Fields of Blood (70 page)

The Saudis’ experience of
modernity had been very different from that of the Egyptians, Pakistanis, or
Palestinians. The Arabian Peninsula had not been colonized; it was rich and had never been forced to secularize. Instead of fighting tyranny and corruption at home, therefore, Saudi Islamists focused on the suffering of Muslims worldwide, their
pan-Islamism close in spirit to Azzam’s global
jihad. The Quran told Muslims that they must take responsibility for one another; King Feisal
had always framed his support for the
Palestinians in these terms, and the Saudi-based
Muslim World League and the Organization of Islamic Conferences had regularly expressed solidarity with member states in conflict with non-Muslim regimes. Now television brought images of Muslim suffering in Palestine and Lebanon into comfortable Saudi homes. They saw pictures of
Israelis bulldozing Palestinian houses and in September 1982 witnessed the Christian
Maronites’ massacre, with the tacit approval of the IDF, of two thousand Palestinians in the
refugee camps of
Sabra and
Chatila. With so much suffering of this kind in the Muslim world,
pan-Islamist sentiment increased during the 1980s, and the government exploited it as a way of distracting their subjects from the kingdom’s internal problems.
¹⁸
It was for this reason too that the Saudis encouraged the young to go to the Afghan
jihad, offering airfare discounts, while the state press celebrated their feats on the frontier. The Wahhabi clerical establishment, however, disapproved of the Afghans’ Sufi practices and insisted that jihad was not an individual duty for civilians but was still the ruler’s responsibility. Yet the Saudi king’s civil government supported Azzam’s teaching for its own temporal reasons.

A study of Saudis who volunteered for Afghanistan and later fought in
Bosnia and
Chechnya shows that most were chiefly motivated by the desire to help their Muslim brothers and sisters.
¹⁹
Nasir al-Bahri, who would become Bin Laden’s bodyguard, gave the fullest and most perceptive explanation of this concern:

This was, he said, a political awakening, and the volunteers began to acquire a global sense of the ummah that transcended national boundaries: “The idea of the umma began to evolve in our minds. We realised we were a nation [
ummah
] that had a distinguished place among nations.… The issue of
nationalism was put out of our minds, and we acquired a wider view than that, namely the issue of the umma.” The welfare of the
ummah had always been a deeply spiritual as well as a political concern in Islam, so the plight of their fellow Muslims cut to the core of their Islamic identity. Many were ashamed that Muslim leaders had responded so inadequately to these disasters. “After all those years of humiliation, they could finally do something to help their Muslim brothers,” one respondent explained. Another said that “he would follow the news of his brothers with the deepest
empathy, and he wanted to do something, anything, to help them.” One volunteer’s friend remembered that “we would often sit and talk about the slaughtering to which Muslims are subjected, and his eyes would fill with tears.”
²¹

The survey also found that in nearly every case, there was more sympathy for the victims than hatred for their oppressors. And despite the
United States’ support for Israel, there was as yet not much anti-Americanism. “We did not go because of the Americans,” insisted
Nasir al-Bahri. Some recruits longed for the glamour of a glorious
martyrdom, but many were also lured by the sheer excitement of warfare, the possibility of heroism, and the comradeship of brothers-at-arms. As ever, the warrior’s transcendence of mundane circumstance seemed very much akin to the believer’s spiritual transcendence. Nasir al-Bahri remembered how they idolized the volunteers: “When we used to look at the Afghan suits that the
mujahidin who returned from
Afghanistan wore as they walked the streets of Jidda,
Mecca or
Medina, we used to feel that we were living with the generation of the triumphant companions of the
Prophet, and hence looked up to them as an example.”
²²

When finally the Soviets were forced to withdraw from Afghanistan in February 1989 and the
Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991, the Arab-Afghans relished a heady, if inaccurate, sense of having defeated a great world power. They now planned to fulfill Azzam’s dream of reconquering all the lost Muslim lands. Throughout the world at this time, political Islam seemed in the ascendant.
Hamas had become a serious challenge to
Fatah. In
Algeria, the
Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) had won a decisive victory over the secular
National Liberation Front (FLN) in the municipal polls of 1990, and the Islamist ideologue
Hassan Al-Turabi had come to power in the
Sudan. After the Soviet withdrawal,
Bin Laden founded
al-Qaeda, which began humbly as an alumni organization for those Arab-Afghans who wanted to take the
jihad forward. At this point the entity, whose name simply means “the Base,” had no coherent ideology or clear goal. And so some of its affiliates returned home as freelances
with the aim of deposing corrupt secularist regimes and replacing them with an
Islamic government. Others, still committed to
Azzam’s classical
jihadism, joined local
Muslims in their struggle against the Russians in
Chechnya and
Tajikistan and the
Serbs in
Bosnia. Yet to their dismay, they found that they were unable to transform these
national conflicts into what they considered a true jihad. Indeed, in Bosnia they were not only
de trop
but a positive liability.

The Bosnian War (1992–95) saw one of the last
genocides of the twentieth century. Unlike the two preceding it, the
Armenian genocide and the
Holocaust, this mass killing was conducted on the basis of religious rather than ethnic identity. Despite the widespread assumption in the West that the divisions in the
Balkans were ancient and ingrained and that the violence was ineradicable because of its strong “religious” element, this communal intolerance was relatively new.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims had lived together peacefully under
Ottoman rule for five hundred years and continued doing so after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, when Serbs,
Slovenians,
Slavic Muslims, and
Croats had formed the multireligious federation of
Yugoslavia (“Land of the South Slavs”). Yugoslavia was dismantled by
Nazi
Germany in 1941 but was revived after the Second World War by the
communist leader
Josip Broz Tito (r. 1945–80) under the slogan “Brotherhood and Unity.” After his death, however, the radical Serbian
nationalism of
Slobodan Milosevic and the equally assertive Croatian nationalism of
Franjo Tudjman pulled the country apart, with Bosnia caught in the middle. Slavic nationalism had a strongly Christian flavor—Serbs were
Orthodox and Croatians Roman Catholic—but Bosnia, with a Muslim majority and Serbian, Croatian, Jewish, and
Gypsy communities, opted for a secular state that respected all religions. Lacking the military capacity to defend themselves, Bosnian Muslims knew they would be persecuted if they remained part of Serbia, and so in April 1992 they declared independence. The
United States and the
European Union recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina as a sovereign state.

Milosevic depicted Serbia as “a fortress, defending European culture and religion” from the Islamic world, and Serbian clerics and academics similarly described their nation as a bulwark against the Asiatic hordes. Another radical Serbian nationalist,
Radovan Karadzic, had warned the Bosnian Assembly that if it declared independence, it would lead their
nation “into hell” and “make the Muslim people disappear.” But this latent hatred of Islam dated only to the nineteenth century, when Serbian nationalists had created a myth that blended
Christianity with a national sentiment based on ethnicity: it cast Prince Lazlo, defeated by the Ottomans in 1389, as a Christ figure; the Turkish sultan as a Christ slayer; and the Slavs who converted to Islam as “Turkified” (
isturciti
). By adopting a non-Christian religion, they had renounced their Slavic ethnicity and become
Orientals; the Serbian nation would not rise again until these aliens were exterminated. Yet so deep-rooted were the habits of coexistence that it took
Milosevic three years of relentless
propaganda to persuade the Serbs to revive this lethal blend of secular
nationalism, religion, and racism. Significantly, the war began with a frantic attempt to expunge the documentary evidence that for centuries
Jews, Christians, and Muslims had enjoyed a rich coexistence. A month after the Bosnian declaration of independence, Serbian militias destroyed the Oriental Institute in
Sarajevo, which housed the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts in the
Balkans, burned down the National Library and National Museum, and targeted all such manuscript collections for destruction. Between them, Serbian and
Croat nationalists also destroyed some fourteen hundred mosques, turning the sites into parks and parking lots to erase all memory of the inconvenient past.
²³

While they were burning the museums, Serbian militias and the heavily armed
Yugoslav National Army overran Bosnia, and in the autumn of 1992 the process that
Karadzic called “ethnic cleansing” began.
²⁴
Milosevic had opened the prisons and recruited petty gangsters into the militias, letting them pillage, rape, burn, and kill with impunity.
²⁵
No Muslim was to be spared, and any Bosnian Serb who refused to cooperate must also die. Muslims were herded into concentration camps, and without toilets or other sanitation, filthy, emaciated, and traumatized, they seemed scarcely human either to themselves or to their tormentors. Militia leaders dulled the inhibitions of their troops with alcohol, forcing them to gang-rape, murder, and torture. When
Srebrenica, a UN “safe area,” was turned over to the Serb army in the summer of 1995, at least eight thousand men and boys were massacred, and by the autumn the last Muslims were either killed or expelled from the
Banja Luka region.
²⁶

The international community was horrified but made no urgent demand for the killing to be stopped; rather, the prevailing feeling was
that all parties were equally guilty.
²⁷
“I don’t care two cents about Bosnia. Not two cents,” said
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman. “The people there have brought on their own troubles. Let them keep on killing one another and the problem will be solved.”
²⁸
To their credit, the
Arab-Afghans were the only people to provide military help, but the Bosnian
Muslims found them intolerant, were baffled by their global jihadism, and adamantly rejected all their plans for an Islamic state. Unfortunately, the Arab-Afghans’ presence gave the impression abroad that the Bosnian Muslims were also fundamentalists, though in fact many wore their Islam very lightly. Stereotypical views about Islam and fears of an Islamic state on the threshold of Europe may well have contributed to the Western reluctance to intervene; Serbian rhetoric of defensive walls may not have seemed such a bad idea to some Europeans and Americans. Nevertheless, in August 1995,
NATO did intervene with a series of air strikes against Bosnian Serb positions, which finally brought this tragic conflict to an end. A peace agreement was signed in Dayton, Ohio, on November 21, 1995. But the world was left with a troubling memory. Once again there had been concentration camps in Europe, this time with Muslims in them. After the
Holocaust, the cry had been “Never again,” but this did not seem to apply to Europe’s Muslim population.