THE GREEN CORRIDOR: MYTH OR REALITY?

Thu 09/16/10 THE GREEN CORRIDOR: MYTH OR REALITY? Implications of Islamic Geopolitical Designs in the Balkans Srdja Trifkovic TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Definition 1 2. Reality and Ideology 2 3. The Setting 4 4. Turkish Conquest 5 5. The Ottoman Legacy 6 6. Demography 7 7. The Role of Modern Turkey 8 8. Bulgaria 9 9. FYR Macedonia 10 10. Kosovo 11 11. Sanjak 13 12. Bosnia 15 13. The Green Corridor and the War on Terror 17 14. Conclusion 18 Chicago, January 2009

1. Definition The Green Transverse or Green Corridor (in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Zelena transverzala ) is a geopolitical concept that has been used in three 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 in the area of Cazin (cca 50 miles from Slovenia, 120 miles from Austria), as a means of attaining wider geo-strategic objectives. In a 2001 report by the Italian security services, it 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. 2. To denote the ongoing process of increasing ethno-religious self-assertiveness among major traditionally Muslim communities in the Balkans, which 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 communitys 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. 3. To refer to the policy of the United States that has 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. The purpose of this study is to give some clarity to this concept. Such clarity is essential to a comprehensive understanding of the motives, actions, and emerging expectations of different actors in the Yugoslav wars of 1991-1999 and their aftermath. It is especially relevant to the events in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo-Metohija of the past two decades, and to the tensions in other parts of the Balkans. It is an area divided by many frontiers, but inhabited by peoples whose goals and ambitions transcend those frontiers. They remain defined chiefly by their blood and faith, rather than by political units they inhabit or universal principles. 2. Reality and Ideology Many Western academic experts, political analysts and media commentators accept the existence of a long-term geopolitical design to dominate parts of the Balkans by the Serbs so much so that the existence of a Greater Serbian ideology and program of action is treated as a given fact. Having been elevated to the status of incontrovertible motivating force behind the Joint Criminal Enterprise that supposedly guided Serbian leaders and their subordinates throughout the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, it is now the keystone of numerous indictments at Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague (ICTY).

On the other hand, some of those same experts, analysts and media commentators (notably in the English-speaking world) have shown curious tendency to be a priori dismissive of any suggestion that a similar geopolitical design exists, let alone that it is being systematically pursued, by other key players in the region. Accordingly it has been alleged, without proof or due analysis, that the notion of the Green Corridor was a product of Serbian nationalist paranoia or based on Islamophobic assumptions. In reality, its most authoritative proponents in recent years have been institutions and experts (British, Italian, Israeli, etc.) with no ethnic or personal axe to grind in the Balkan imbroglio. 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. The reality and the implications of the Transverse, as an idea and as an ongoing project, are well understood by an increasing number of experts around the world. The Bosnian war was still raging when Sir Alfred Sherman, former advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of the Centre for Policy Studies, warned that the Muslims objective was to create a Green Corridor from Bosnia through the Sanjak to Kosovo that would separate Serbia from Montenegro and facilitate Albanian pressures on Montenegro and Macedonia. 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 Ataturks secularist and Western stance back to a more Ottomanist, pan-Muslim orientation, and is actively helping the Muslim forces. Shermans diagnosis proved to be prescient. More than a decade later it was confirmed by Col. Shaul Shay, an expert on Islam at BESA (Begin-Sadat) Center at Bar-Ilan University. He notes 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 conclusions regarding the Green Corridor are disquieting: [T]he establishment of an independent Islamic territory including Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania along the Adriatic Coast, 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. Shays 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 and organizational infrastructures were thus established.

John R. 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-Qaidas transformation from an isolated fighting force into a lethal global threat. Radical Islam played a key role in the post-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 theory is implicitly based on Samuel Huntingtons Clash of Civilizations, which used the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a paradigmatic case of the so called fault-line wars between the Christians and the Muslims. Many years before the first shots were fired in Bosnia in 1992, that paradigm was confirmed by the late Bosnian-Muslim leader 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. When Yugoslavia started unraveling, the Green Corridor was not stated by Izetbegovic as an objective of his struggle, just as there is no mention of his plans for Bosnia as such in his Islamic Declaration. Both followed clearly enough from his broad strategic blueprint, however, his grand design for the world. In addition, by the early 1990s he needed the multicultural image to be presented to the West. Izetbegovics followers understood; the fruits of their labor and that of their coreligionists in another half-dozen Balkan countries are clearly visible along a thousand miles trail through the middle of todays Balkans. 3. The Setting The Balkan peninsula is traditionally defined as the area of Europe south of the line extending from Istria in the northwest along the Kupa, Sava and Danube rivers in the north, to the Danube Delta/the Black Sea in the northeast. Unlike other European peninsular regions (Iberia, Italy), the northern boundary of the Balkans is not marked by mountain ranges that sharply separate the peninsula from the heartland of Europe. On the contrary, that boundary is long and wide open, marked by easily fordable rivers, and criss-crossed by several key transit corridors essential to European commerce. They provide road, rail and waterway connection between Central and Western Europe with the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. On the whole poor in energy and natural resources and devoid of large tracts of fertile soil, the region is inherently significant mainly because of its location as the hub of several pan-European transport corridors. That location has been the bane of its history, too, inviting invaders and turning the region for most of the modern era into a mere object of competing designs and interests of the great powers.

The pan-European Corridor Ten, from Austria to Greece via Zagreb, Belgrade, Nis (with a branch to Sofia) and Skopje, is regarded as a particularly important route. It has been deemed worthy of investment in blood and treasure from the times of Roman legions to both world wars, and on to our own time. The Balkan peninsula has gained additional importance over the last decade as a result of competing gas and oil pipeline projects that aim to bring energy from the Caspian basin to Europe. Some of those projects are clearly designed to bypass and even marginalize Russia (Nabucco, AMBO), while others are actually sponsored by Russia as a countermeasure (e.g. South Stream). Competing pipeline projects merely serve to increase the already considerable strategic importance of the Balkans an area that remains the most historically unstable and politically volatile region in Europe. 4. Turkish Conquest The initial onslaught of Islamic conquerors on Europe started twelve centuries ago across the Straits of Gibraltar: Spain was the first European Christian country to be invaded by the Arab Islamic armies, which were finally stopped at Tours by Charles Martel (732 AD). The second attack of Islam on Europe came at the southeastern fringe of the Old Continent, starting 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 previous seven centuries of Islamic legal and political practice. The line of the attack went from Thrace via Macedonia to Kosovo; through Rascia (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. This is not to suggest that Ottoman strategists had devised an elaborate plan of conquest along those lines, but rather that the Green Corridor has a geopolitical logic that influences political and military decision-making either consciously or spontaneously. The historical record further indicates that Ottoman efforts at Islamization of the local population were more determined, and far more successful, along the Transverse 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. 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 to be converted to Islam and trained as janissaries. In the collective memory of Balkan Christian nations, five centuries of Turkish conquest and overlordship with all their consequences, social and political are carved as an unmitigated disaster. 5. The Ottoman Legacy The Turkish occupation did not mean the same thing for all Balkan nationalities. Under the new masters the Greeks, key players in the Byzantine world, provided a degree continuity in commerce, administration, and in understanding the affairs of the Balkan mosaic, as well as spiritual leadership for the Christian raya. Most other Orthodox Christians, by contrast, were deprived not only of statehood and liberty (that was the common destiny for all) but also of an educated elite capable of transmitting cultural identity. Conversions to Islam, a phenomenon more strongly pronounced along the Green Route than in the central regions of the Empire, contributed to a new stratification of the society under Ottoman rule and a new power balance. That balance shifted in favor of those individuals and communities that embraced the conquerors faith. They soon assumed the role of officials and tax collectors, holding power over and oppressing their neighbors, former co-religionists. People of the same ethno-linguistic community, sharing the same ancestors, thus often evolved into members of two fundamentally opposed social and political groups. The Ottoman variety of the old divide-et-impera policy had an additional characteristic. When setting up areas brought under their rule into vilayets (districts), the Turks purposely drew the dividing lines in such a way so as to encompass several nationalities in each district, instead of separating them. While the rationale for such a policy was not explicitly stated, it kept rivalry alive and prevented a common front against the Turks. The Ottoman zenith was reached under Suleyman the Magnificent in the first half of the 16th century. As that decline gathered pace after the defeat at Vienna (1683), the provincial Ottoman governors and local warlords in the Balkans grew stronger and disobedient of the Sultan. They were often 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 and a counterweight against Russia. The Western powers 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--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, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Cyprus.

It is remarkable that in this age of great sensitivity to victimology, the persecution of Balkan Christians by Ottoman Muslims has been largely ignored by Western historians. Centuries of arbitrary violence based on institutionalized religious discrimination, causing suffering and death of millions, have been covered by the myth of Ottoman tolerance that is as hurtful to the descendants of the victims as it is useless as a means of appeasing latter-day jihadists. 6. Demography The most enduring, and 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, all the more so considering its relatively small area (just over 200,000 square miles) and population (around 55 million). 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 just over 40 percent; and Roman Catholics (mainly Croats) are at around 5 percent. Those communities do not live in multicultural harmony. Their mutual lack of trust that occasionally spills into violence is a lasting product of the Ottoman legacy. Four salient features of the Ottoman state were: (a) Institutionalized, religiously justified discrimination of non-Muslims; (b) Personal insecurity of all subjects (Muslims included), but more keenly felt by Christians; (c) A tenuous coexistence without intermixing of its many ethnicities and creeds; and (d) The absence of unifying state ideology or supra-denominational source of loyalty. It was a largely Hobbesian world, and it bred a befitting mindset: the zero-sum-game approach to politics, in which one sides gain is perceived as anothers loss. That mindset has not changed although almost a century has elapsed since the disintegration of the Empire. Most Balkan Muslims live in continuous swathes of territory along the Green Corridor, from Istanbul in the southeast to Cazin in the northwest. 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 country of Blagoevgrad. The other is in the region of Raska (northern Sanjak to Muslims) in southwestern Serbia, along the main road and railway from Belgrade to the Montenegrin port of Bar. 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. 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. 7. The Role of Modern Turkey Turkeys European foothold on the Straits and in Eastern Thrace is populous (over 11 million) and overwhelmingly mono-ethnic (Turkish) and mono-religious (Muslim): after the final Greek exodus of 1955, the Christian

remnant is negligible. It is also the most densely populated part of the Balkans, thanks to the exponential growth of the city of Istanbul. But more significant than the numbers are those peoples attitudes and the policies of their political leaders. A nation-state of 72 million, the Turkish Republic is based on a blend of European-style nationalism and an underlying Islamic ethos that breeds a sense of intense kinship with the Muslim communities further west in the Balkans. The father of the modern Turkish nation Mustafa Kemal Ataturk hoped to impose a strictly secular concept of nationhood. Political Islam has reasserted itself, however, and its upholders are now in power. The Kemalist dream of Western-style secularism has 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 recentlyin 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 majority of Turks support Erdogan, validating the late Samuel Huntington's verdict that modern Turkey is a "torn country." The Islamism practiced by the AKP, according to a Turkish scholar living in Germany, is 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. That agenda of Islamization is no longer confined to the borders of the Turkish state. To the discomfort of its small Westernized secular elite, the country stubbornly remains Asian and Muslim, not only in the bulk of its land mass but more importantly in its common people's culture, religion, way of life, and a rekindled sense of kinship with their Balkan co-religionists. That kinship is what connects Turks with other Balkan Muslims. It is essential to the revival of Islamic fervor and ethnic self-assertiveness all along the Green Corridor: The [Yugoslav] wars of the 90s opened whole areas where [Muslims] were in the majority: While the regional realities modified, so did geopolitics between those who remained in the 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 . 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. Without a strong, solidly supportive anchor at its southeastern end, no Muslim revival in former Ottoman lands along the Green Corridor would be possible. The magnitude of that support, already manifested during the war in Bosnia, became fully visible during NATOs 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia, in which Turkey was one of the most active and enthusiastic participants. It also provided facilities for KLA training camps, with some officers privately conceding that it was payback time for Turkeys defeat in the First Balkan War (1912). 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 Islamist

AKP government it is becoming increasingly revisionist, potentially irridentist, and detrimental to stability in the Balkans. 8. Bulgaria Of the countrys 8 million inhabitants, ethnic Turks account for just under ten percent (750,000). Their numbers were reduced through forced emigration under the Zhivkov regime in the 1980s, but many have returned following Bulgarias entry into the EU. 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. They have been subjected to failed attempts at state-sponsored assimilation, including the change of their Muslim names to ethnic Bulgarian ones. Most Pomaks and Turks live in six counties that are situated between Turkey and 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, many of them financed by the Wahhabi pseudocharity Al-Waqf Al-Islami. Similar Middle Eastern groups are establishing Kuranic schools, paying for trips to the Hajj, and offering scholarships to young Pomaks to study Islam in Saudi Arabia. In February 2007 the authorities closed two websites for posting Jihadist propaganda in Bulgarian and agitating for Pomak autonomy, and arrested Ali Khairradin, the former mufti of Sofia. In the second half of 2008 the government banned two Pomak organizations accused of spreading Islam under the guise of being secular NGOs. 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. In addition to the religious revival, the Pomaks are establishing a new form of ethnic identityand demand the recognition of their separate nationality. Some Pomak activists assert that, far from being Islamized Bulgarians, they are descended from ancient Thracians. Others assert Arab descent and an Islamic identity that antedates Turkish conquest, supported by the claim that Pomaks practice a purer form or Islam than Bulgarian Turks. Some Bulgarians see the assertion of a separate ethnic identity as the first step in a future call for the establishment of a Pomak state Islamic in character in the Rhodope region. Others, like the nationalist Ataka Party, sees Pomaks as participants in the ongoing effort by Turkey and the Arab countries to re-Islamicize southern Bulgaria as the key link to the Western Balkans. In a recent statement the party warned of unprecedented aggression based on religious and ethnic grounds and accused Muslim activists of contempt for the laws of the Republic of Bulgaria. Even pro-Western sources in Sofia concede that it is stretching credibility to imagine that Bulgaria is not a target of radical Islam. 9. Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia FYROM is widely considered the weakest state in the Balkans. It has a large and restive Albanian population, 98 percent Muslim. According to the internationally supervized 2002 census results, Macedonian Slavs account for 66 percent (1.3 million) and Albanians for 25 percent (500,000) of the republics two million people. Some Albanians say that theyve been undercounted and

claim that their share of population exceeds 30 percent. Either way, they have had a remarkable rate of growth since 1961 when they accounted for 13 percent of the total. Macedonias Albanians have other reasons to feel upbeat. Their birthrate is more than twice that of Slavs. Their communities now extend far into northeastern and central regions of the republic, including areas with no prior record of Albanian settlement. Following the signing of the Ohrid Agreement that ended the 2001 Albanian armed rebellion by the NLA (a KLA subsidiary), the state itself is effectively becoming binational and bilingual. Albanians are de facto the second constituent nation in FYROM. They are guaranteed proportional share of government power and ethnicallybased police force. Skopjes surrender to Albanian demands came under intense U.S. pressure. As Jan Oberg of the Transnational Institute in Sweden pointed out at that time, the United States arms and trains both sides in Macedonia: ten years of Western policies combined with the NATO bombing and the failure of the mission in Kosovo have destabilized the region beyond repair. Having secured their dominance in the western part of the country, along the borders of Albania and Kosovo, the current main thrust of the Albanian ethno-religious enroachment has the countrys capital city as its primary objective. It is a little-known fact that todays 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 from the minaret five times a day, to create the visible and audible impression of their dominance that intimidates non-Muslims (sonic cleansing). In those mosques a Wahhabiconnected imam or administrative worker is invariably present to keep an eye on the rest. The Wahhabis, led by Skopjes former chief mufti Zenun Berisha, lost control of the IVZ (Islamic Religious Community) in 2006, but 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. French terrorism expert Claude Moniquet of the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center 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. Both demographically and politically, the Republic of Macedonia has a precarious present and an uncertain future. In the long term its stability and sustainability is open to doubt.

10. Kosovo Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton warned a year ago 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. His was a rare voice in Washington to warn of the ongoing merger of aggressive greater-Albanian nationalism and transnational Islamism. Boltons 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 KosovoAlbanian independence movement, he says. The fact that the KLA was universally designated a terrorist organization supported by al-Qaeda was conveniently ignored. Both assessments have been confirmed by events. Over the past decade, since the 1999 US-led NATO intervention, Kosovo has been cleansed of most of its Serbs. It became the crime capital of Europe. A dozen organized crime families (see map on the left), supported by private networks of KLA veterans, are in charge of Kosovos political institutions, as well as lucrative illegal transactions. Crime is the provinces main economic activity: hard drugs (primarily heroin), followed by human trafficking, associated sex trade, and arms smuggling. With the UDI in February 2008, the crime bosses were given formal state authority, in addition to the substantive power they have had for years. No less significant, from the vantage point of the Green Corridor, has been the symbiosis that has developed between Kosovos 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 with ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations have been 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. This process started well before the 1999 NATO intervention. In the late 1990s, while an intricate Islamic terror network was maturing in Bosnia, Osama bin Laden found fresh Balkan opportunities in Kosovo, but the Clinton Administration ignored the warnings. Iran also supported the Albanian insurgency in Kosovo, hoping to turn the region into their main base for Islamic armed activity in Europe. In 1999 the KLA earned its spurs in the eyes of its Islamist partners by blowing up Christian churches. The relationship was cemented by the zeal of KLA veterans who joined Bin Ladens network in Afghanistan. By the end of 1998, with Bin Ladens network firmly established in Albania, the U.S. drug officials (DEA) complained that the transformation of the KLA from terrorists into freedom fighters hampered their ability to stem the flow of Albanianpeddled heroin into America. 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, a mono-ethnic hotbed of criminality and intollerance, a major source of irridentism and regional instability and a key pillar of the Green Corridor. 11. Sanjak The region known to Muslims as Sandak (administrative district in Turkish) is one of the most critical geopolitical pressure points in the Balkans. It covers some 8,500 square kilometers along the border between Serbia and Montenegro, linking Kosovo to the southeast with Bosnia to the northwest. Serbs refer to it as Raka (Rascia) or the Raka Oblast (region). It derives its name from the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, an Ottoman district that existed until the Balkan Wars of 1912. The demographic picture of the region is exceptionally complex. According to the census in Serbia (2002) and Montenegro (2003), the population of Sandak was 420,259. Of that number 235,567 lived in Serbia and 184,692 in Montenegro. Bosniaks and Muslims-bynationality accounted for 52 percent while Serbs and Montenegrins had 43 percent, with other smaller groups making up the balance. Most Orthodox Slavs in six municipalities in Montenegro declared themselves as Serbs in 2003, reducing the number of Montenegrins-by-nationality in the region to under seven percent. Most Muslims are now Bosniaks but a minority still declare themselves Muslim by nationality. The crucial demographic gap in the Green Corridor still exists in the northwestern half of Sanjak, comprising three municipalities in Serbia (Priboj, Nova Varos and Prijepolje) and Pljevlja in Montenegro (yellow on the map). In addition there are two municipalities in Montenegro, Bijelo Polje and Berane, without a simple majority but with a Serb plurality (blue on the map). 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. The likely pattern of escalation has been tested in the 1990s. The Muslim separatist movement in Sanjak first emerged in 1990, when the Bosnian Party of Democratic Action (SDA), led by Alija Izetbegovic, appointed Sulejman Ugljanin as president of its Sandzak branch. In March 1991 he announced that the SDA would declare autonomy of Sandzak if any Yugoslav republic seceded from the Federation an event that was at that time imminent in view of Slovenias stated intentions. Two months later a Muslim National Council was established, with Ugljanin at its head (renamed Bosniak National Council in 1993). In October 1991, after the Muslim-Croat alliance in the Bosnian Assembly illegally adopted a declaration on Bosnias sovereignty and independence, the Sandzak SDA organised a bogus referendum on autonomy. On that dubious basis, in January 1992 the Muslim National Council demanded special status for the region from the international community. The Sanjak SDA was acting in accordance with instructions from Sarajevo, and at both ends the strategic objective was complete separation from Serbia and Montenegro and eventually unification with Izetbegovics independent Bosnia. The October referendum accordingly proposed full political and territorial autonomy with the right to join one of the other republics (i.e. Bosnia), and the January demand for special status corresponded to the one the EU was proposing for Kosovo.

A major problem for the SDA project was the principle of inviolability of internal Yugoslav frontiers, however, announced by the EU in late 1991. Nevertheless, by 1993 both Izetbegovic Ugljanin asserted that Sandzak must join Bosnia. Just like his partners in Sarajevo, Ugljanin's branch of the SDA played the Islamic card. The SDA displayed religious flags at their rallies (as well as Turkish ones). According to Adil Zulfikarpasic, a founder of the SDA who later split from Izetbegovic over the latters Islamism, a 1990 rally in the city of Novi Pazar the unofficial Muslim capital of Sandzak was conducted in a fascist way, with hundreds of religious flags and SDA guards everywhere. Today both Ugljanin and his arch-rival Rasim Ljajic, who split from him a decade ago, have been ostensibly tamed in that they take part in Serbias political process, occupy cabinet posts in the ruling coalition, and refrain from the kind of rhetoric that marked their rise in the 1990s. The mantle of ethno-religious activism has passed to Muamer Zukorlic, an Arab-educated imam with pan-Islamic credentials. Zukorlic is in dispute with the leadership of the Islamic Religious Community of Serbia (IVZ), the authority of which he refuses to accept. The leaders of the IVZ, reis-ul-ulema Adem Zilkic and his predecessor Hamdija Jusufspahic, are powerless to bring Zukorlic to heel because he is supported by the Muslim leadership in Sarajevo and well-endowed from foreign (mainly Arab) sources. While both sides in the dispute claim to be opposed to Wahhabi infiltration, Zukorlics position on this issue is ambivalent. He is widely believed to be sympathetic to the radicals. Even after a secret Wahhabi training camp stocked with weapons and explosives was discovered 20 miles from Novi Pazar he said that the problem was blown out of proportion. Many Muslims continue to regard Sanjak as more than a geographic term, however, insisting that its historic and geographic reality should be reflected in an autonomous political status. That goal seems less attainable than before after Montenegro proclaimed independence following the referendum in May 2006, as it would entail an unlikely agreement of both Belgrade and Podgorica to allow an entity to be set up that would straddle both sides of the Serbian-Montenegrin border. The demand for autonomy this time in the guise of regionalization is still present in Novi Pazar, however. It is now 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. 12. Bosnia Alija Izetbegovics 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 neither unusual nor unorthodox for a sincere Islamist. Nevertheless, many Western politicians and media commentators preferred to believe that the Bosnian-Muslim leadership wanted to establish a multiethnic, democratic society.

The U.S. military experts saw the situation more clearly than the politicians, assessing that such ideals may appeal to a few members of Bosnias ruling circles, but President Izethbegovic and his cabal appear to harbor much different private intentions and goals. It is obvious, 17 years later, that Izetbegovic meant business. President Clinton was still in the White House when a classified State Department report warned that the Muslimcontrolled parts of Bosnia were a safe haven for Islamic terrorism. It warned that hundreds of foreign mujaheddin, who had become Bosnian citizens and remained there after fighting in the war, presented a major terrorist threat to Europe and the United States. Among them were hard-core terrorists, some with ties to bin Laden, protected by the Muslim government. A confirmation came in November 2001 when two Bosnian passports were found in a house vacated in Kabul by the fleeing Taliban. The findings were summarized by a former State Department official: Bosnia was a staging area and safe haven for Islamic terrorists. The core of Bin Ladens Balkan network are the veterans of El Moujahed brigade of the Bosnian-Muslim army. It was established in 1992 and included volunteers from all over the Islamic world . The unit was distinguished by its spectacular cruelty to Christians, including decapitation of prisoners to the chants of Allahu-akbar. El Moujahed was the nursery from which an international terrorist network spread to Europe and North America. After the end of the Bosnian war, many Muslim volunteers remained. The Bosnian-Muslim government circumvented the Dayton rules by granting Bosnian citizenship to several hundred Arab and other Islamist volunteers. Less than a year after the wars end they were well established, having taken over Serbian-owned properties and married local women, sometimes by force. They and other Bosnian veterans went on to perpetrate murder and mayhem in many countries in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the U.S. An early sign came in March 1996, when on the eve of a G-7 summit in Lille the French police discovered a plot to attack the Western leaders by a group of Muslims at nearby Roubaix who had fought in the Balkans. All of their weapons and explosives were smuggled from Bosnia. The French thus uncovered what they called the Bosnian Connection. They also established that Osama Bin Ladens links to the Bosnian Muslims were known to the Clinton Administration, and quietly tolerated by Washington. The following year, the Bosnian Connection resurfaced following the bombing of the Al Khobar building in Riyadh: several suspects had served with the Bosnian Muslim forces and were linked to Osama Bin Laden. Abdelkader Mokhtari, an Algerian but a Bosnian citizen, tried to help smuggle C-4 plastic explosives and blasting caps to a group plotting to destroy U.S. military installations in Germany. Even 9/11 itself had a Bosnian Connection: Khalid Sheikh Muhammad the infamous KSM, the senior al-Qaida operative who planned the 9/11 attacks was a seasoned veteran of the Bosnian jihad, as were two of the hijackers. It should be noted that the Millennium Plot at the end of December 1999, the narrowly averted al-Qaida attempt to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, was

planned by a cell of mujahedeen operating in Montreal, most of them veterans of the Bosnian war, and the operation was controlled out of central Bosnia. Iran had already obtained a foothold of its own in Bosnia when the Clinton Administration got Teherans help in supplying the Muslim army with weapons. This was done in violation of the UN arms embargo initially demanded by the U.S. and behind the back of its European allies. The CIA and the Departments of State and Defense were not told at first. Iranian intelligence operatives came with the weapons. The result is a symbiotic relationship between the ruling Muslim establishment in Sarajevo and the Tehran regime. While meeting Sarajevos representatives in 2003, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said that the Jihad of the the Bosnian and Palestinian nations is praiseworthy and a source of honor for Muslims and that the resistance and faith of these nations will be registered in the history of Islam. Rafsanjani said Iran attaches great importance to Bosnias geographic position in the Balkans. The meaning of this and many similar encounters is (1) that the Bosnian nation is equated exclusively with its Muslims (Bosniaks), whereas other constituent nations (Serbs, Croats) are by implication aliens and enemies; (2) that Bosnian Muslim officials are perceived and treated in Teheran as allies in a jihad; (3) that Iranian Islamists see Bosnia as no less important than Palestine to their strategic design ( evident in the reference to Bosnias geographic position in the Balkans. Last but not least, Bosnia remains a staging post for thousands of illegal Muslim immigrants from the Middle East making their way into Western Europe. International officials fear that many terrorist operatives and their potential recruits are slipping in: There should be a sign on the tarmac saying Welcome to Bosniathe open backdoor to Fortress Europe. Izetbegovic stepped down in 2000, but the hard-liners who have internalized his teaching and his vision remain active at all levels of Bosnias Muslim nomenklatura. As Janes 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. 13. The Green Corridor and the War on Terror Terrorism, understood as unpredictable violence against non-combatants used in pursuit of ideological, religious and political objectives, is as old as humanity, and it has manifestations in many parts on the world. Only Islamic terrorism, however that used by Muslims in pursuit of political objectives inspired by Islamic teaching, tradition, and historical practice is a global phenomenon, and it is the only variety that threatens Western countries as such. It is also the only variety that properly falls under the category global terrorism. This war belongs to fourth-generation warfare in which it is inherently hard to target the enemy and to evaluate results. In the Balkans, a phenomenon initially based on local groups is morphing into an integral part of a global network of autonomous cells with local reach but with a global cumulative potential. 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 alQaeda. The process was summarized by Magnus Ranstorp, a specialist at the Swedish

National Defense College who testified before the 9-11 Commission. He warned that the presence of Islamic militants in the Balkans makes it an attractive gateway into Europe for terrorists, as well as the embryo of what became al-Qaida in Europe: the Balkans have become the crossroads where we see the merger of Islamic extremist groups who reach out to organized crime groups. Ranstorp stresses the link between organized and terrorism: both move in the same circles and need the same things. If you want to tackle terrorists, you have to tackle the supporting environment, the organized crime rings and the human trafficking rings. Indeed, a hidden alliance between terror networks and organized crime gangs that control smuggling routes in the Balkans, is making it easier for terrorists to infiltrate Western Europe. Western law-enforcement officials quietly concede that the region has become a paradise for al-Qaida. By contrast, Western politicians and diplomats are typically evasive. They do not deny the existence of the problem, but as a rule 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 from the region 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 Eurointegration of the whole region would narrow the space for radical Islamism until such tendencies will finally disappear. The problem with such optimistic assessment is not that it is totally wrong but that it becomes less right with each passing day. A major fault of the Western approach is its nave faith in the attractive powers of secularisation. This growing gap between the reality of Islam in the Balkans and Western mainstream narrative about the moderate and tolerant Balkan Islam is too obvious to remain unchallenged. The problem of the Green Corridor and its implications not only for the Balkans but for Europe as a whole and the rest of the world will not be resolved without critical reexamination of Western policies as well as Western illusions. Appeasing global jihad, in the Balkans or anywhere else, is not only morally unsupportable. It is also completely counterproductive in countering the existential threat of global terrorism. 14. Conclusion The Green Corridor is not an invention, even less a conspiracy theory. Over the past two decades it has morphed into a transformed demographic, social and political Islamic reality. It is a vibrant geopolitical project whose fruits are visible, tangible, and undeniable. A leading Israeli authority on Islam has summarized the problem succinctly: In Bosnia it was the revivalist Islamic ideology of Izetbegovic was aided by Iran and other Muslim countries, happy to see Islamic politics back in Central Europe. Then came the Albanian uprising in Kosovo, which duplicated the same situation and drove the reIslamization of that land under the support of the West. The result is that while 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.

Effectively helping the establishment of a continuity which drives a wedge in the heart of Europe has been a key theme of American policy-making in the region since 1992. The involvement of successive U.S. administrations in the Balkans illustrates the failed expectation that satisfying Muslim ambitions in a secondary theater will improve the U.S. standing in the Muslim world as a whole. The policy has never yielded any dividends, but repeated failure only prompts its advocates to redouble their efforts. Former U.S. UnderSecretary of State Nicholas Burns thus declared on February 18, 2008, a day after Kosovos 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. Its a stable we think its going to be a stable state. 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 previously ethnically cleansed of nonMuslims, on the smouldering ruins of a hundred-plus Christian churches and monasteries, 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 borthers 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. 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. All along the Green Corridor, the Balkan Peninsula is visibly morphing from part of Europe into an area more reminiscent of the Middle East. The rising ambitions of the regions Muslims mean that, if the process is allowed to proceed unabated, the Balkan Peninsula is also likely to be as stable and peaceful as the Middle East. The ambition was clearly 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 mandate, but a permanent peace is impossible for as long as there is a single infidel entity refusing to submit to Dar al-Islam.

An honest confrontation with similar statements of intent and more generally, with the phenomenon of the Green Corridor and the problem it poses for non-Muslims in the Balkans and for the rest of Europe is long overdue. Confronting the issue does not imply any antagonism towards Islam as such, or its adherents. On the other hand, continuous refusal to deal with this problem may be indicative of a deeply engrained prejudice against those who find themselves at its receiving end. Of course it would be preferable to have a reformed Islam as a neighbor, rather than those models that currently prevail in Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere; but Islams ability to reform itself can only be undermined by the appeasement of Islamism that continues in the Balkans. 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, Western policies in the Balkans continue to encourage seven distinct but interconnected trends centered on the Green Corridor: (a) Pan-Islamic agitation for the completion of an uninterrupted Transverse by linking its as yet unconnected segments. (b) Destabilization of Bosnia resulting from constant Muslim demands for the erosion of all constitutional prerogatives leading to the abolition of the Republika Srpska. (c) Growing separatism among Muslims in the Raska region of Serbia, manifest in the demand for the establishment of an autonomous Sanjak region. (d) Continuing intensification of greater-Albanian aspirations against Macedonia, Montenegro, Greece, and rump-Serbia. (e) Further religious radicalization and ethnic redefinition of Muslims in Bulgaria, leading to demands for territorial autonomy in the Rhodope region. (f) Ongoing spread of Islamic agitation, mainly foreign-financed, through a growing network of mosques, Islamic centers, NGOs and charities all along the Route. (g) Escalation of Turkeys regional ambitions and Ankaras 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, but many longterm costs of the Green Corridor will come to haunt the Western policy-makers. As the late Sir Alfred Sherman has said, What they are doing in the Balkans today, they are doing to themselves tomorrow.