Pro-Yugoslav Muslim Leader Put on Trial (original) (raw)

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Pro-Yugoslav Muslim Leader Put on Trial

Below we have printed an English translation of an article from the Yugoslav newspaper, Politika, reporting on the trial of Fikret Abdic, the popular Bosnian Muslim leader.

Abdic was a great embarrassment to the U.S. government.

He was and is popular, arguably the most popular Muslim leader; he got the most votes in the 1990 Bosnian elections. And that was the problem because he was allied with the Bosnian Serbs. He supported the concept of Yugoslavia - a multiethnic state. He fought Alija Izetbegovic, the extreme Islamist, installed and maintained in Sarajevo through U.S. power and ludicrously misdescribed by U.S. government apologists as a great and broadminded democrat.

Fikret Abdic gives the lie to the claim, put forth by chauvinists of various sorts in Bosnia and by the media, that the fighting in Bosnia resulted from a racist attack by Serbian forces on Muslims.

Abdic and tens of thousands of followers set up the Autonomous Region of Western Bosnia, an area with a very strong partisan and anti-fascist tradition stemming from the W.W.II struggle against Nazi occupation and Croatian Ustasha terror.

The Autonomous area, which straddled the Bosnian and Croatian border, was populated by Muslims, Serbs, and some Croats who upheld Yugoslav ideals of solidarity. Abdic and his followers sided with the Serbs who wanted to preserve Yugoslavia and feared the rise of local fascism backed by the Great Powers. He fought on the Serbian side in Bosnia until both the Serbian Republic in Krajina (RSK) and his own ARWB were crushed by a coordinated offensive combining NATO airstrikes and a ground offensive by the 5th Corps of Alija Izetbegovic's army and the Croatian regular army (trained and led by the CIA and the privatized CIA-linked company, MPRI) thereby launching an ethnic-cleansing operation that drove 250,000 Serbs and some 50,000-80,000 Muslims from their traditional homes.

-- Emperor's Clothes

"Case Opened Against Fikret Abdic" By: R. Arsenic

Politika (Belgrade)

ZAGREB (June 6, 2001) - After two months of preparations the regional state prosecutor in Rijeka initiated a case against Fikret Abdic, a citizen of B&H and Croatia, who has been based for a while now in Opatija, where the HQ of his company is found. By this act, the long-standing controversy between Bosnia and Croatia over the eventual fate of the leader of the Autonomous Movement for Western Bosnia - where Abdic has the support of his own people who followed him in resistance to the centralism of Alija Izetbegovic and his SDA.

Fikret Abdic lost that war (even though he had won in elections), and the Izetbegovic regime has since accused him of war-crimes against those who disagreed with his policies and has asked for Abdic's extradition from Croatia to which he fled and whose citizenship he held.

After his military defeat in the region of Cazinska Krajina and Velika Kladusha at the hands of the 5th Corps. of the ARBiH [Alija Izetbegovic's Islamist army], more than 50,000 Muslims loyal to Abdic - some put the figure at 80,000 - moved into the neighboring Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK) to seek refuge. This fact proved that the propaganda claiming that the war was rooted in an unbridgable gap between Serbs and Muslims was false, but that its roots lied somewhere else. Soon after this the RSK also fell and the fact that Muslims were escaping from Alija's men and seeking refuge with the Serbs was quickly suppressed by those who didn't want to highlight these truths because they brought into question already formed stereotypes of the conflict.

Alija's regime couldn't forgive Fikret's rebellion, and judging from the available evidence they also couldn't support his unquestionable popularity with not only the people of the region of Cazinska Krajina (remember that Abdic received the most votes in Bosnia, but Izetbegovic nonetheless seized the Presidency in the early 1990s). This is why after the fall of the Autonomous Region of Western Bosnia Croatia received a demand from Bosnia to extradite Fikret Abdic, who was accused of having opened a camp near Velika Kladusha and of torturing prisoners within the camp.

According to the statement of Rijeka's prosecutor Draga Marincela, the case against Abdic is composed of documents that were obtained from Bosnia, and is being raised on the basis of the international treaty between Croatia and Bosnia regarding approaches to criminal cases, and following the Bosnian governments acceptance of this process.

R. Arsenic

***

Further reading:

1) http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/nonviole.html

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