Bosnia Charges Alleged Mujahedin

Wednesday, 9 November, 2005

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Beth Kampschror

An Iraqi-born Bosnian citizen has become the first alleged mujahedin, or foreign Islamic fighter, to be charged with war crimes by Bosnia’s state prosecutor.

Abdul Maktouf, 45, was charged on September 13 with offences allegedly committed against Serb and Croat civilians during the Bosnian war.

The indictment claims that Maktouf abducted five civilians – four Croats and one Serb – from the central Bosnian town of Travnik in October 1993 and transported them to a mujahedin camp outside the town, where the five were allegedly severely beaten. The Serb captive was eventually beheaded.

Bosnia state prosecutor John McNair told IWPR that witnesses questioned during the investigation have described Maktouf as a “facilitator” for a notorious unit of mujahedin fighters in central Bosnia called El-Mujahed, which is alleged to have fought under the auspices of the Bosnian army’s third corps commanded by Enver Hadzihasanovic.

Hadzihasanovic and his subordinate officer Amir Kubura are currently being tried in The Hague on charges of superior command responsibility for crimes committed against Serb and Croat civilians by the members of this unit.

The Maktouf indictment is the first war crimes-related case to come out of Bosnia’s state court, created under the auspices of the international community’s high representative for Bosnia in January 2003.

But it has come almost half a year before the court’s specialised war crimes chamber is expected to actually open its doors, and was issued not by the war crimes prosecutor but the court’s special department for economic crime, organised crime and corruption.

McNair, a Canadian who heads the latter department, said that Maktouf has been in their custody since June, as the department had been investigating him on suspicion of tax evasion and document forging – charges he denied.

In July, on the basis of new information, prosecutors broadened the investigation into the area of war crimes, McNair explained.

Some international observers have expressed reservations about the way war crimes charges were brought against Maktouf, pointing that he was indicted only after spending months in pre-trial detention on entirely different charges.

But McNair said that he was “not inclined to wait” to delay issuing an indictment.

“We have conducted quite a thorough investigation of the war crimes allegation over the last three months, and we believe the evidence supporting it is strong,” he said, adding that the fact that Maktouf was already in custody “militated against any delay”.

Maktouf’s lawyer Adil Lozo argued that he was not informed that his client was being investigated for war crimes, and claims that he found this information out from the media.

"I got that information from you," he told a reporter from Banja Luka daily Nezavisne Novine on September 13. "Surely we should have been the first to get that sort of information, and then the media."

The charges against Maktouf have been approved by the Hague tribunal’s Office of The Prosecutor – a necessary move according to the 1996 Rome agreement which stipulates that no war crimes charges in Bosnia can be issued without such an agreement.

It is Maktouf’s alleged mujahedin connections that raised the profile of the case in Bosnia, where scores of war crimes cases have already been tried by various local courts.

The presence of these fighters – especially after the September 11 attacks on the United States – has been something of a thorn in the side of the western and especially US representatives here.

Though the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war stipulated that all foreign fighters had to leave the country, many mujahedin married Bosnian women and received Bosnian citizenship. Fours years ago, the local media reported that as many as 1,200 former combatants were believed to have taken this option.

After the September 11 attacks, the Bosnian government moved to review the passports of hundreds of people who had received Bosnian citizenship between 1992 and 2001. They also extradited groups of Egyptians and Moroccans who were suspected of connections with extremist groups.

In the most dramatic episode to date, a group of six Algerians suspected of issuing threats against the US embassy in Sarajevo, was seized by American troops as they left a Bosnian jail on the same morning that a local court ruled there was not enough proof to keep them in custody anymore.

Islamic humanitarian organisations operating in Bosnia have also been raided on suspicion of funneling money to extremist groups, and western news agencies have reported that US agents and military operatives are tracking more than 300 suspected Muslim militants in Bosnia.

Rumours of the existence in Bosnia of training camps for such radicals also persist, but these were dismissed by state prosecutors in January of this year.

However, the Bosnian government’s Serb representatives were happy to seize on the news of the indictment to speak of mujahedin “tarnishing the image of Bosnia”.

“The issue of terrorism in Bosnia has never really been addressed,” Bosnian foreign minister Mladen Ivanic, a Serb, told the press earlier this week.

But the Sarajevo media in general applauded the move, mirroring the Bosnian Muslim population’s general dislike of the mujahedin presence in their country.

The full story of Islamic fighters in Bosnia, however, is yet to be told, according to Senad Slatina, an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Sarajevo, adding he hoped the Maktouf case would help shed light on “who were these people, how they came here, and what the attitude of the local population, especially Bosnian Muslims, was towards them”.

If Maktouf is found guilty of kidnapping the five civilians, he faces a minimum sentence of ten years in prison.

Beth Kampschror is an IWPR contributor in Sarajevo. Ana Uzelac contributed to this report from The Hague.