Heed Bolt's warnings on terror

Some of us who grew up as "ethnics" in writer Catherine Deveny's allegedly infamous and "rough" Melbourne suburb of Reservoir during the 1970s would have looked upon the likes of conservative columnist Andrew Bolt as a stern high school teacher, offering you tough advice you did not want to hear but knew deep down was right. So we should heed Bolt's recent warnings about the rise of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism on Australian soil.

But in this age of permanent adolescence, to borrow a term from Canadian pundit Mark Steyn, many of our cultural elite who should know better have to trash our elders for the sake of pretend or feigned radical chic.

However, some of us as writers/bloggers, as part of our shtick, don't have professional ethnic angst, an Anglo-Celtic Australian angst, a Catholic angst, patriachal angst, matriachal angst, heteronormative angst nor ex-soldier angst. In fact we don't want to punish society because of any personal angst nor are we on a "curious crusade" to use a term coined by a now retrenched Age newspaperman! We simply want to discuss and debate hot issues of the day. Ok, that's out of the way...!

I want to talk about Balkan Blowback and how it impacts Australia and the rest of the Western world. How in our naivety in trying to help we have ourselves become the target since 9 September 2001.

The Americans love coming up with catchy and punchy terms. Take for instance "blowback", a term used in espionage to describe the unintended consequences of covert operations. In the war on terror context it means former Mujahaddin Islamic holy war warriors once sponsored by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Cold War who have now turned against their former paymaster by morphing into Al Qaeda.

Balkan Blowback refers to events in the former Communist multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, namely Bosnia-Hercegovina and how this now impacts upon security in the West, including Australia.

The Bosnian war, 1992-95, was a result of the break up of the former Yugoslavia and in a three-way struggle which pitted Muslim Bosnians (Bosnjaks) against ethnic Serbs, against ethnic Croats, in a bid to control the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Bosna-Hercegovina). No one can forget the images of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo being bombarded constantly by Serb artillery or the infamous Serb concentration camp with emaciated Muslim Bosnian prisoners or the UN's inability to stop the slaughter of Muslim Bosnians at Srebrenica. The war ended with the US-brokered Dayton Agreement in 1995.

The Muslim Bosnians were regarded as the "good muslims" by the United States. In fact so much so that in this pre 9/11 environment, Islamic militants from around the world, including Iran were "allowed" to enter Bosnia and even the score against the Serbs and Croats. When things got out of hand the militants were ordered to leave by the US, especially when many of the post 9/11 attacks against the West were coming from Bosnian training camps.

An American academic, Dr John Schindler, a lecturer at the prestigious US Naval War College, was an international war crimes investigator in Bosnia. He reached two startling conclusions: one, many of the war criminals from either the Serb, Croat or Bosnian side were former Yugoslav intelligence service (UDBa) officers from the old communist regime who had switched their allegiances to their respective sides, and secondly, and most importantly for the West, the growth of Iranian influence over the Muslim Bosnian government.

Dr Schindler reveals an interesting story about Fikret Muslimovic, "Bosnia's true eminence grise and the man who engineered the alliance with Iran back in the early 1990... Muslimovic was a career Yugoslav military counterintelligence (KOS) officer and convinced Communist who spent the 1980s locking away Islamic radicals in Bosnia, yet who upon Bosnian independence in 1992 suddenly became an Islamic hardliner and advocate of linkages with Iran and Al-Qaeda … sometimes it's better not to ask too many questions."

A different report titled, Jihad, bought and sold on January 26, 2009 by ISA Consulting, a non-profit international think tank reveals an interesting individual offering his services in the fight on terror:

"He is an Islamic warrior who fought in Bosnia during the war, a fierce follower of jihad who has pledged to die in the name of God, a convicted terrorist and proclaimed al-Qaida commander. Ali Ahmed Ali Hamad is now trying to sell information about atrocities committed by his warriors in Bosnia in return for asylum."