{"id":38289,"date":"2011-08-01T01:29:20","date_gmt":"2011-07-31T22:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=38289"},"modified":"2023-04-30T13:28:48","modified_gmt":"2023-04-30T10:28:48","slug":"breiviks-balkan-obsession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2011\/08\/01\/breiviks-balkan-obsession\/","title":{"rendered":"Breivik’s Balkan obsession"},"content":{"rendered":"

AN UNPLEASANT little surprise. Anders Behring Breivik, the man who has confessed to the Friday attacks in Norway that killed at least 96 people, makes a glancing reference to me in the \u201cmanifesto\u201d he apparently put on the internet hours before he began his killing. Discussing a key event in the history of Serbia and Kosovo, in 1690, Mr Breivik refers to me (mistakenly) as a historian, and says that I “refuted” a specific claim made by Noel Malcolm in one of my book reviews. In fact I questioned the claim; “refute” is too categorical.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A look through Mr Breivik’s 1,500-page 2083: A European Declaration of Independence<\/em>, which he published under the pseudonym “Andrew Berwick”, shows that he had a strange obsession with the Balkans.\u00a0A word search for \u201cKosovo\u201d comes up with 143 matches, \u201cSerb\u201d yields 341 matches, \u201cBosnia\u201d 343 and \u201cAlbania\u201d 208. (“Srebrenica”\u2014the site of a Bosnian Serb massacre of some 8,000 Bosniaks in 1995\u2014does not appear in the document.)<\/p>\n

The document is best described as a kind of “Mein Kampf” for our times, in which Jews are replaced by Muslims as the enemy which must be fought and expunged from Europe. Drawing on the crudest of warmongering Serbian propaganda from the 1990s, the document describes Muslim Albanians and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) as an evil jihad-waging enemy. Needless to say, its history is convoluted and misinformed.<\/p>\n

\n

In one section Mr Breivik says he would like to meet Radovan Karad\u017ei\u0107, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs who is currently on trial at the UN\u2019s war crimes tribunal in The Hague. \u201cBut isn\u2019t Radovan Karad\u017ei\u0107\u00a0a mass murderer and a racist?!\u201d he asks. \u201cAs far as my studies show he is neither.\u201d<\/p>\n

The document goes on to claim that for decades Muslims in \u201cBosnian Serbia\u201d andAlbanians\u00a0waged deliberate demographic warfare, or \u201cindirect genocide\u201d, against the Serbs. This echoes\u00a0an infamous draft\u00a0\u00a0memorandum<\/span> by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts,\u00a0which was leaked in 1986 and widely regarded as a key influence on Serbian nationalists at the time.<\/p>\n

The section goes on to display the extent of Mr Breivik’s delusions. Mr Karad\u017ei\u0107, he says, \u201coffered the Muslims in Bosnian Serbia the chance to convert or leave the country\u201d. He continues:<\/p>\n

…he even went as far as offering the Muslims certain enclaves. When they refused he wanted to deport them by force. When this was made impossible by NATO he gave the order to fight the people who refused which was his sovereign right and responsibility as one of the primary leaders of Serb forces. This was never about ethnicity but about ridding the country of the genocidal hate ideology known as Islam. I do condemn any atrocities committed against Croats and vice versa but for his efforts to rid Serbia of Islam he will always be considered and remembered as an honourable Crusader and a European war hero. As for the NATO war criminals, the Western European category A traitors who gave the green light, they are nothing less than war criminals.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mr Breivik also has harsh words for Albanians. Their families, he says, “procreate at large scales [sic] trying to conquer territories demographically and later through bloodshed.\u201d Although Albanians are among the most secular Muslims in the world, and fanatically pro-American at that, Mr Breivik chooses to highlight alleged links to al-Qaeda.<\/p>\n

In the coming “war” that Mr Breivik foresees, he discusses the deportation of Muslims from Europe and appears to endorse the physical annihilation of any Albanians and Bosniaks that resist. As they have lived here for \u201cseveral centuries\u201d, he says, \u201cthey will not accept being deported from Europe and will fight for their survival. A more long term and brutal military strategy must therefore be applied.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Europe is cleansed of Muslims, Albania is designated by Mr Breivik as the official \u201ctransit zone for the Balkans\u201d. After that, the local map is to be completely redrawn. Once all Muslims have been deported from Europe, Kosovo will be \u201creunified with Serbia once again.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

Bosnia, too, is to disappear from the map, in a manner that recalls the failed attempts of the 1990s to divide it between Serbia and Croatia. Mr Breivik refers to the country as \u201cthe Serbian\/Croatian territory currently known as Bosnia Herzegovina.\u201d It will be divided into a \u201cSerbian (60-70%) and Croatian (30-40%) part\u2026 after historical ethnic lines. All Muslim individuals (Bosniaks and Albanians) will be deported to the nearest transit area (Albania) awaiting deportation from Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

His geography gets a little wonky when it comes to the country he refers to as\u00a0\u201cthe Greek\/Croatian\/Serbian territory currently known as Albania\u201d:\u00a0Albania shares no border with Croatia. He suggests dividing the country such that Greece and Montenegro get 20% each, with the rest left for Christian Albanians. \u201cAll Muslim Albanians will be deported to central Anatolia.\u201d The resulting “rather large” unpopulated areas in Albania could be offered as a \u201cpermanent home (territory) to several Christian minorities\u201d coming from the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Seeing himself as a modern-day crusader, Mr Breivik presumably hoped that by murdering so many fellow Norwegians he would provoke a new world war in which the Balkans would be one of the central fronts. His document contains details of various medals to be awarded. The “Liberation of the Balkans Service” medal is to be given \u201cfor assisting to drive out Islam from occupied territory belonging to Serbia and Croatia (Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina).\u201d There are similar prizes for Macedonia and Albania.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Mr Breivik claims that it was Norway’s \u201cinvolvement in the attacks on Serbia\u201d (the NATO bombing of the country during the Kosovo war) that led him to want to \u201cmove on with the assault\u201d. He writes:<\/p>\n

It was completely unacceptable how the US and Western European regimes bombed our Serbian brothers.\u00a0All they wanted was to drive Islam out by deporting the Albanian Muslims back to Albania. When the Albanians refused, they really didn\u2019t have any choice but to use military force. By disallowing the Serbians the right for self-determination over their sovereign territory they indirectly dug a grave for Europe. A future where several Mini-Pakistan\u2019s would eventually will be created in every Western European capital. This is unacceptable, completely unacceptable.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Finally, Mr Breivik discusses the creation of a so-called military order, to which he says he belongs. The initial contact was through Serbian “cultural conservatives”\u2014presumably extreme nationalists\u2014on the internet. He met others from all over Europe, but notes:<\/p>\n

I had the privilege of meeting one of the greatest living war heroes of Europe at the time, a Serbian crusader and war hero who had killed many Muslims in battle. Due to EU persecution for alleged crimes against Muslims he was living at one point in Liberia. I visited him in Monrovia once, just before the founding session in London, 2002.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

www.economist.com\/blogs\/easternapproaches,\u00a0Jul 25th 2011<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AN UNPLEASANT little surprise. Anders Behring Breivik, the man who has confessed to the Friday attacks in Norway that killed at least 96 people, makes a glancing reference to me in the \u201cmanifesto\u201d he apparently put on the internet hours before he began his killing. Discussing a key event in the history of Serbia and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":33039,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[284],"tags":[3765,9745,6599],"class_list":["post-38289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-norway","tag-al-qaeda","tag-balkans","tag-breivik"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}