem the flow of Albanian-peddled heroin into America. (32)
By that time the NATO bombing of Serbia was in full swing, however, and the mujaheddin were, once again, American “allies.”
A decade later Kosovo is run by those “allies.” It is the worst administered and most corrupt spot in Europe, (33) a mono-ethnic hotbed of criminality and intolerance, a major source of irredentism and regional instability — and a key pillar of the Green Corridor.
Sanjak — The region known to Muslims as Sandžak (“administrative district” in Turkish) is one of the most critical geopolitical pressure points in the Balkans. It covers some 8,500 sq.km. along the border between Serbia and Montenegro, linking Kosovo to the southeast with Bosnia to the northwest. Bosniaks and Muslims-bynationality accounted for 52 percent while Serbs and Montenegrins had 43 percent, with smaller groups making up the balance. The crucial demographic gap in the Green Corridor exists in the northwestern half of Sanjak, comprising three municipalities in Serbia (Priboj, Nova Varos and Prijepolje) and Pljevlja in Montenegro. If there is to be a fresh crisis in the Balkans over the next decade, it is to be feared that this will be its location.
After Montenegro proclaimed independence in May 2006, the Muslim demand for autonomy is focused on the six municipalities on the northern side of the border, in Serbia. Such an entity would have a 58% overall Muslim majority. More importantly, even in the reduced format it would still provide the all-critical land bridge between Kosovo and Bosnia.
Bosnia — Alija Izetbegovic’s memorable assertion in his Islamic Declaration that “there can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions,” and that his goal is “a great Islamic federation spreading from Morocco to Indonesia,” was not unusual for a sincere Islamist. (34)
(BuA: Read my very first article in my blog: ISLAM - WHY DOES IT NOT INTEGRATE WITH HOST COUNTRIES?)
Bill Clinton was still in the White House when a classified State Department report warned that the Muslim-controlled parts of Bosnia were a safe haven for Islamic terrorism. (35) This was confirmed in November 2001 when Bosnian passports were found in a house in Kabul used by the fleeing Taliban. (36) The core of Bin Laden’s Balkan network consists of the veterans of El Moujahed brigade of the Bosnian-Muslim army. The unit was distinguished by its spectacular cruelty, including decapitation of prisoners to the chants of Allahu-akbar. (37)
After the end of the Bosnian war, many Muslim volunteers remained. (BuA note - THESE WERE PAKISTAN BASED TERROR MODULES OF LASHKAR E TAIBA, JAISH E MOHAMMAD. Read it here : ISI & AL QAEDA) (38) The Bosnian-Muslim government circumvented the Dayton rules by granting them Bosnian citizenship. (39) The Bosnian veterans went on to perpetrate murder and mayhem in many countries in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and North America. (40) They planned the Millennium Plot and the bombing of the Al Khobar building in Riyadh. (41) They plotted to blow up U.S. military installations in Germany. (42) Even 9/11 itself had a Bosnian Connection: Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who planned the 9/11 attacks, was a seasoned veteran of the Bosnian jihad, as were two of the hijackers. (43)
As Jane’s Intelligence Review concluded in 2006, “The current threat of terrorism in Bosnia and Herzegovina comes from a younger, post-war generation of militant Islamists, radicalized by US actions in Iraq and AFGHANISTAN.” (THE PAKISTANI ISI, LASHKAR E TAIBA ETC NEXUS)
The Green Corridor and the War on Terrorism — In the Balkans, a phenomenon initially based on local groups is morphing into an integral part of a global network. Al-Qaeda and its loosely linked Balkan offshoots, or self-starting independent cells merely inspired by it, are capable of fielding operatives who are European in appearance and seemingly integrated into the Western society — the “white al-Qa’eda.” (44) Western law-enforcement officials concede that the region has become “a paradise” for Islamic radicals.” (45)
By contrast, Western politicians and diplomats are typically evasive. They do not deny the existence of the problem, but tend to relativize it by adding that it is unlikely to disturb the political and security balance in the region, or to damage Western interests. As a former diplomat notes, “Then usually follows the reassuring mantra about the pro-European orientation of secularized Balkan Muslims with the optimistic conclusion that the accelerated process of the Euro-integration of the whole region would narrow the space for radical Islamism until such tendencies will finally disappear.” (46)
A major fault of the Western approach is its naïve faith in the attractive powers of secularisation. There is a growing gap between the reality of Islam in the Balkans and Western mainstream narrative about the allegedly moderate and tolerant “Balkan Islam.” The problem of the Green Corridor will not be resolved without critical reexamination of Western policies as well as Western illusions. That problem has morphed over the past two decades into a demographic, social and political reality:
“[W]hile the Muslims have established a continuity which drives a wedge within Christian Central Europe, the West is looking with indifference at that evolving situation which they hope will create a docile, Turkish-like Islam. But in view of the trouble Turkey itself is suffering from Muslim fundamentalists, it is doubtful whether these hopes will be fulfilled.” (47)
(BuA: Actually the author hit it right when he pointed out the western interests not being hit. The western interest is Oil & Gas and the Green Corridor ensures that oil pipelines are under control of Islamic assets that the West controls. However, the havoc these Isalmist will rein on the host countries seems oblivious to this Cheney, Haliburton led Western consortium. The Isamists are feeding into the greed of these corporations and entities into the West and quietly taking over an important part of Europe)
The U.S. policy in Southeast Europe over the past two decades in general, and Washington’s Kosovo policy in particular, have had the effect, by design or default, to favor the aspirations of various supposedly pro-Western Muslim communities in the Balkans along the geographic line extending from Turkey north-westwards towards Central Europe. (48) That policy was based on the expectation that satisfying Muslim ambitions in a secondary theater will improve the U.S. standing in the Muslim world as a whole. (BuA: ALSO OIL & GAS)
The policy has never yielded any dividends, but repeated failure only prompts its advocates to redouble their efforts. Former U.S. Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns thus declared on February 18, 2008, a day after Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence: “Kosovo is going to be a vastly majority Muslim state, given the fact that 92 to 94 percent of their population is Muslim, and we think it is a very positive step that this Muslim state, Muslim majority state, has been created today. It’s a stable — we think it’s going to be a stable state.” (BuA: BURNS FORGOT TO MENTION THE AMBO PIPELINE, CAMP BONDSTEEL in KOSOVO)
If it is intrinsically “a very positive step” for the United States that a “vastly Muslim state” is created on European soil that had been “cleansed” of non-Muslims then it should be expected that Washington will be equally supportive of an independent Sanjak that would connect Kosovo with Bosnia, of a centralized, i.e. Muslim-controlled Bosnia that will abolish the legacy of Dayton, or of any other putative Islamistan in the region — from yet-to-be federalized Macedonia to a revived Eastern Rumelia in southern Bulgaria. It is worthy of note that the Organization of the Islamic Conference statement, to which the State Department referred so approvingly, announced that the Islamic Umma wishes its brothers and sisters in Kosovo success: “There is no doubt that the independence of Kosovo will be an asset to the Muslim world and further enhance the joint Islamic action.” (49)
“There is no doubt,” indeed. Far from providing a model of pro-Western “moderate Islam,” Kosovo, Muslim Bosnia, Sanjak, western Macedonia, and southern Bulgaria are already the breeding ground for thousands of young hard-line Islamists. Their dedication is honed in thousands of newly-built, mostly foreign-financed mosques and Islamic centers. The intent was stated by the head of the Islamic establishment in Sarajevo. “The small jihad is now finished … The Bosnian state is intact. But now we have to fight a bigger, second jihad,” Mustafa Ceric, the Reis-ul-Ulema in Bosnia-Herzegovina, declared over a decade ago. This statement reflects the inherent dynamism of political Islam: a truce with Dar al-Harb is allowed, sometimes even mandated, but a permanent peace is impossible for as long as there is a single infidel entity refusing to submit to Dar al-Islam.
If Western and especially U.S. policy in the Balkans was not meant to facilitate the Green Corridor, the issue is not why but how its effects paradoxically coincided with the regional objectives of those same Islamists who confront America in other parts of the world. Far from enhancing peace and regional stability, such policies continue to encourage seven distinct but interconnected trends centered on the Green Corridor:
(e) Pan-Islamic agitation for the completion of an uninterrupted Transverse by linking its as yet unconnected segments.
(f ) Destabilization of Bosnia resulting from constant Muslim demands for the erosion of all constitutional prerogatives leading to the abolition of the Republika Srpska.
(g) Growing separatism among Muslims in the Raska region of Serbia, manifest in the demand for the establishment of an “autonomous” Sanjak region.
(h) Continuing intensification of greater-Albanian aspirations against Macedonia, Montenegro, Greece, and rump-Serbia.
(i) Further religious radicalization and ethnic redefinition of Muslims in Bulgaria, leading to demands for territorial autonomy in the Rhodope region.
(j) Ongoing spread of Islamic agitation, mainly foreign-financed, through a growing network of mosques, Islamic centers, NGOs and “charities” all along the Route.
(k) Escalation of Turkey’s regional ambitions and Ankara’s quiet encouragement of all of the above trends and phenomena.
In all cases the immediate bill will be paid by the people of the Balkans, as it is already being paid by Kosovo’s disappearing Serbs; but long-term costs of the Green Corridor will haunt the West. By encouraging its Albanian clients go ahead with the UDI, the U.S. administration has made a massive leap into the unknown. That leap is potentially on par with Austria’s July 1914 ultimatum to Serbia. The fruits will be equally bitter. While their exact size and taste are hard to predict right now, that in the fullness of time both America and Europe will come to regret the criminal folly of their current leaders is certain. Pandora’s Box is wide open.
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BuA end note: The world may remember 9/11 as the date Twin Towers were brought down. But it has a far more significant connotation with the Islamic world and the Balkans. It is the date, Muslims were defeated in Europe at the gates of Vienna. For an excellent reading, go to: THE OTHER SEPTEMBER 11th.
There is also a metaphysical component to this Balkan tale - maybe I will put in the next article.
Notes
1 Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, for many years foreign affairs editor of Chronicles, is Executive Director of The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies.
2 The term “Zelena transverzala” first gained prominence 25 years ago, just before the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984. The organizing committee — dominated by Bosnian Muslim members of the Communist Party (“League of Communists,” SKJ) — decided to give the sports hall built for the event an unusual name, “Zetra.” This was the acronym for the Green Corridor (ZElena-TRAnsverzala); it supposedly referred to the belt of urban parkland in central Sarajevo. Some observers — including Bosnian anti-terrorism expert Dzevad Galijasevic, himself a Muslim — believe that the choice of the name was anything but incidental.
3 In a 2001 report by the Italian security services, the dorsale verde is defined as “the project of Islamic colonization of the Balkans that aims at the gradual establishment of a green corridor to include all regions in which predominantly Muslim ethnic groups prevail.” Cf. Fiorenza Saranzini: “Soldi e moschee, Osama avanza nei Balcani.” Corriere della Sera, November 8, 2001, p. 11. See also “Come nasce la dorsale verde“ in Limes, 3/1998, pp. 15-27.
4 Massimo Nava, “Il nostro Afghanistan”, in Limes Quaderni Speciali 4/2001, pp. 177-185.
5 Cf. Laura Iucci: “La Bosnia resta un serbatoio di terroristi.” Limes (Rome), No 6-2003, pp. 203-208.
6 Sir Alfred Sherman: “Let’s Remove the Blinkers.” The Jewish Chronicle, September 30, 1994.
7 Shaul Shay, Islamic Terror and the Balkans. Transaction Publishers, 2008.
8 John R. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad. Zenith Press, 2007.
9 Alija Izetbegovic, Islamska deklaracija. Sarajevo: Mala muslimanska biblioteka, 1990.
10 “The attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master toward slaves,” a British diplomat, H.E.W. Young, reported as late as 1909, “whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed.”
11 All data based on official statistics, adjusted for Panonian (non-Balkan) regions of Serbia and Croatia.
12 The region’s once-thriving Jewish community was destroyed during World War II, with the enthusiastic participation of two Waffen SS divisions, Hanjar (Bosnian-Muslim) and Skenderbey (Kosovo- Albanian).
13 It now stand at -0.83 percent in both Bulgaria and Greece.
14 Bassam Tibi, “Turkey’s Islamist Danger.” Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2009.
15 “The Role of the Balkan Muslims in the Shaping of Europe,” Muslim Media Network, May 4, 2008.
16 Christopher Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate. Praeger, 2007, p. 106.
17 In November 2008 the “Justice Federation,” a Pomak NGO in the town of Gotse Delchev, declared hat Pomaks were separate ethnicity and demanded their own TV channel and political party.
18 This claim is similar to the Albanian assertion of “Illyrian” descent: by implication, Orthodox Christian Slavs (Serbs, Bulgarians) are the relative “newcomers,” whose claim to the land is therefore more tenuous.
19 FOCUS News Agency, January 10, 2009: www.focus-fen.net/index.php?id=n166573.
20 Clive Leviyev-Sawyer,”Radical Islam in Bulgaria?” The Sofia Echo, April 16, 2007.
21 Deliso, op. cit., p. 84.
22 The Washington Times, June 22, 2001.
23 “Fissures in Balkan Islam,” The Christian Science Monitor, February 14, 2006.
24 Voice of America interview, February 17, 2008.
25 Lewis Mackenzie, “We Bombed the Wrong Side in Kosovo.” The National Post, April 6, 2004.
26 Less than a year after NATO intervention, on 10 March 2000, the UN human rights rapporteur Jiri Dienstbier declared that “Kosovo is in chaos,” having become “a mafia paradise.” Reuters, 20 March 2000.
27 Cf. Norbert Spinrath, president of the Association of German Police Officers, in Der Spiegel, December 15, 1999. In March 2008, a similar picture was presented in a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
28 “Terrorists use Balkan corridor.” International Herald Tribune, April 18, 2006.
29 The Jerusalem Post, September 14, 1998.
30 USA Today, November 26, 2001.
31 The Sunday Times (London), March 22, 1998.
32 The Washington Times, May 4, 1999.
33 In a November 2008 progress report, the European Union said “corruption is still widespread and remains a major problem in Kosovo… due to insufficient legislative and implementing measures.”
34 Cf. Lieutenant Colonel John E. Sray, USA, Selling the Bosnia Myth to America: Buyer Beware. U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, KS, October 1995.
35 The Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2001.
36 AP, November 21, 2001.
37 Videos of such gruesome spectacles are circulated through Islamic centers and Internet sites in the West.
38 The Washington Post, November 30, 1995.
39 “Mujaheddin Remaining in Bosnia,” The Washington Post, July 8, 1996.
40 “Le troisième membre du ‘gang de Roubaix’ se revendique proche du FIS.” Le Monde, October 6, 2001.
41 The New York Times, June 26, 1997.
42 The Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2001.
43 John Schindler, author of Unholy Terror, in World Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 35, September 27, 2007.
44 “Terrorist Cells Find Foothold in the Balkans,” The Washington Post, December 1, 2005.
45 Gregory Katz, “Terrorists said to be getting aid in Balkans,” Houston Chronicle, December 27, 2005.
46 Chronicles Online, April 6, 2006. www.chroniclesmagazine.org.
47 Raphael Israeli: From Bosnia To Kosovo: The Re-Islamization Of The Balkans. Ariel Center for Policy Research, Policy Paper No. 109, 2004.
48 Cf. a “programmatic” article on the U.S.-sponsored Greater Middle East by two New Republic editors, Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind: “The Third American Empire.” The New York Times, January 2, 1996.
49 Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the head of the OIC, as quoted by Reuters, February 19, 2008.
1. Kosovo independence, camp BONDSTEEL and oil – interference by US, UK, NATO.
2. Global Islamic Caliphate spewing network are headquartered in UK – Hizbut Tahrir and Tableeghi Jamaat (both aligned to Al Qaeda).
3. The role of Ghazwatul Hind, Khorasan and the march of the Army from South Asia to Europe and beyond.
4. The author misses the crucial part ISI played in Bosnia, though he mentions Khalid Sh Md. Read more of ISI & Bosnia here : ISI & AL - QAEDA.
Already the US has arm twisted India into making two important concessions post 26/11 - and even had the audacity to ask us to trim our consulate in JALALABAD, Afghanistan as it may be creating trouble for the Pakistanis in SWAT, BALCOHCISTAN !!
1. Talk to Pakistan even after they have taken no action against the perpetrators and in fact thumbed their nose by releasing the mastermind Hafeez Saeed.
2. Army presence from Kashmir is thinning down for a sinister plan for greater autonomy and increasing trade across LOC (Line of Control), which will see Pakistan taking greater control of the valley.
The following article by Dr. Srdja Trifkovic (1) was the basis for the author’s presentation and an accompanying discussion at the meeting in Copenhagen on May 17, 2009. It is one of a series of essays collected in the book Kosovo: The Score 1999-2009, which was published earlier this year by the American Council for Kosovo and the Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies. It is reproduced here with permission.
U.S. Policy and Geopolitics of Jihad: The Green Corridor in the Balkans by Srdja Trifkovic
The Green Transverse or “Green Corridor” (in Serbian/Croatian: Zelena transverzala (2) is a geopolitical concept that has been used in two distinct, albeit interconnected meanings:
1. To define the long-term goal of Islamist ideologues, both in the Balkans and in the wider Muslim world, to create a geographically contiguous chain of majority- Muslim or Muslim-dominated polities that will extend from Turkey in the southeast to the northwestern-most point of Bosnia (120 miles from Austria). (3)
2. To denote the ongoing process of increasing ethno-religious self-assertiveness among major traditionally Muslim communities in the Balkans, (4) this has had a fourfold effect:
(a) Expanding the geographic area of their demographic dominance;
(b) Establishing and/or expanding various entities under Muslim political control with actual or potential claim to sovereign statehood;
(c) Enhancing the dominant community’s Islamic character and identity within those entities, with the parallel decrease of presence and power of non-Muslim groups; and
(d) Prompting Muslim communities’ ambitions for ever bolder designs in the future, even at the risk of conflict with their non-Muslim neighbors. Giving some clarity to this concept is essential to a comprehensive understanding of the motives, actions, and emerging expectations of different actors in the Yugoslav wars in general and the ongoing Kosovo crisis in particular.
Reality Denied — Political, cultural, religious and demographic trends among Muslim communities in the Balkans strongly suggest that the Green Corridor is taking shape, either deliberately or spontaneously. (5) Nevertheless, many Western academic experts and media commentators (especially in the English-speaking world) have shown the tendency to be a priori dismissive of any suggestion that a long-term Islamic geopolitical design exists in the Balkans, let alone that it is being deliberately and systematically pursued. The notion of the Green Corridor was thus criticized as a product of Serbian propaganda with “Islamophobic” overtones, although its most authoritative proponents have been institutions and experts with no ethnic or personal axe to grind in the Balkan imbroglio.
The Bosnian war was still raging when Sir Alfred Sherman, former advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of The Lord Byron Foundation, warned that the Muslims’ objective was “to create a ‘Green Corridor’ from Bosnia through the Sanjak to Kosovo” that would separate Serbia from Montenegro. (6) Western powers are “in effect fostering this Islamistan,” Sherman warned, and developing “close working relations with Iran, whose rulers are keen to establish a European base for their politico-religious activities.” In addition, “Washington is keen on involving its NATO ally Turkey, which has been moving away from Ataturk’s secularist and Western stance back to a more Ottomanist, pan-Muslim orientation, and is actively helping the Muslim forces.”
THE GREEN CORRIDOR
Sherman’s diagnosis proved to be prescient. A decade later it was echoed by Col. Shaul Shay of BESA Center at Bar-Ilan University. He noted that “the Balkans serve as a forefront on European soil for Islamic terror organizations, which exploit this area to promote their activities in Western Europe, and other focal points worldwide.” His verdict regarding the Green Corridor is disquieting:
The establishment of an independent Islamic territory including Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania is one of the most prominent achievements of Islam since the siege of Vienna in 1683. Islamic penetration into Europe through the Balkans is one of the main achievements of Islam in the twentieth century. (7)
Shay’s account shows how the Bosnian war provided the historical opportunity for radical Islam to penetrate the Balkans at a time when the Muslim world — headed by Iran and the various Islamic terror organizations, including al-Qaeda — came to the aid of the Muslims. The Jihadist operational-organizational infrastructure was thus established.
John Schindler, professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer, concurs: in his view the Balkans provide the missing piece in the puzzle of al-Qa’ida’s transformation from an isolated fighting force into a lethal global threat. (8) Radical Islam played a key role in the Yugoslav conflict, Schindler says: like Afghanistan in the 1980s, Bosnia in the 1990s became a training ground for the mujahidin, leading to blowback of epic proportions.
The Green Corridor paradigm reflects Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which used the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a paradigmatic case of the so called “fault-line wars” between Islam and the rest. Many years before the first shots were fired in Bosnia in 1992, that paradigm was confirmed by Alija Izetbegovic. In his Islamic Declaration Izetbegovic denied any chance of “peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions”:
“Islam contains the principle of ummet, the tendency to unite all Muslims into a single community — a spiritual, cultural and political community… It is a natural function of the Islamic order to gather all Muslims and Muslim communities throughout the world into one.” (9)
During the Bosnian war (1992-1995) Izetbegovic presented a “pluralist” image to the West, but his followers acted in accordance with his primary message. The fruits of their labor — and that of their coreligionists in another half-dozen countries in the region — are clearly visible along a thousand miles’ trail through the middle of today’s Balkans.
Ottoman Legacy — Unlike other European peninsular regions (Iberia, Italy), the northern boundary of the Balkans is not marked by mountain ranges. That boundary is open and crossed by several key transit corridors connecting Central and Western Europe with the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. This has been the bane of the region’s history, inviting invaders and turning the Balkans for most of the modern era into an object of competing designs and interests of outside powers.
The Ottoman conquest and occupation left an indelible mark on the region. It started in 1354, when Ottoman Turks crossed the Dardanelles from Asia Minor and established a foothold on the northern shore. The subsequent spread of Islam in the Balkans was “by the sword”: it was contingent upon the extent of Ottoman rule and the establishment of political and social institutions based on the teaching of Kuran and the Islamic legal and political practice. The line of the attack went from Thrace via Macedonia to Kosovo; through the Sanjak into Bosnia all the way to the Una River, was finally stopped at the Habsburgs’ Military Frontier created in the 16th century.
It is noteworthy that the geographic thrust of the Ottoman attack and later colonization of Muslims from other parts of the Empire in the Balkans coincided exactly with the “Green Corridor.” From earliest days the Green Corridor has had a geopolitical logic that influences political and military decision-making. Furthermore, Ottoman efforts at Islamization of the local population were more determined, and more successful, along the “Corridor” axis (Thrace-Macedonia-Kosovo-Sanjak-Bosnia) than in other conquered Christian lands (e.g. in mainland Greece, central Serbia, northern Bulgaria, or Wallachia).
The Ottoman conquest destroyed the materially and culturally rich Christian civilization of Byzantium and its dynamic and creative Slavic offspring in Serbia and Bulgaria. The conquered populations became second-class citizens (“dhimmis”), whose physical security was predicated upon their abject obedience to the Muslim masters. (10) They were heavily taxed (jizya, or poll tax, and kharaj) and subjected to the practice of devshirme: the annual “blood levy” (introduced in the 1350s) of a fifth of all Christian boys in the conquered lands. Conversion to Islam, a phenomenon more strongly pronounced along the Green Route than in the central regions of the Empire, was near-universal among northern Albanians, including the settlers in Kosovo. This contributed to a new stratification of the society under Ottoman rule and a new power balance. It favored local converts to Islam, eager to assert their power over their former co-religionists, Christian gaiurs. This resulted in far harsher treatment of their Christian subjects than was mandated from the Porte, and helped ignite uprisings in Serbia (1804) and Greece (1821). The 19th century witnessed a more thorough oppression of the Christian communities under Ottoman rule than at any prior period.
At the same time, some great powers (Great Britain in particular) supported the continued Turkish subjugation of Balkan Christians on the grounds that the Ottoman Empire was a “stabilizing force.” France’s and Britain’s alliance with Turkey against Russia in the Crimean War (1853-1856) reflected a frame of mind and a strategic calculus — the desire to score points in the Muslim world vis-à-vis another, non-Muslim power — that has manifested itself in recent years in the overt or covert support by those same powers for the Muslim side in Bosnia and Kosovo, and somewhat less overtly in the Israeli-Arab conflict. (BuA: NOTE THIS IMPORTANT POINT ABOUT UK, and its continued dalliance with Pan Islamic terror organizations like HIZBUT TAHRIR and TABLEEGHI JAMMAT by giving them headquarters in UK)
Demography — The most enduring, politically and culturally relevant consequence of the Ottoman rule in the Balkans is the presence of large indigenous Muslim communities. The Balkan Peninsula is one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse regions in the world, especially considering its relatively small area (just over 200,000 square miles) and population (around 55 million). (11) Of that number, Eastern Orthodox Christians — mainly Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs and Slavic Macedonians — have the slim majority of around 53 percent; Sunni Muslims (11 million Turks in European Turkey and a similar number of Albanians, Slavic Muslims and ethnic Turks elsewhere) make up 40 percent; and Roman Catholics (mainly Croats) are at around 5 percent. (12)
Those communities do not live in multicultural harmony. Their mutual lack of trust that occasionally turns into violence is a lasting fruit of the Turkish rule. Four salient features of the Ottoman state were institutionalized, religiously justified discrimination of non-Muslims; personal insecurity; tenuous coexistence of ethnicities and creeds without intermixing; and the absence of unifying state ideology or supradenominational source of loyalty. It was a Hobbesian world, and it bred a befitting mindset: the zero-sum-game approach to politics, in which one side’s gain is perceived as another’s loss. That mindset has not changed, almost a century since the disintegration of the Empire.
Most Balkan Muslims live in continuous swathes of territory along the Green Corridor. There are but two major gaps in the chain. One is in northeastern Macedonia, where 80 miles divides easternmost Albanian villages near Kumanovo from the westernmost Bulgarian-Muslim (i.e. Pomak) villages in the Bulgarian southwestern corner at Blagoevgrad. The other is in the region of Raska (northern Sanjak) in southwestern Serbia, along the main road and railway from Belgrade to Montenegro.
The Christian communities all over the Balkans are in a steep, long-term demographic decline. Fertility rate is below replacement level in every majority-Christian country in the region. (13) The Muslims, by contrast, have the highest birth rates in Europe, with the Albanians topping the chart. On current form it is likely that Muslims will reach a simple majority in the Balkans within a generation.
The Role of Modern Turkey — Turkey’s European foothold is populous (over 11 million) and overwhelmingly mono-ethnic (Turkish) and mono-religious (Muslim); the Christian remnant is negligible. A nation-state of 72 million, the Turkish Republic is based on a blend of European-style nationalism and an Islamic ethos that breeds a sense of intense kinship with the Muslim communities further west in the Balkans.
The Kemalist dream had never penetrated beyond the military and a narrow stratum of urban elite. For decades described as the key to U.S. strategy in eastern Mediterranean, in the Middle East, and—more recently—in the oil-rich Caspian region and the sensitive ex-Soviet Central Asia, the country is ruled by the ever more openly Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The AKP “espouses an ideology of cultural divide, tension, and conflict, despite all of the pro-Europe rhetoric in which Islamists in Turkey engage in their pursuit to exploit the European Union for their agenda of Islamization.” (14) That agenda is no longer confined to the borders of the Turkish state. There is a rekindled sense of kinship among the growing ranks of Turkish Islamists with their Balkan co-religionists and with the old Ottoman domains further west. The re-Islamization and assertiveness of Turkey under Erdogan is essential to the revival of Islam and ethnic self-assertiveness all along the Green Corridor:
The [Yugoslav] wars of the 90s opened whole areas where they [Muslims] were in the majority: While the regional realities modified, so did geopolitics between those who remained in their traditional homes in the Balkans and the ever expanding Islam over Europe itself [with] pan-European Islamic clusters from the West southward into the Balkans themselves. Of the utmost importance to Muslims in Western Europe, but especially the Balkans, is the admission of Turkey into the EU, for Ankara will be a voice for all Muslims inside the E.U. itself. (15)
Without a strong, solidly supportive anchor at its southeastern end, no Muslim revival in former Ottoman lands along the Balkan Green Corridor would be possible. The mix of nationalism and Islamism in Turkey aims not only at reversing the process of modernization of the past 85 years; it also aims at reversing the outcome of the preceding period of Ottoman decline. Under the AKP Turkey is becoming increasingly revisionist, potentially irredentist, and detrimental to stability in the Balkans.
Bulgaria — Of the country’s 8 million inhabitants, ethnic Turks account for just under ten percent (750,000). Southern Bulgaria is also home to several hundred thousand Pomaks, Islamized Slavic speakers. Their number is unknown as they are not recognized as a distinct ethnic group: officially they are “Muslim Bulgarians.”
Most Pomaks and Turks live in six districts that connect Turkey with FRY Macedonia: Haskovo, Kardjali, Smolian, Blagoevgrad, and southern parts of Pazardzhik and Plovdiv. The Pomaks are experiencing an intense Islamic religious revival, mainly financed from the Arab world. Hundreds of new mosques have been built in recent years. Middle Eastern “charities” are also establishing Kuranic schools, paying for trips to the Hajj, and offering scholarships to young Pomaks to study Islam in Saudi Arabia. Since religion defines their identity, “these poor, pastoralist Slavic Muslims have become prime targets for Arab proselytizers seeking to make inroads in Bulgaria, the EU country with the largest indigenous Muslim population.” (16)
In addition to the religious revival, the Pomaks are establishing a new form of ethnic identity. (17) Some Pomak activists assert that, far from being “Islamized Bulgarians,” they are descended from ancient Thracians. (18) Others assert Arab descent and an Islamic identity that antedates Turkish conquest. Many Bulgarians see such assertions as the first step in a future call for the establishment of a Pomak state — Islamic in character — in the Rhodope region as the key link to the Western Balkans. Some politicians warn of “unprecedented aggression based on religious and ethnic grounds” and accuse Muslim activists of “contempt for the laws of the Republic of Bulgaria.” (19) Even pro-Western sources in Sofia concede that “it is stretching credibility to imagine” that Bulgaria is not a target of radical Islam. (20)
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia — FYROM is widely considered the weakest state in the Balkans. Macedonian Slavs account for 66 percent (1.3 million) and Albanians for 25 percent (500,000) of the republic’s two million people. The latter, 98 percent Muslim, have had a remarkable rate of growth since 1961, when they accounted for 13 percent of the total. Albanian birthrate is more than twice that of the Slavs. Following the signing of the Ohrid Agreement that ended the 2001 armed rebellion by the “NLA” (a KLA subsidiary); the state itself is effectively becoming bi-national and bilingual. Albanians are de facto the second constituent nation in FYROM. They are guaranteed proportional share of government power and ethnicallybased police force.
Having secured their dominance along the borders of Albania and Kosovo, the current main thrust of the Albanian ethno-religious encroachment has the country’s capital city as its primary objective. It is a little-known fact that today’s Skopje is effectively as divided as Nicosia, or Jerusalem, or Mostar. Once a city quarter becomes majority-Albanian, it is quickly emptied of non-Albanian (i.e. Slavic-Macedonian, non- Muslim) population. The time-tested technique is to construct a mosque in a mixed area, to broadcast prayer calls at full blast five times a day, and to create the visible and audible impression of dominance that intimidates non-Muslims (“sonic cleansing”). In those mosques a Wahhabi-connected imam or administrator is invariably present to keep an eye on the rest. (21) Through their links with Arab donors they can influence the payment of salaries to imams and administrative staff.
During the 2001 Albanian rebellion the NLA was largely financed by the smuggling of narcotics from Turkey and Afghanistan, but in addition to drug money, “the NLA also has another prominent venture capitalist: Osama bin Laden.” (22) French terrorism expert Claude Moniquet estimated in 2006 that up to a hundred fundamentalists, “dangerous and linked to terrorist organizations,” were active or dormant but ready in sleeper-cells in Macedonia. New recruits are offered stipends to study Islam in Saudi Arabia, and they are given regular salaries and free housing to spread the Wahhabi word on their return to Macedonia. (23)
Both demographically and politically, the Republic of Macedonia has a precarious present and an uncertain future. In the aftermath of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence, FYROM’s long term stability and sustainability are open to doubt.
Kosovo — Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton warned in early 2008 that “Kosovo will be a weak state susceptible to radical Islamist influence from outside the region… a potential gate for radicalism to enter Europe,” a stepping stone toward an anti-Christian, anti-American “Eurabia.” (24) His was a rare voice in Washington to warn of the ongoing merger of aggressive greater-Albanian nationalism and transnational Islamism. Bolton’s verdict is shared by former UN commander in Bosnia, Canadian Gen. Lewis McKenzie. In 1999 the West intervened “on the side of an extremist, militant Kosovo-Albanian independence movement,” he says. “The fact that the KLA was universally designated a terrorist organization supported by al- Qaeda was conveniently ignored.” (25)
Since the 1999 US-led NATO intervention, Kosovo has become the crime capital of Europe. (26) Crime is the province’s main economic activity: hard drugs (primarily heroin), followed by human trafficking, associated sex trade, and arms smuggling. (27) But no less significant, from the vantage point of the Green Corridor, has been the symbiosis that has developed between Kosovo’s Albanian crime families and the Jihadist networks abroad. As a result, according to a 252-page report compiled by U.S. intelligence agencies in April 2006, Islamic militants have been freely crisscrossing the Balkans for more than 15 years: “extremists, financed in part with cash from narcotics smuggling operations, were trying to infiltrate Western Europe from Afghanistan and points farther east via a corridor through Turkey, Kosovo and Albania.” (28)
This process started well before the 1999 NATO intervention, but the Clinton Administration ignored the warnings. (29) The relationship was cemented by the zeal of KLA veterans who joined Bin Laden’s network in Afghanistan. (30) Iran also supported the Albanian insurgency in Kosovo, hoping “to turn the region into their main base for Islamic armed activity in Europe.” (31) By the end of 1998 U.S. DEA officials complained that the transformation of the KLA from terrorists into freedom fighters hampered their ability to stem the flow of Albanian-peddled heroin into America. (32)
By that time the NATO bombing of Serbia was in full swing, however, and the mujaheddin were, once again, American “allies.”
A decade later Kosovo is run by those “allies.” It is the worst administered and most corrupt spot in Europe, (33) a mono-ethnic hotbed of criminality and intolerance, a major source of irredentism and regional instability — and a key pillar of the Green Corridor.
Sanjak — The region known to Muslims as Sandžak (“administrative district” in Turkish) is one of the most critical geopolitical pressure points in the Balkans. It covers some 8,500 sq.km. along the border between Serbia and Montenegro, linking Kosovo to the southeast with Bosnia to the northwest. Bosniaks and Muslims-bynationality accounted for 52 percent while Serbs and Montenegrins had 43 percent, with smaller groups making up the balance. The crucial demographic gap in the Green Corridor exists in the northwestern half of Sanjak, comprising three municipalities in Serbia (Priboj, Nova Varos and Prijepolje) and Pljevlja in Montenegro. If there is to be a fresh crisis in the Balkans over the next decade, it is to be feared that this will be its location.
After Montenegro proclaimed independence in May 2006, the Muslim demand for autonomy is focused on the six municipalities on the northern side of the border, in Serbia. Such an entity would have a 58% overall Muslim majority. More importantly, even in the reduced format it would still provide the all-critical land bridge between Kosovo and Bosnia.
Bosnia — Alija Izetbegovic’s memorable assertion in his Islamic Declaration that “there can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions,” and that his goal is “a great Islamic federation spreading from Morocco to Indonesia,” was not unusual for a sincere Islamist. (34)
(BuA: Read my very first article in my blog: ISLAM - WHY DOES IT NOT INTEGRATE WITH HOST COUNTRIES?)
Bill Clinton was still in the White House when a classified State Department report warned that the Muslim-controlled parts of Bosnia were a safe haven for Islamic terrorism. (35) This was confirmed in November 2001 when Bosnian passports were found in a house in Kabul used by the fleeing Taliban. (36) The core of Bin Laden’s Balkan network consists of the veterans of El Moujahed brigade of the Bosnian-Muslim army. The unit was distinguished by its spectacular cruelty, including decapitation of prisoners to the chants of Allahu-akbar. (37)
After the end of the Bosnian war, many Muslim volunteers remained. (BuA note - THESE WERE PAKISTAN BASED TERROR MODULES OF LASHKAR E TAIBA, JAISH E MOHAMMAD. Read it here : ISI & AL QAEDA) (38) The Bosnian-Muslim government circumvented the Dayton rules by granting them Bosnian citizenship. (39) The Bosnian veterans went on to perpetrate murder and mayhem in many countries in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and North America. (40) They planned the Millennium Plot and the bombing of the Al Khobar building in Riyadh. (41) They plotted to blow up U.S. military installations in Germany. (42) Even 9/11 itself had a Bosnian Connection: Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who planned the 9/11 attacks, was a seasoned veteran of the Bosnian jihad, as were two of the hijackers. (43)
As Jane’s Intelligence Review concluded in 2006, “The current threat of terrorism in Bosnia and Herzegovina comes from a younger, post-war generation of militant Islamists, radicalized by US actions in Iraq and AFGHANISTAN.” (THE PAKISTANI ISI, LASHKAR E TAIBA ETC NEXUS)
The Green Corridor and the War on Terrorism — In the Balkans, a phenomenon initially based on local groups is morphing into an integral part of a global network. Al-Qaeda and its loosely linked Balkan offshoots, or self-starting independent cells merely inspired by it, are capable of fielding operatives who are European in appearance and seemingly integrated into the Western society — the “white al-Qa’eda.” (44) Western law-enforcement officials concede that the region has become “a paradise” for Islamic radicals.” (45)
By contrast, Western politicians and diplomats are typically evasive. They do not deny the existence of the problem, but tend to relativize it by adding that it is unlikely to disturb the political and security balance in the region, or to damage Western interests. As a former diplomat notes, “Then usually follows the reassuring mantra about the pro-European orientation of secularized Balkan Muslims with the optimistic conclusion that the accelerated process of the Euro-integration of the whole region would narrow the space for radical Islamism until such tendencies will finally disappear.” (46)
A major fault of the Western approach is its naïve faith in the attractive powers of secularisation. There is a growing gap between the reality of Islam in the Balkans and Western mainstream narrative about the allegedly moderate and tolerant “Balkan Islam.” The problem of the Green Corridor will not be resolved without critical reexamination of Western policies as well as Western illusions. That problem has morphed over the past two decades into a demographic, social and political reality:
“[W]hile the Muslims have established a continuity which drives a wedge within Christian Central Europe, the West is looking with indifference at that evolving situation which they hope will create a docile, Turkish-like Islam. But in view of the trouble Turkey itself is suffering from Muslim fundamentalists, it is doubtful whether these hopes will be fulfilled.” (47)
(BuA: Actually the author hit it right when he pointed out the western interests not being hit. The western interest is Oil & Gas and the Green Corridor ensures that oil pipelines are under control of Islamic assets that the West controls. However, the havoc these Isalmist will rein on the host countries seems oblivious to this Cheney, Haliburton led Western consortium. The Isamists are feeding into the greed of these corporations and entities into the West and quietly taking over an important part of Europe)
The U.S. policy in Southeast Europe over the past two decades in general, and Washington’s Kosovo policy in particular, have had the effect, by design or default, to favor the aspirations of various supposedly pro-Western Muslim communities in the Balkans along the geographic line extending from Turkey north-westwards towards Central Europe. (48) That policy was based on the expectation that satisfying Muslim ambitions in a secondary theater will improve the U.S. standing in the Muslim world as a whole. (BuA: ALSO OIL & GAS)
The policy has never yielded any dividends, but repeated failure only prompts its advocates to redouble their efforts. Former U.S. Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns thus declared on February 18, 2008, a day after Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence: “Kosovo is going to be a vastly majority Muslim state, given the fact that 92 to 94 percent of their population is Muslim, and we think it is a very positive step that this Muslim state, Muslim majority state, has been created today. It’s a stable — we think it’s going to be a stable state.” (BuA: BURNS FORGOT TO MENTION THE AMBO PIPELINE, CAMP BONDSTEEL in KOSOVO)
If it is intrinsically “a very positive step” for the United States that a “vastly Muslim state” is created on European soil that had been “cleansed” of non-Muslims then it should be expected that Washington will be equally supportive of an independent Sanjak that would connect Kosovo with Bosnia, of a centralized, i.e. Muslim-controlled Bosnia that will abolish the legacy of Dayton, or of any other putative Islamistan in the region — from yet-to-be federalized Macedonia to a revived Eastern Rumelia in southern Bulgaria. It is worthy of note that the Organization of the Islamic Conference statement, to which the State Department referred so approvingly, announced that the Islamic Umma wishes its brothers and sisters in Kosovo success: “There is no doubt that the independence of Kosovo will be an asset to the Muslim world and further enhance the joint Islamic action.” (49)
“There is no doubt,” indeed. Far from providing a model of pro-Western “moderate Islam,” Kosovo, Muslim Bosnia, Sanjak, western Macedonia, and southern Bulgaria are already the breeding ground for thousands of young hard-line Islamists. Their dedication is honed in thousands of newly-built, mostly foreign-financed mosques and Islamic centers. The intent was stated by the head of the Islamic establishment in Sarajevo. “The small jihad is now finished … The Bosnian state is intact. But now we have to fight a bigger, second jihad,” Mustafa Ceric, the Reis-ul-Ulema in Bosnia-Herzegovina, declared over a decade ago. This statement reflects the inherent dynamism of political Islam: a truce with Dar al-Harb is allowed, sometimes even mandated, but a permanent peace is impossible for as long as there is a single infidel entity refusing to submit to Dar al-Islam.
If Western and especially U.S. policy in the Balkans was not meant to facilitate the Green Corridor, the issue is not why but how its effects paradoxically coincided with the regional objectives of those same Islamists who confront America in other parts of the world. Far from enhancing peace and regional stability, such policies continue to encourage seven distinct but interconnected trends centered on the Green Corridor:
(e) Pan-Islamic agitation for the completion of an uninterrupted Transverse by linking its as yet unconnected segments.
(f ) Destabilization of Bosnia resulting from constant Muslim demands for the erosion of all constitutional prerogatives leading to the abolition of the Republika Srpska.
(g) Growing separatism among Muslims in the Raska region of Serbia, manifest in the demand for the establishment of an “autonomous” Sanjak region.
(h) Continuing intensification of greater-Albanian aspirations against Macedonia, Montenegro, Greece, and rump-Serbia.
(i) Further religious radicalization and ethnic redefinition of Muslims in Bulgaria, leading to demands for territorial autonomy in the Rhodope region.
(j) Ongoing spread of Islamic agitation, mainly foreign-financed, through a growing network of mosques, Islamic centers, NGOs and “charities” all along the Route.
(k) Escalation of Turkey’s regional ambitions and Ankara’s quiet encouragement of all of the above trends and phenomena.
In all cases the immediate bill will be paid by the people of the Balkans, as it is already being paid by Kosovo’s disappearing Serbs; but long-term costs of the Green Corridor will haunt the West. By encouraging its Albanian clients go ahead with the UDI, the U.S. administration has made a massive leap into the unknown. That leap is potentially on par with Austria’s July 1914 ultimatum to Serbia. The fruits will be equally bitter. While their exact size and taste are hard to predict right now, that in the fullness of time both America and Europe will come to regret the criminal folly of their current leaders is certain. Pandora’s Box is wide open.
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BuA end note: The world may remember 9/11 as the date Twin Towers were brought down. But it has a far more significant connotation with the Islamic world and the Balkans. It is the date, Muslims were defeated in Europe at the gates of Vienna. For an excellent reading, go to: THE OTHER SEPTEMBER 11th.
There is also a metaphysical component to this Balkan tale - maybe I will put in the next article.
Notes
1 Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, for many years foreign affairs editor of Chronicles, is Executive Director of The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies.
2 The term “Zelena transverzala” first gained prominence 25 years ago, just before the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984. The organizing committee — dominated by Bosnian Muslim members of the Communist Party (“League of Communists,” SKJ) — decided to give the sports hall built for the event an unusual name, “Zetra.” This was the acronym for the Green Corridor (ZElena-TRAnsverzala); it supposedly referred to the belt of urban parkland in central Sarajevo. Some observers — including Bosnian anti-terrorism expert Dzevad Galijasevic, himself a Muslim — believe that the choice of the name was anything but incidental.
3 In a 2001 report by the Italian security services, the dorsale verde is defined as “the project of Islamic colonization of the Balkans that aims at the gradual establishment of a green corridor to include all regions in which predominantly Muslim ethnic groups prevail.” Cf. Fiorenza Saranzini: “Soldi e moschee, Osama avanza nei Balcani.” Corriere della Sera, November 8, 2001, p. 11. See also “Come nasce la dorsale verde“ in Limes, 3/1998, pp. 15-27.
4 Massimo Nava, “Il nostro Afghanistan”, in Limes Quaderni Speciali 4/2001, pp. 177-185.
5 Cf. Laura Iucci: “La Bosnia resta un serbatoio di terroristi.” Limes (Rome), No 6-2003, pp. 203-208.
6 Sir Alfred Sherman: “Let’s Remove the Blinkers.” The Jewish Chronicle, September 30, 1994.
7 Shaul Shay, Islamic Terror and the Balkans. Transaction Publishers, 2008.
8 John R. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad. Zenith Press, 2007.
9 Alija Izetbegovic, Islamska deklaracija. Sarajevo: Mala muslimanska biblioteka, 1990.
10 “The attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master toward slaves,” a British diplomat, H.E.W. Young, reported as late as 1909, “whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed.”
11 All data based on official statistics, adjusted for Panonian (non-Balkan) regions of Serbia and Croatia.
12 The region’s once-thriving Jewish community was destroyed during World War II, with the enthusiastic participation of two Waffen SS divisions, Hanjar (Bosnian-Muslim) and Skenderbey (Kosovo- Albanian).
13 It now stand at -0.83 percent in both Bulgaria and Greece.
14 Bassam Tibi, “Turkey’s Islamist Danger.” Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2009.
15 “The Role of the Balkan Muslims in the Shaping of Europe,” Muslim Media Network, May 4, 2008.
16 Christopher Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate. Praeger, 2007, p. 106.
17 In November 2008 the “Justice Federation,” a Pomak NGO in the town of Gotse Delchev, declared hat Pomaks were separate ethnicity and demanded their own TV channel and political party.
18 This claim is similar to the Albanian assertion of “Illyrian” descent: by implication, Orthodox Christian Slavs (Serbs, Bulgarians) are the relative “newcomers,” whose claim to the land is therefore more tenuous.
19 FOCUS News Agency, January 10, 2009: www.focus-fen.net/index.php?id=n166573.
20 Clive Leviyev-Sawyer,”Radical Islam in Bulgaria?” The Sofia Echo, April 16, 2007.
21 Deliso, op. cit., p. 84.
22 The Washington Times, June 22, 2001.
23 “Fissures in Balkan Islam,” The Christian Science Monitor, February 14, 2006.
24 Voice of America interview, February 17, 2008.
25 Lewis Mackenzie, “We Bombed the Wrong Side in Kosovo.” The National Post, April 6, 2004.
26 Less than a year after NATO intervention, on 10 March 2000, the UN human rights rapporteur Jiri Dienstbier declared that “Kosovo is in chaos,” having become “a mafia paradise.” Reuters, 20 March 2000.
27 Cf. Norbert Spinrath, president of the Association of German Police Officers, in Der Spiegel, December 15, 1999. In March 2008, a similar picture was presented in a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
28 “Terrorists use Balkan corridor.” International Herald Tribune, April 18, 2006.
29 The Jerusalem Post, September 14, 1998.
30 USA Today, November 26, 2001.
31 The Sunday Times (London), March 22, 1998.
32 The Washington Times, May 4, 1999.
33 In a November 2008 progress report, the European Union said “corruption is still widespread and remains a major problem in Kosovo… due to insufficient legislative and implementing measures.”
34 Cf. Lieutenant Colonel John E. Sray, USA, Selling the Bosnia Myth to America: Buyer Beware. U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, KS, October 1995.
35 The Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2001.
36 AP, November 21, 2001.
37 Videos of such gruesome spectacles are circulated through Islamic centers and Internet sites in the West.
38 The Washington Post, November 30, 1995.
39 “Mujaheddin Remaining in Bosnia,” The Washington Post, July 8, 1996.
40 “Le troisième membre du ‘gang de Roubaix’ se revendique proche du FIS.” Le Monde, October 6, 2001.
41 The New York Times, June 26, 1997.
42 The Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2001.
43 John Schindler, author of Unholy Terror, in World Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 35, September 27, 2007.
44 “Terrorist Cells Find Foothold in the Balkans,” The Washington Post, December 1, 2005.
45 Gregory Katz, “Terrorists said to be getting aid in Balkans,” Houston Chronicle, December 27, 2005.
46 Chronicles Online, April 6, 2006. www.chroniclesmagazine.org.
47 Raphael Israeli: From Bosnia To Kosovo: The Re-Islamization Of The Balkans. Ariel Center for Policy Research, Policy Paper No. 109, 2004.
48 Cf. a “programmatic” article on the U.S.-sponsored Greater Middle East by two New Republic editors, Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind: “The Third American Empire.” The New York Times, January 2, 1996.
49 Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the head of the OIC, as quoted by Reuters, February 19, 2008.
Monday, June 15, 2009
CHINESE MEDIA : INDIA'S UNWISE MILITARY MOVES
This report came out on June 11th, 2009 in an editorial in People's Daily Online, CHINA: titled "India's unwise military moves". (c) People's Daily Online and Global Times.
Important article and a must read for fence sitters.
THE ARTICLE:
In the last few days, India has dispatched roughly 60,000 troops to its border with China, the scene of enduring territorial disputes between the two countries.
J.J. Singh, the Indian governor of the controversial area, said the move was intended to "meet future security challenges" from China. Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh claimed, despite cooperative India-China relations, his government would make no concessions to China on territorial disputes.
The tough posture Singh's new government has taken may win some applause among India's domestic nationalists. But it is dangerous if it is based on a false anticipation that China will cave in.
India has long held contradictory views on China. Another big Asian country, India is frustrated that China's rise has captured much of the world's attention. Proud of its "advanced political system," India feels superior to China. However, it faces a disappointing domestic situation which is unstable compared with China's.
India likes to brag about its sustainable development, but worries that it is being left behind by China. China is seen in India as both a potential threat and a competitor to surpass.
But India can't actually compete with China in a number of areas, like international influence, overall national power and economic scale. India apparently has NOT YET realized this.
Indian politicians these days SEEM to think their country would be doing China a huge favor simply by NOT joining the "ring around China" established by the US and Japan.
India's growing power would have a significant impact on the balance of this equation, which has led India to think that fear and gratitude for its restraint will cause China to defer to it on territorial disputes.
But this is WISHFUL THINKING, as China won't make any compromises in its border disputes with India. And while China wishes to coexist peacefully with India, this desire isn't born out of fear.
India's current course can only lead to a rivalry between the two countries. India needs to consider whether or not it can afford the consequences of a potential confrontation with China. It should also be asking itself why it hasn't forged the stable and friendly relationship with China that China enjoys with many of India's neighbors, like Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Any aggressive moves will certainly not aid the development of good relations with China. India should examine its attitude and preconceptions; it will need to adjust if it hopes to cooperate with China and achieve a MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL OUTCOME.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
KARGIL - PAF's retd AIR COMMODORE'S ACCOUNT
This article appeared today (Sunday 14th June, 2009) in Indian Express, hence (c) to Indian express. Article title was: Pakistan's Kargil Plot.
Air Commodore (retd) Kaiser Tufail was Director of Operations, Pakistan Air Force, at the time of the Kargil war in 1999. His account, published in the Vayu Aerospace and Defence Review magazine, shows how steps taken by Pakistan triggered the conflict. Before excerpts, do go to Kaiser's blog : KAISER - AERONAUT - it has a treasure trove of information for buffs (Prasun - you may like this blog!).
INDIAN EXPRESS ARTICLE:
The Planning: As Director of Operations (in the rank of Gp Capt), the first occasion when I got an opportunity to interact with the Army’s Director of Military Operations (DMO) was over a phone call, some time in March 1999. Brig Nadeem Taj (who later became the ISI Chief) called with great courtesy and requested some information that he needed for a paper exercise, as he told me. He wanted to know when did the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) last carry out a deployment at Skardu, how many aircraft were deployed. Rather impressed with the Army’s interest in PAF matters, I passed on the requisite details. Next day, Brig Taj again called, but this time his questions were more probing and he wanted some classified information, including fuel storage capacity at Skardu, fighter sortie-generation capacity, radar coverage, etc.
He insisted that he was preparing a briefing and wanted his facts and figures right, in front of his bosses. Although he made it sound like routine contingency planning, I sensed that something unusual was brewing.
A cautious Air Marshal Zahid Anis (the Deputy Chief of Air Staff Operations) decided to check things for himself and despatched Gp Capt Tariq Ashraf, Officer Commanding of No. 33 Wing at PAF Base, Kamra, to look things over at Skardu and make a report. Within a few days, Gp Capt Tariq (who was also the designated wartime Commander of Skardu Base) had completed his visit, which included his own periodic war-readiness inspection.
While he made a detailed report to the DCAS (Ops), he let me in on the Army’s mobilisation and other preparations that he had seen at Skardu. His analysis was that ‘something big is imminent’. Helicopter flying activity was feverishly high as Army Aviation’s Mi-17s were busy moving artillery guns and ammunition to the posts that had been vacated by the Indians during winter season. Troops in battle gear were to be seen all over the city. Interestingly, Army messes were abuzz with war chatter amongst young officers.
In retrospect, one wonders how Indian intelligence agencies failed to read any such signs, many weeks before the operation unfolded. After hearing Gp Capt Tariq’s report, Air Marshal Zahid again got in touch with Major General Tauqir and, in a roundabout way, told him that if the Army’s ongoing ‘review of contingency plans’ required the PAF to be factored in, an Operations and Plans team would be available for discussion.
Nothing was heard from the GHQ till 12 May, when Air Marshal Zahid was told to send a team for a briefing at HQ 10 Corps with regard to ‘Kashmir Contingency’. Air Cdre Abid Rao, Air Cdre Saleem Nawaz (the Assistant Chief of Air Staff Plans) and myself were directed by the DCAS (Ops) to attend a briefing on the ‘latest situation in Kashmir’ at HQ 10 Corps. We were welcomed by the Chief of Staff (COS) of the Corps, who led us to the briefing room. Shortly thereafter, Corps Commander Lt General Mehmud Ahmad entered, clad in a bush-coat and his trademark camouflage scarf, cutting an impressive figure. After exchange of pleasantries, the COS started with the map orientation briefing.
Thereafter, Lt General Mehmud took over and broke the news that a limited operation had started two days earlier. It was nothing more than a ‘protective manoeuvre’, he explained, and was meant to foreclose any further mischief by the enemy, who had been a nuisance in the Neelam Valley, specially on the road of our side of the Line of Control (LoC). He then elaborated that a few vacant Indian posts had been occupied on peaks across the LoC, overlooking the Dras-Kargil Road.
The target was a vulnerable section of Dras-Kargil Road, whose blocking would virtually cut off the crucial lifeline which carried the bulk of supplies needed for daily consumption as well as annual winter-stocking in Leh-Siachen Sector. “Come October, we shall walk in to Siachen—to mop up the dead bodies of hundreds of Indians left hungry, out in the cold,” he succinctly summed up what appeared to be a new dimension to the Siachen dispute.
When Lt General Mehmud asked for questions at the end of the rather crisp and to-the-point briefing, Air Cdre Saleem Nawaz opened up by enquiring on the type of air support that might be needed for the operation. Lt General Mehmud assured us that air support was not envisaged and that his forces could take care of enemy aircraft, if they intervened. “I have Stingers on every peak,” he announced.
Air Cdre Saleem tried to point out the limited envelope of these types of missiles and said that nothing stopped the IAF from attacking the posts and artillery pieces from high altitude. To this, Lt General Mehmud’s reply was that his troops were well camouflaged and concealed and that IAF pilots would not be able to pick out the posts from the air. As the discussion got more animated, I asked the Corps Commander if he was sure the Indians would not use their artillery to vacate our incursion, given the criticality of the situation from their standpoint.
He replied that the Dras-Kargil stretch did not allow positioning of hundreds of guns that were required, due to lack of depth; in any case, it would be suicidal for the Indians to denude artillery firepower from any other sector as defensive balance had to be maintained.
It seemed from the Corps Commander’s smug appreciation of the situation that the Indians had been tightly straitjacketed in Dras-Kargil Sector and had no option but to submit to our operational design. More significantly, an alternate action like a strategic riposte by the Indians in another sector had been rendered out of question, given the nuclear environment.
Whether an exterior manoeuvre (diplomatic offensive) by the beleaguered Indians had crossed the planners’ minds, it was not discernible in the Corps Commander’s elucidation. Perhaps it was the incredulousness of the whole thing that led Air Cdre Abid Rao to famously quip, “After this operation, it’s going to be either a Court Martial or Martial Law!” as we walked out of the briefing room. Back at Air Headquarters, we briefed the DCAS (Ops) about what had transpired at the 10 Corps briefing.
His surprise at the developments, as well as his concern over the possibility of events spiralling out of control, could not remain concealed behind his otherwise unflappable demeanour. We all were also piqued at being left out of the Army’s planning, though we were given to believe that it was a ‘limited tactical action’ in which the PAF would not be required—an issue that none of us agreed with.
PAF’s predicament
From the very beginning of the Kargil operations, the PAF was entrapped by a circumstantial absurdity: it was faced with the ludicrous predicament of having to provide air support to infiltrators already disowned by the Pakistan Army leadership! In any case, it took some effort to impress on the latter that crossing the LoC by fighters laden with bombs was not, by any stretch of imagination, akin to lobbing a few artillery shells to settle scores.
There was no doubt in the minds of PAF Air Staff that the first cross-border attack would invite an immediate response from the IAF in the shape of a retaliatory strike against the home base of the intruding fighters, thus starting the next round. PAF’s intervention meant all-out war: this unmistakable conclusion was conveyed to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif by the Air Chief in no equivocal terms.
Short of starting an all-out war, PAF looked at some saner options that could put some wind in the sails after doldrums had been hit. Air Marshal Najib Akhtar, the Air Officer Commanding of Air Defence Command, was co-opted by the Air Staff to sift the possibilities. Audacious and innovative in equal parts, Air Marshal Najib had an excellent knowledge about own and enemy’s Air Defence Ground Environment.
He had conceived and overseen the unprecedented heli-lift of a low-looking radar to a 14,000 ft mountain top on the forbidding Deosai Plateau. The highly risky operation became possible with the help of some courageous flying by Army Aviation pilots. With good low level radar now available up to the LoC, Air Marshal Najib along with the Air Staff focused on fighter sweeps as a possible option.
While the PAF looked at some offensive options, it had a more pressing defensive issue at hand. The IAF’s minor border violations during recce missions were not of grave consequence in so far as no bombing took place in our territory; however, the fact that these missions helped the enemy refine its air and artillery targeting was, to say the least, disconcerting. There were constant reports of our troops on the LoC disturbed to see (or hear) IAF fighters operating with apparent impunity.
The matter was taken up by the GHQ with AHQ and it was resolved that Combat Air Patrols (CAPs) would be flown by the F-16s operating out of Minhas (Kamra) and Sargodha. This arrangement resulted in less on-station time but was safer than operating out of vulnerable Skardu, which had inadequate early warning in the mountainous terrain; its status as a turn-around facility was, however, considered acceptable for its location. A flight of F-7s was, nonetheless, deployed primarily for point defence of the important garrison town of Skardu as well as the air base.
F-16 CAPs could not have been flown all day long as spares support was limited under the prevailing US sanctions. Random CAPs were resorted to, with a noticeable drop in border violations only as long as the F-16s were on station. There were a few cases of F-16s and Mirage 2000s locking their adversaries with the on-board radars but caution usually prevailed and no close encounters took place. After one week of CAPs, the F-16 maintenance personnel indicated that war reserve spares were being eaten into and the activity had to be ‘rationalised’, a euphemism for discontinuing it altogether.
Those not aware of the gravity of the F-16 operability problem under sanctions have complained of lack of cooperation by the PAF. Suffice to say that if the PAF had been included in the initial planning, this anomaly (along with many others) would have emerged as a mitigating factor against the Kargil adventure.
It is another matter that the Army high command did not envisage operations ever coming to such a pass. Now, it was almost as if PAF was to blame for the Kargil venture spiralling out of control!
Might it strike to some that PAF’s restraint in warding off a major conflagration may have been its paramount contribution to the Kargil conflict?
The Aftermath
It has emerged that the principal protagonists of the Kargil adventure were the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Pervez Musharraf, Commander 10 Corps Lt General Mehmud Ahmed and Commander Force Command Northern Areas (FCNA) Major General Javed Hasan. The trio, in previous ranks and appointments, had been associated with planning during paper exercises on how to wrest control of lost territory in Siachen.
The plans were not acceptable to the then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, to whom the options had been put up for review more than once. She was well-versed in international affairs and all too intelligent to be taken in by the chicanery. It fell to the wisdom of her successor, Mr Nawaz Sharif, to approve the Army trio’s self-serving presentation. “General sahib, bismillah karen …” is how he is supposed to have given the go ahead, not withstanding the denials we hear from him every new moon.
In an effort to keep the plan secret—which was the key to its successful initiation, so it was thought—the Army trio took no one into confidence, neither its operational commanders, nor the heads of the other services. This, regrettably, resulted in a closed loop thought process, which engendered a string of oversights and failures.
Kargil, I suspect, like the 1965 and 1971 Wars, was a case of not having enough dissenters (‘devil’s advocates’, if you will) during planning, because everyone wanted to agree with the boss. That single reason, I think, was the root cause of most of the failures that were apparent right from the beginning. If this point is understood well, remedial measures towards tolerance and liberalism can follow as a matter of course.
Such an organisational milieu, based on honest appraisal and fearless appeal, would be conducive to sound and sensible planning. It would also go a long way in preclusion of Kargil-like disasters.
‘The truth is out…Sharif not innocent’
Gen VP Malik, Indian Army Chief during kargil conflict
It is a good that now some more information about the war has started coming from Pakistan. He (Kaiser Tufail) is the first Pakistan Air Force officer who has written about it in a candid manner. I am sure that slowly more information on the Kargil operations will come out now that Pervez Musharraf is not around. The article basically confirms our view that not many people had been taken into confidence (when the Pakistan Army planned the operation), particularly from the other two services—the Air Force and the Navy. It was conceived by the trio of Musharraf, 10 Corps Commander Lt Gen Mehmud Ahmad and Force Command Northern Areas commander Maj Gen Javed Hasan.
These three people were deeply involved as was the Director General of Military Operations. It also confirms my view that Nawaz Sharif is not as innocent as he makes himself out to be. In my book, In Kargil: From Surprise to Victory, I had written that Sharif had been briefed about the operation though he may not have understood the implications of it. He is really confirming what we always knew.
What I don’t agree with is that the Pakistani Army airlifted guns to vacated posts. Except for one post, none of the positions had been vacated by us. No guns were taken to our areas expect that in one case, we found 120 mm mortars. The artillery remained on their side.
What he has written is confirming what is known to us. If we have to learn proper lessons and Pakistan has to learn proper lessons, more such truth should come out. From our side, there is a lot of material on the war that has been brought out officially as well as in books. We did not get the confirmation from the Pakistani side but now that too has started coming.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
PAKISTAN & CHINA'S ECONOMIC TERRORISM AGAINST INDIA
Counterfeiting is economic terrorism, but terrorism none the less. When your adversary is economically becoming stronger it will mean that the adversary will also become militarily stronger and powerful, a situation to the detriment of the host country.
Pakistan’s ISI has systematically tried to weaken India by supporting insurgencies in India, opening of caste and religious divide in the society and also good old terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere. Where it has played with finesse is in the counterfeiting department.
Before this, I cannot resist a little history : OPERATION BERNHARD
Only a fortnight after the start of World War II, at a meeting that has remained a secret for more than half a century, officials of German finance and Nazi espionage approved an audacious plot to bring down the world's financial system. Hundreds of millions of forged British pounds were to become a weapon of war. Operation Bernhard not only became the greatest counterfeit scheme in history but the most wide-ranging and bizarre, with its own gallery of rogues.
COUNTERFEIT £5 NOTE MADE BY THE NAZIS
Major Bernhard Krueger, a meticulously correct SS engineer, ran a production line of Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. The millions of forged notes they printed were laundered through a Nazi confidence man with the help of Jewish agents who concealed their origins. Toward the end, one of Europe 's most accomplished professional forgers, the only career criminal in the operation, was brought in to counterfeit dollar bills.
Bernhard Krueger as a young SS officer (left), and in a mug shot taken by the British after the war. Photo Credit: British National Archives
In London, the arrogant grandees at the Bank of England could not believe their pound notes could be forged with such expertise and in such quantity. Even George Soros, the great speculator who broke the Bank of England fifty years later, almost got bilked as a boy on the Budapest black market. In one of the crowning ironies of many, after the war Golda Meir protected a millionaire Jewish money-launderer from British authorities in what was then known as Palestine.
The plot was hatched in Berlin on September 18, 1939, behind the imposing stone facade of what had once been Kaiser Wilhelm's Finance Ministry. Walther Funk, a pudgy former financial journalist whose principal task was keeping German industry in Hitler's camp, was the only one to register the least objection because he feared the counterfeit notes would upset his task of milking Hitler's conquered territories. Josef Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, was not present but feared the "grotesque plan" might be turned against Germany 's own fragile finances by the Allies. In fact, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt toyed with the idea of counterfeiting enemy currency but their advisers rejected it.
Nevertheless, the minds of Nazi espionage believed they could weaken the pound as the trading standard and store of value underpinning the British Empire. Bullies and incompetents were at first put in charge of the operation. After several false starts, Krueger, a textile engineer, figured out how to match the paper, printing, and design of the impressive British notes. He found his forgers in Jewish death camps on the orders of SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler. Some were plucked from Auschwitz by Krueger himself, who courteously addressed them with the formal German Sie.
The SS planned to keep the operation secret by killing them when the job was done. The prisoners worked with the knowledge that they were marked for death when they had finished their jobs. " From the start, they wondered whether they should stretch out their work and risk execution for sabotage, or perform efficiently and thus hasten their own deaths. No one ever knew for sure where Krueger stood, but by keeping the operation going, he kept himself from being sent to the Russian front. What all these men said and thought as they lived under this sword of Damocles makes chilling, personal drama.
From 1942 to 1945, the Germans forged more pound notes than all the reserves in the vaults of the Bank of England--132 million pounds, equal to about 15 per cent of all genuine notes in circulation and enough to cast suspicion on all of England 's paper money. They were worth $650 million at the wartime rate of exchange and six or seven billion dollars in today's money.
By 1943 the Luftwaffe was almost kaput, so instead of pursuing their original goal of dropping the counterfeits on England to cast suspicion on real pound notes, the SS used the fakes to finance its own espionage service--whose discoveries Hitler ignored like all bad news--and to undermine and eventually absorb the German military's own intelligence corps. The SS specialized mainly in dirty tricks and, true to the nature of the Nazis' gangster regime, in skimming money to enrich themselves. So many counterfeit pounds flooded the black markets on the European continent and North Africa that Britain's currency came under widespread suspicion abroad, and its value plunged.The British defense was as weak as it was unprecedented. Normally nations at war guard their currency by prohibiting its export. Instead, the British imposed a wartime blockade on bringing pounds into the country to prevent the counterfeits from infecting the economy. Scotland Yard was powerless, and so was Interpol. Its Vienna headquarters had fallen into Hitler's hands when he swallowed Austria in 1938. The Nazis even fooled Swiss bankers, whom the British left swinging in the wind rather than let their secret defenses against counterfeits become known.
By the end of the war, Operation Bernhard had left its imprint. Through one of the Jewish money launderers, the Jewish underground passed on thousands of counterfeits to help the ingathering of exiles to Palestine and the purchase of war materiel for the nascent Israeli army. The Bank of England was so embarrassed by the massive counterfeit that it not only burned the fakes but some of its files. In the continuing and futile search for Nazi loot and bank records deep in the Alpine lakes where the SS dumped millions of forged bills, the financial and political ripples continued into this century.
PAKISTAN:
Times of India: Though the role of Pakistani intelligence agency ISI in printing and circulation of FICN (Fake Indian Currency Notes) has never been a secret, sleuths recently found that the spy agency had, of late, impressed upon the government in Islamabad to import additional currency-standard printing paper from companies located in London to pursue its nefarious designs in India.
Pakistan has been procuring currency-standard printing paper in huge quantities from London-based companies — much higher than normal requirement of the country for printing its own currency — for diverting it to print FICN.
The ISI has, in fact, been using state air-carrier Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) to tansport counterfeit currency to its conduits in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, sources in investigating agencies said.
The modus operandi of the ISI was revealed by two Nepali counterfeit currency traffickers who were arrested by Thailand police in October 2008. During interrogation, the accused disclosed that they were working for a prominent Nepali businessman who was the son of a former minister in King Gyanendra's regime. “The fact that Nepali territory is being used by Pakistanis to smuggle counterfeit currency is well known. The first such expose was made when Pakistani diplomats were caught distributing FICN in Nepal,” an official said.
According to a recent Government estimate, counterfeit currency amounting to Rs 169,000 crore (USD 36,000 MILLION) is floating around in the Indian financial system. From real estate transactions to ordinary grocery shopping, these bogus notes are being deployed everyday — sometimes innocently, sometimes with a sinister objective. “In 2008, the CBI registered 13 cases having international/ inter-State ramifications relating to the recovery/ seizure of fake Indian currency notes,” says Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) spokesperson Harsh Bhal.
Intelligence agencies see the counterfeit rupee attack as a form of “economic terrorism”. They have traced many of the fake currency operations back to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its ancillary crime syndicates such as the Dawood Ibrahim gang. With a multi-layered network in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka and also inside India, counterfeit notes enter India in all three ways — through land, sea and air.
Intelligence officials say the ISI uses terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) to smuggle and circulate counterfeit currency in India.
Dangerously, the counterfeiters have managed to find their way into the official banking system. “Perhaps there is no better way to pummel India’s economy,” says an intelligence official. He explains the modus operandi. Fake currency operatives usually deposit the notes during peak hours when bank tellers are pressed for time and liable to make mistakes.
Fake currency amounting to nearly Rs 3 crore was found in the chest of the State Bank of India’s Domariaganj branch in Uttar Pradesh’s Siddarthnagar district. Some fake notes were also found in the currency chest of ICICI Bank’s Sanjay Place branch in Agra. The examples can go on.
Where are the fake notes printed? A CBI report to the Finance Ministry suggested that the Pakistan Government printing press in Quetta (Baluchistan) was churning out large quantities of counterfeit Indian currency.
Karachi’s security press, and two other presses in Lahore and Peshawar, have also been suspected.
The fine quality of Pakistan-produced fake currency has alarmed India. Printed on security paper, the sophistication and craftsmanship is of a high order. “Only a specialist can make out the notes as counterfeit,” says an intelligence official. The fake notes duplicate serial numbers and floral designs of genuine notes. In addition, they even have the security wire or “guide wire” — the common man’s mode of authenticating a currency note.
However, in the larger reckoning, the problem remains. If and when India does decide to take action against Pakistan-based terror, it may find that it is not enough to destroy merely military camps. A certain currency printing press in Quetta may also need to be blown up!
CHINA:
China loses no chance to undermine India at international for a, be if for surreptitious moves during the Nuclear Deal or blocking Maulana Massod’s Azhar’s terrorist tag in the UN (though this was together with UK) or the more blatant vetoing of ADB loan of US$60 million to India because there was a reference to Arunachal Pradesh.
But what takes the cake is this Nigerian Tribune News dated 6th June 2009. It states: “A clearing agent(names withheld) has been apprehended by the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) over his involvement in the importation of fake malaria drugs (Maloxine and Amalar tablets) worth N32.1million.
He was arrested at Kirikiri Terminal in Lagos while attempting to clear a container load of the drugs marked PCIU 2184458 which was imported by Divine Favour Overseas limited of 41, Tejuosho Street, Yaba.
According to the Director-Genral of NAFDAC, Dr. Paul Orhii, who disclosed this at a press conference in Lagos on Monday, the arrest and subsequent seizure of the drugs followed a text message from an informant on the development.
He said the fake products were produced in China but labelled “Made in India,” adding that the laboratory analysis of the drugs had revealed that it lacked an important active ingredient called pyrimenthamine.
The NAFDAC boss said the seizure was significant in view of the emergence of resistance strain of malaria parasites, saying the use of the fake drugs might lead to treatment failure, anaemia and death if no effective drug was given after.”
Bear in mind, The Indian pharmaceutical industry’s exports to Africa are worth $1,065 million a year and undermining that will suit China.
It is worth noting that multinational EU / US drug manufacturers who are hardest with the cheap Indian generic drugs, started a smear campaign in Africa that Indian generic drugs are fake. They forgot to mention that the fake ones are MADE IN CHINA.
How India helps : It costs about $15,000 a year to treat a patient with patented medicines. But the cost of the same treatment with generic drugs is just $300.
the Indian industry supplies quality drugs at one-tenth the cost of patented drugs. Over 15 per cent of India’s drug exports go to Africa. “And nearly a fifth of Africa’s $4.86 billion drug imports imports annually are from India.
A worthy target for economic terrorism. As China tries to increase its sphere of influence deeper into Africa, probably it makes economic sense to kill off India's entry to other sectors including oil, gas, coal, gemstones, other industries by sullying its name.
Pakistan’s ISI has systematically tried to weaken India by supporting insurgencies in India, opening of caste and religious divide in the society and also good old terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere. Where it has played with finesse is in the counterfeiting department.
Before this, I cannot resist a little history : OPERATION BERNHARD
Only a fortnight after the start of World War II, at a meeting that has remained a secret for more than half a century, officials of German finance and Nazi espionage approved an audacious plot to bring down the world's financial system. Hundreds of millions of forged British pounds were to become a weapon of war. Operation Bernhard not only became the greatest counterfeit scheme in history but the most wide-ranging and bizarre, with its own gallery of rogues.
COUNTERFEIT £5 NOTE MADE BY THE NAZIS
Major Bernhard Krueger, a meticulously correct SS engineer, ran a production line of Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. The millions of forged notes they printed were laundered through a Nazi confidence man with the help of Jewish agents who concealed their origins. Toward the end, one of Europe 's most accomplished professional forgers, the only career criminal in the operation, was brought in to counterfeit dollar bills.
Bernhard Krueger as a young SS officer (left), and in a mug shot taken by the British after the war. Photo Credit: British National Archives
In London, the arrogant grandees at the Bank of England could not believe their pound notes could be forged with such expertise and in such quantity. Even George Soros, the great speculator who broke the Bank of England fifty years later, almost got bilked as a boy on the Budapest black market. In one of the crowning ironies of many, after the war Golda Meir protected a millionaire Jewish money-launderer from British authorities in what was then known as Palestine.
The plot was hatched in Berlin on September 18, 1939, behind the imposing stone facade of what had once been Kaiser Wilhelm's Finance Ministry. Walther Funk, a pudgy former financial journalist whose principal task was keeping German industry in Hitler's camp, was the only one to register the least objection because he feared the counterfeit notes would upset his task of milking Hitler's conquered territories. Josef Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, was not present but feared the "grotesque plan" might be turned against Germany 's own fragile finances by the Allies. In fact, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt toyed with the idea of counterfeiting enemy currency but their advisers rejected it.
Nevertheless, the minds of Nazi espionage believed they could weaken the pound as the trading standard and store of value underpinning the British Empire. Bullies and incompetents were at first put in charge of the operation. After several false starts, Krueger, a textile engineer, figured out how to match the paper, printing, and design of the impressive British notes. He found his forgers in Jewish death camps on the orders of SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler. Some were plucked from Auschwitz by Krueger himself, who courteously addressed them with the formal German Sie.
The SS planned to keep the operation secret by killing them when the job was done. The prisoners worked with the knowledge that they were marked for death when they had finished their jobs. " From the start, they wondered whether they should stretch out their work and risk execution for sabotage, or perform efficiently and thus hasten their own deaths. No one ever knew for sure where Krueger stood, but by keeping the operation going, he kept himself from being sent to the Russian front. What all these men said and thought as they lived under this sword of Damocles makes chilling, personal drama.
From 1942 to 1945, the Germans forged more pound notes than all the reserves in the vaults of the Bank of England--132 million pounds, equal to about 15 per cent of all genuine notes in circulation and enough to cast suspicion on all of England 's paper money. They were worth $650 million at the wartime rate of exchange and six or seven billion dollars in today's money.
By 1943 the Luftwaffe was almost kaput, so instead of pursuing their original goal of dropping the counterfeits on England to cast suspicion on real pound notes, the SS used the fakes to finance its own espionage service--whose discoveries Hitler ignored like all bad news--and to undermine and eventually absorb the German military's own intelligence corps. The SS specialized mainly in dirty tricks and, true to the nature of the Nazis' gangster regime, in skimming money to enrich themselves. So many counterfeit pounds flooded the black markets on the European continent and North Africa that Britain's currency came under widespread suspicion abroad, and its value plunged.The British defense was as weak as it was unprecedented. Normally nations at war guard their currency by prohibiting its export. Instead, the British imposed a wartime blockade on bringing pounds into the country to prevent the counterfeits from infecting the economy. Scotland Yard was powerless, and so was Interpol. Its Vienna headquarters had fallen into Hitler's hands when he swallowed Austria in 1938. The Nazis even fooled Swiss bankers, whom the British left swinging in the wind rather than let their secret defenses against counterfeits become known.
By the end of the war, Operation Bernhard had left its imprint. Through one of the Jewish money launderers, the Jewish underground passed on thousands of counterfeits to help the ingathering of exiles to Palestine and the purchase of war materiel for the nascent Israeli army. The Bank of England was so embarrassed by the massive counterfeit that it not only burned the fakes but some of its files. In the continuing and futile search for Nazi loot and bank records deep in the Alpine lakes where the SS dumped millions of forged bills, the financial and political ripples continued into this century.
PAKISTAN:
Times of India: Though the role of Pakistani intelligence agency ISI in printing and circulation of FICN (Fake Indian Currency Notes) has never been a secret, sleuths recently found that the spy agency had, of late, impressed upon the government in Islamabad to import additional currency-standard printing paper from companies located in London to pursue its nefarious designs in India.
Pakistan has been procuring currency-standard printing paper in huge quantities from London-based companies — much higher than normal requirement of the country for printing its own currency — for diverting it to print FICN.
The ISI has, in fact, been using state air-carrier Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) to tansport counterfeit currency to its conduits in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, sources in investigating agencies said.
The modus operandi of the ISI was revealed by two Nepali counterfeit currency traffickers who were arrested by Thailand police in October 2008. During interrogation, the accused disclosed that they were working for a prominent Nepali businessman who was the son of a former minister in King Gyanendra's regime. “The fact that Nepali territory is being used by Pakistanis to smuggle counterfeit currency is well known. The first such expose was made when Pakistani diplomats were caught distributing FICN in Nepal,” an official said.
According to a recent Government estimate, counterfeit currency amounting to Rs 169,000 crore (USD 36,000 MILLION) is floating around in the Indian financial system. From real estate transactions to ordinary grocery shopping, these bogus notes are being deployed everyday — sometimes innocently, sometimes with a sinister objective. “In 2008, the CBI registered 13 cases having international/ inter-State ramifications relating to the recovery/ seizure of fake Indian currency notes,” says Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) spokesperson Harsh Bhal.
Intelligence agencies see the counterfeit rupee attack as a form of “economic terrorism”. They have traced many of the fake currency operations back to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its ancillary crime syndicates such as the Dawood Ibrahim gang. With a multi-layered network in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka and also inside India, counterfeit notes enter India in all three ways — through land, sea and air.
Intelligence officials say the ISI uses terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) to smuggle and circulate counterfeit currency in India.
Dangerously, the counterfeiters have managed to find their way into the official banking system. “Perhaps there is no better way to pummel India’s economy,” says an intelligence official. He explains the modus operandi. Fake currency operatives usually deposit the notes during peak hours when bank tellers are pressed for time and liable to make mistakes.
Fake currency amounting to nearly Rs 3 crore was found in the chest of the State Bank of India’s Domariaganj branch in Uttar Pradesh’s Siddarthnagar district. Some fake notes were also found in the currency chest of ICICI Bank’s Sanjay Place branch in Agra. The examples can go on.
Where are the fake notes printed? A CBI report to the Finance Ministry suggested that the Pakistan Government printing press in Quetta (Baluchistan) was churning out large quantities of counterfeit Indian currency.
Karachi’s security press, and two other presses in Lahore and Peshawar, have also been suspected.
The fine quality of Pakistan-produced fake currency has alarmed India. Printed on security paper, the sophistication and craftsmanship is of a high order. “Only a specialist can make out the notes as counterfeit,” says an intelligence official. The fake notes duplicate serial numbers and floral designs of genuine notes. In addition, they even have the security wire or “guide wire” — the common man’s mode of authenticating a currency note.
However, in the larger reckoning, the problem remains. If and when India does decide to take action against Pakistan-based terror, it may find that it is not enough to destroy merely military camps. A certain currency printing press in Quetta may also need to be blown up!
CHINA:
China loses no chance to undermine India at international for a, be if for surreptitious moves during the Nuclear Deal or blocking Maulana Massod’s Azhar’s terrorist tag in the UN (though this was together with UK) or the more blatant vetoing of ADB loan of US$60 million to India because there was a reference to Arunachal Pradesh.
But what takes the cake is this Nigerian Tribune News dated 6th June 2009. It states: “A clearing agent(names withheld) has been apprehended by the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) over his involvement in the importation of fake malaria drugs (Maloxine and Amalar tablets) worth N32.1million.
He was arrested at Kirikiri Terminal in Lagos while attempting to clear a container load of the drugs marked PCIU 2184458 which was imported by Divine Favour Overseas limited of 41, Tejuosho Street, Yaba.
According to the Director-Genral of NAFDAC, Dr. Paul Orhii, who disclosed this at a press conference in Lagos on Monday, the arrest and subsequent seizure of the drugs followed a text message from an informant on the development.
He said the fake products were produced in China but labelled “Made in India,” adding that the laboratory analysis of the drugs had revealed that it lacked an important active ingredient called pyrimenthamine.
The NAFDAC boss said the seizure was significant in view of the emergence of resistance strain of malaria parasites, saying the use of the fake drugs might lead to treatment failure, anaemia and death if no effective drug was given after.”
Bear in mind, The Indian pharmaceutical industry’s exports to Africa are worth $1,065 million a year and undermining that will suit China.
It is worth noting that multinational EU / US drug manufacturers who are hardest with the cheap Indian generic drugs, started a smear campaign in Africa that Indian generic drugs are fake. They forgot to mention that the fake ones are MADE IN CHINA.
How India helps : It costs about $15,000 a year to treat a patient with patented medicines. But the cost of the same treatment with generic drugs is just $300.
the Indian industry supplies quality drugs at one-tenth the cost of patented drugs. Over 15 per cent of India’s drug exports go to Africa. “And nearly a fifth of Africa’s $4.86 billion drug imports imports annually are from India.
A worthy target for economic terrorism. As China tries to increase its sphere of influence deeper into Africa, probably it makes economic sense to kill off India's entry to other sectors including oil, gas, coal, gemstones, other industries by sullying its name.
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