Do These Bosnian Kids Look Like Jihadi Extremists?

The International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has finally reached its climax. And former Bosnian Serb rebel leader Radovan Karadzic has taken the opportunity of his war crimes trial to make his last argument that he was doing the right thing when he ordered and consented to the murder of civilians.

Recently, Change.org's Genocide blogger Michelle posted "How Not to Defend Yourself Against Genocide Charges." True, Karadzic sounds like an extremist who portrays himself as a believer in his own ideological rhetoric, defending himself not by claiming he misunderstood the situation but by claiming the world misunderstood the situation. The world can learn a great deal from this about the problem of evil.

Specifically, Karadzic makes the argument that he and his administration led Serbs in Bosnia to defend themselves against a growing, threatening jihadist movement represented by the country's Muslim majority. He repeats the rhetoric told in rural Serbian circles before and during the war that there was evidence that the Bosnian Muslims had aims to repress or expel the Serbs, so the Serbs, he argues, had to act .. .pre-emptively to protect themselves.

Looking back on Bosnia, many sympathizers to the Karadzic argument remember that global jihadists from the Arab world came to Bosnia during the war to support the Bosnian side. Many of the foreign jihadists were the fiercest fighters against the Serbs in the war, in Mostar and at the music school detention camp in Zenica.

But the vast majority of Muslims in Bosnia have always been secular and moderate. In the early days of the war, foreign jihadists had never even heard of the Bosnian Muslims. Those who did considered them faithless.

In fact, the Tribunal has collected public evidence showing very clearly that throughout the Drina Valley, as well as in Western Bosnia, the Karadzic group received funds from the Serbian security service in Belgrade to protect Bosnian Serbs from being subjugated to a Muslim-majority independent Bosnia. If necessary, the Karadzic group was willing to break the Serb communities off of Bosnia and re-connect them to Serbia.

But most Serbs in the rural areas who lived side by side with Muslims were not to be motivated by parliamentary gambits and ideas of voting majorities and democratization. The only way they would put force behind Karadzic's political quest for Serbian right-of-way in the region is if they were afraid, if they believed that their neighbors were preparing a conspiracy to kill them. In a sense, this was a democratic war.

Photo credit: Daniel J Gerstle (Zivinice, Bosnia)