COMMENTARY DETAILS ROLE OF NGO IN SPREADING WAHHABI ISLAM IN BOSNIA
BBC Monitoring International Reports - January 10, 2008, Thursday

Text of commentary by Adi Halvo: "I witnessed establishment and work of TWRA organization" published by Bosnian Serb privately-owned centrist newspaper Nezavisne novine, on 5 January

The statement by the Hague tribunal's chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, to the German Der Spiegel of 18 October 2007, that the tribunal could prove that the president of the B-H Presidency, Alija Izetbegovic, was paying mojahedin to come to Bosnia-Hercegovina, is really dangerous for the position of the Bosnian Muslims amid the current anti-Islamic paranoia.

The closest relatives of the wartime president of the B-H Presidency requested that Carla Del Ponte deny this statement publicly, which she did by saying that Alija Izetbegovic did not pay the mojahedin, but the TWRA [Third World Relief Agency]. The gesture by the Izetbegovic family to protect their father's reputation and dignity is decent and justified, but only to the extent that it concerns their privacy.

On the other hand, the request for a denial of this statement can be interpreted as a calculated political move by Bakir Izetbegovic [senior official in the Party of Democratic Action - SDA.] He used the shield of being the closest relative to justify his late father's, and his own, contribution to all the misfortune that was inflicted on the Bosniak people by the politicians who were close to him, those who held similar political views and by the ideologists in and around the TWRA. [sentence as published]

As someone who witnessed what happened in Vienna, where I have lived since 1991, and in Zagreb, where I owned a company and an apartment in which I accommodated family members, refugees from Sarajevo, I can testify the following:

Elfatih Ali Hassanein, a close friend of Alija Izetbegovic's and a former student in Belgrade, founded the TWRA "humanitarian organization" in Vienna on 12 February 1987. However, during the war, the TWRA's main activities were carried out at this organization's address in Zagreb, on Mandalicina Street, where Elfatih Ali Hassanein, Hasan Cengic [former B-H defence minister who was involved in arming the B-H Army] and Mustafa Ceric [then imam in Zagreb, currently reis ul ulema of the B-H Islamic Community] had their offices, and where Alija Izetbegovic stayed from time to time.

At the same time, the TWRA managed a news agency in Zagreb; this agency was broadcasting reports, video recordings, and television reports every day, thus contributing to spreading the truth in the Islamic world about the suffering and the persecution of the Bosnian Muslims. The TWRA was also publishing the Al Sahid monthly magazine in Arabic. This magazine, among other things, glorified the Bosniaks with similar views to those of Elfatih Ali Hassanein, that is, Alija Izetbegovic, Mustafa Ceric, and Hasan Cengic, as the most prominent leaders of jihad in Bosnia. The best illustration of the kind of friendly-ideological relationship that existed between the TWRA's founder and chairman and Alija Izetbegovic is the statement by Elfatih's brother, Sukarno Ali Hassanein, to the Sabrana Bosnia newspaper of 20 September 1995: "...Elfatih Ali Hassanein, PhD, has been an old friend of Mr Alija Izetbegovic's since 1964. He is now an adviser to His Excellency Izetbegovic."

The area where the TWRA and its leadership played a positive role is the promotion and affirmation of the Bosniak interest in the world, and particularly in the Islamic countries. However, it is another question how much benefit this brought to the state of Bosnia-Hercegovina (in the sense of the material and political help in supplying arms and equipment to the Bosniaks,) and how much harm it inflicted on Bosnia-Hercegovina (pronounced Islamism at the expense of the Bosniak identity, the spreading of the ideology of the Wahhabi Islam, the mobilization of the mercenary mojahedin in the Islamic countries.) One thing is certain: the Muslim, Bosniak, and the Bosnian interests, which are not necessarily always identical, got mixed up in this process, and religion was misused for political purposes during the war and in the post-war period.

As those who are well-informed about the situation at the time know, the decisions were made in the TWRA organization in 1993 about a putsch within the Islamic Community, about forming an Islamic army, about who would be the commander of the B-H Army, who would have political power in the SDA in the headquarters and on the ground. It is known that Hasan Cengic, under the political leadership of the TWRA, during the war, was appointing politically acceptable cadres to the senior posts in the SDA municipal organizations, and, in this way, he placed the SDA in the Una-Sana canton under his control and that of Cengic's son-in-law, Mirsad Veladzic, and his closest and distant relatives.

Alija Izetbegovic was the president of the wartime B-H Republic Presidency and, at the same time, the engine of the TWRA organization, so, he was legally in the position, by his signature, to authorize and enable Elfatih Ali Hassanein and Hasan Cengic to collect donations for years, and thereby make unimaginable wealth. As the supreme head of the Army, he was also in a position to order General Rasim Delic to integrate the mojahedin unit into the B-H Army. Owing to Izetbegovic's policy and tolerating the invasion by the Islamic ideologists and "benefactors" of the territory controlled by the Bosniaks, he contributed to the formation of dozens of Islamic "humanitarian organizations" with suspicious intentions (it has been proved that some of them were linked with Al-Qa'idah.)

Whether Alija Izetbegovic, with his intellectual competence, political maturity, his moral responsibility and mentality, and his education, was capable of managing such complex processes, and to what extent he, as the wartime president of the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the commander of the B-H Army, influenced all these processes through an agreement with the enemies to the sovereignty and integrity of this internationally recognized state, is not to be judged by the Hague tribunal, or those with the same views as the late Alija Izetbegovic's, or by his family. The final judgment will be made by the intellectuals and historians!

What remains to be seen is whether the Bosniaks, by acting through the political parties and by electing good, European-oriented politicians in the next election, will solve their problems by themselves and thereby prevent Bosnia-Hercegovina from remaining a gray zone outside the EU. The future will show if the Bosniak people, who have been manipulated through religion and corrupted through the media, are capable of identifying the enemy within. This enemy is a corrupt, war-profiteering group, consisting of the disguised mentors of Islamic Wahhabism, which has been imposed on the Bosniaks by the ideologist of the TWRA organization.

Source: Nezavisne novine, Banja Luka, in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian 5 Jan 08
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