SLOVENE ACADEMIC SAYS BOSNIA HAS 'SEVERAL' RADICAL MUSLIM INTERNET SITES
BBC Monitoring International Reports - November 13, 2007 Tuesday

Text of report by Bosnian Serb newspaper Nezavisne novine on 13 November

[Report by N. Moraca: "'Several Radical and Extremist Sites in B-H'"]

Ljubljana - Uros Svete from the Defence Department at Ljubljana's Faculty for Social Studies, which, among other things, researches the Internet and the abuse of it, claims that there are several sites in B-H that are quite radical and extremist. He also said that these sites were supported by international Islamists' movements.

"There are many calls on B-H Muslims to join the brothers in Chechnya. It is also possible that the Internet has influenced Bosnia with the ideology of global jihad," Svete said.

He added that it was possible to classify certain individual sites and internet servers in B-H as propaganda and an attempt to impose Islamist and religious issues on everyday life.

"The sites differ greatly and not all of them are equally developed. Some just offer links to certain servers with extremist content in the Arab world and the rest of the Islamic world, while others are at a higher level of development and have specific features," Svete explained. He singled out the portal www.islambosna.ba, which he said was a reflection of developments in the Bosnian Muslim community. Svete said that, although these sites were different in terms of form and content, they had something in common: most of them were on the servers outside B-H.

"It is very hard, without the cooperation of the companies that offer space on the Internet, to determine who maintains certain servers with certain kind of content," Svete concluded.

He added that the abuse of the Internet as a mass medium was becoming a serous security threat, particularly in the context of what had been called "the war against terrorism" since 11 September 2001.

Source: Nezavisne novine, Banja Luka, in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian 13 Nov 07
Posted for Fair Use only.