Alright, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Our first guest on the show today is Christopher DeLiso.
He's been a regular contributor to Antiwar.com for a long, long time and is the author of the new book, The Coming Balkan Caliphate, The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West.
He is the proprietor of the website Balkanalysis.com and is on the phone from a town I cannot pronounce in Macedonia.
Welcome to the show, Chris.
Hi, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
How are you, my friend?
Very well.
And what's the name of that town I can't pronounce again?
Skopje.
Skopje.
Yeah, there you go.
The capital of Macedonia.
In Macedonia.
Well, one thing that really hit me about that part of Europe as I was reading this book was how little I know about it, virtually nothing.
And I wonder if we could just start out here with maybe a brief description of the Balkans.
Which handful of countries are we talking about that are included when you say the Balkans?
And maybe some of the history, not intricate detail, but some of the history in terms of that area being the crossroads of various empires through the centuries and the results in terms of different religions and ethnicities sharing the territory there.
Right.
Okay.
Well, in the context of my book, the countries that I'm discussing are the countries of the former Yugoslavia, or most of them, at least Bosnia, Serbia, now a new country of Kosovo, Macedonia, as well as Albania and Bulgaria, and a bit about Turkey as well.
And Romania, does Romania count?
Romania counts, but I didn't cover it because I didn't see much of a problem there.
I see.
And I don't really specialize in Romania either, so that may be something for the future, but I'm not sure.
When you ask about religions, this is the most interesting part because the Ottoman Empire ruled parts of the Balkans for up to 500 years, and only the last sultan was finished after World War I.
So this was still a very relatively recent time.
And before that, you had Christianity, either the Greek Orthodox, Byzantine Christianity across much of the Balkans, or else pockets of Catholicism closer to the Adriatic in Albania or Croatia and places like this.
So you have a mixed legacy of Christians and Muslims, and this is part of the current dispute because you've had in all of these countries, basically, you've had a communist system from 1945 until about 1990.
So one of the themes in my book is about the denationalization process in several of these countries, which basically means that the state seized a lot of assets or land or property from the original owners.
And a lot of these original owners were either the church or the Islamic community, and people are now fighting over who gets what back and whether they can build mosques or churches or whatever.
So there's still a sort of religious overtone to the whole thing.
You talk about in the book exactly that, where one group cites titles, property titles, deeds and so forth from under the days of the Ottoman Empire.
And then the other group says, oh yeah, well, we have these records from the Byzantine Empire that predate yours, and so the land belongs to us.
This is a resolution that a bunch of kids from rural Pennsylvania and Texas are supposed to go there and solve.
Is that it?
You mean the soldiers?
Well, yeah, or just, you know, I guess there's no peacekeepers in Kosovo now, no American peacekeepers in Kosovo.
Oh, there are plenty of peacekeepers in Kosovo National Guard in Camp Bonnefield.
Americans?
Yeah.
I didn't realize there were still Americans in Kosovo.
NATO is continuing its mission now, you know, maybe to bring the listeners up to speed.
Kosovo has declared independence a couple of days ago, and this means that the United Nations mission, which was in operation since the summer of 99, now has to phase out and the European Union is going to come in.
So there's going to be a much more European focus to the administration, but the U.S. will stay on in some, you know, advisory capacity, and also with the soldiers, because apparently NATO's mission will continue.
And we built this enormous Camp Bonnefield in the middle of Kosovo, and so they clearly had the idea of a long-term presence.
But anyway, that's background.
Right, well, now, with the secession of Kosovo, or the, I guess, sort of pseudo-secession under the authority of NATO and the European Union, this is basically continuing the breakup of this part of the world after the fall of the Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia and surrounding states there, and it seems like everything is being divvied up by ethnicity and religion.
It's not, I guess, wide-scale massacres like it was in the mid-90s, but it's sort of slow-motion ethnic cleansing still all over the place.
Is that right?
Well, yeah, if you take the long-term view, there'll probably be no Serbs left in Kosovo, at least not in the enclave south of the river Ibar, where north of that river, the city of North Mitrovica, which is divided, mostly Serbs are living north of that on the border with Serbia proper, and so they're, you know, claiming they won't have anything to do with the new Kosovo government, and they might, you know, try to succeed themselves or become part of Serbia, but there's many very vulnerable minority enclaves in central, southern, and western Kosovo, which will probably be, you know, eventually cleaned out, and I had heard this years ago from, you know, high officials in, you know, the International Organization for Migration, or UNHCR, all these kind of, you know, humanitarian organizations who say basically, you know, the Serbs in Kosovo don't have any future at all.
Well, I think it was in your book that I read that 250,000 Serbs have been forced out of Kosovo since 1999 when America intervened.
Yeah, I don't know exactly, but around that 200,000, 250,000.
Well, and there's already news stories about Serb-dominated towns in Kosovo saying, well, we refuse to be independent.
We still want to be tied to the river.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
From north Mitrovica and Leposavac, and that side north of the river Ibar, they're in a sort of concentrated area, so they're a little bit more brave, but the Serbs in the enclaves who are really just isolated in the middle of hostile Albanian, you know, settlements, they really are in a very precarious position.
Which includes, by the way, some of their most historically significant churches and monasteries, which is really what they're trying to protect, like the Patriarchate in Pec or the Gračanica Monastery are both very, very precarious positions right now.
Yeah, Ivan Ilin came up with an idea in an article a few weeks back that perhaps the European Union could negotiate a situation where Serbia would retain some sovereignty over holy sites and things like that, ancient shrines and so forth, in order to stave off conflict over them.
Because that's basically what we're talking about, right?
Is that whichever faction gains power, the other side has no reason to believe that their property will be protected in the new order.
Yeah, basically it's total mistrust and fear.
It's not a healthy atmosphere.
So this book, The Coming Balkan Caliphate, I have to tell you, and in fact, I think you kind of admit this in the introduction, that this is a pretty shocking title.
Perhaps it's meant to shock the idea that the Balkans...
It's a marketing-friendly title, you know, to get the people to open the book.
Because I explicitly say in the beginning, look guys, I'm not talking that there's going to be some huge territorial contiguous caliphate the way that, you know, it's been thought of in the past.
What I'm talking about is these certain decentralized areas springing up in various pockets of the Balkans.
Yeah, it's more a situation where the Balkans becomes, or has become, a safe haven for stateless terrorist groups, rather than them running the place.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Although there is, within this, I don't know, intrareligious war, the battle between the Turks who have the Ottoman legacy to uphold, and the Saudi proselytizers, the Wahhabis, who are challenging that, you know, and trying to erect mosques in the Arab fashion.
For now, it's actually, most of the conflict is within the Islamic communities.
It's not Muslim against Christian, for now, anyway.
They're fighting over their own properties and their own heritage, and which kind of Islam will prevail.
Now, I've never been to that part of the world, so forgive me, but you really do come across, not necessarily as an alarmist, but you come across as quite alarmed in this book about the development of this Saudi-financed, Wahhabist form of Islam spreading in that part of Europe.
Is it really that much of a problem, or it has the potential to be a real problem in terms of, you know, terrorist safe haven in Central Europe?
You know, I wouldn't have written the book if I didn't think, you know, that there wasn't a problem.
And on that note, I could say, you know, it wouldn't take, you know, a lot of forethought to say, look, Iraq is a mess, or Afghanistan is a mess, because you can see, you know, on the TV, people getting blown up every day.
So this is a bit of a risk, because I'm predicting, you know, strategically into the future.
You know, people can come here and say, look, the Albanians are waving American flags, you know, what, you know, how could you possibly think there's a problem or anything?
But I'm examining sort of social and demographic trends, and religious trends, economic trends, and balancing them against known events that have happened.
You know, in my book, I do a lot of interviews with present and former intelligence officials of different countries, military personnel, different security experts, people who have been involved on the ground.
And you know, what you come away with is the idea that a lot more has gone on, that for various reasons of political correctness or careerism, has just simply been suppressed and has not been reported.
And since I am the only one, let's say, the only Anglo journalist living in Macedonia, after the war of 2001, all of them left, I can tell you there's only 42 accredited foreign journalists in Macedonia.
I'm the only one here.
And so, you know, I'm in a position to investigate more things than, you know, most people who just come in for a day or two.
Well, sure, and being a voice in the wilderness doesn't mean that you're wrong or anything like that.
And, you know, I just, I'm just trying to provoke you into backing up your position is all.
Well, you know, so much of the media, what the media is doing is just to create consensus, whether it's about a political candidate, or a cause, or an issue.
And, you know, if you get enough people who are saying, you know, don't worry about this, or don't worry about that, there won't be any Islamic problem here.
Then people start to believe that becomes a conventional wisdom.
And if you buck that trend in any way, people start to say, well, how can you possibly say that without looking at the evidence?
So all I'm trying to do is to put out the evidence, and, you know, most of it is stuff that, you know, even well-informed people have not seen before.
So in this sense, it's kind of an exciting book.
And I was, you know, I was very, very much enjoyed researching it.
And it's not like you're joining up with the war party and saying, you know, therefore we have to fight some extensive war on terrorism in the Balkans.
No, definitely not.
And this is a very important distinction as well.
What I'm doing, and also I should mention this is not an anti-Islam or anti-Muslim book or something like this.
What I'm basically doing is saying the international peacekeepers and international intervention in the last 15 years has really screwed up the situation.
And so we need to take some sort of corrective measures towards intelligence gathering and security in general.
So this book is aimed basically at the Western intelligence community and policymakers and so on.
I would say that in the last three or four months, I've gotten a lot of, you know, positive reactions from former and present American military and intelligence officials who seem to think that, you know, they're excited by what I've written or they could say, you know, I've got some stuff wrong, but I've got more stuff right than I got wrong, you know, which as a journalist is very gratifying because obviously you're not in a position to be privy to huge amounts of, you know, classified information.
You just do what you can.
So I know that there's an interest in this and the question is just, you know, attaining a critical mass, getting enough people who would be interested in this.
I'm sure that people would be interested in if they knew what was going on.
Well, now, if we can rewind to the beginning of the Clinton administration in the early to mid 90s, you wrote in your book that the Bosnian interventions by Bill Clinton, that was basically his gift to fundamentalist Islam.
Explain that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm being a little rough on him probably.
But it is.
It is the case that they tacitly allowed a few thousand Mujahideen to come in.
Just remember, that was the end of the Soviet Afghan jihad that we sponsored in the 80s.
So you had a bunch of out of work jihadis who needed something to do.
Can't go home.
Can't go home.
And actually, that's the case.
Many of them from countries like Egypt or Tunisia or Jordan would be wanted at home.
And that was a major issue with how the Balkan terrorist threat shaped up during the 90s, especially with Albania.
So these people needed to be routed somewhere.
And so Chechnya was starting to get hot and then Bosnia.
And there was an arms embargo held by the UN on the warring parties in the Yugoslav war.
But, you know, the Bosnian Muslim government was really at a disadvantage because the Yugoslav army had recalled the weapons from the succeeding countries.
And so the Clinton administration basically looked the other way when these Mujahideen came into Bosnia.
And this has been in the news in the last year because the Bush administration was putting a lot of pressure on the Bosnian government to expel several hundred of these former jihadis who had been given Bosnian passports and had basically settled down.
And you know, they're protesting this.
And I think they did finally, the court finally said, you know, about 500 or so have to get out.
But of course, they have appeals and so on.
And I don't know if they actually will leave.
The interesting thing about that, though, was just the the fear of being extradited to some home country where they would probably be tortured or imprisoned or whatever, led some of them to go underground to escape.
And in this case is where you said before the Balkans is a safe haven.
We found in Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia, in these small areas where the Wahhabi extremists have, you know, gained a foothold.
They're also using these areas as safe houses for, you know, ideological fellow travelers you have, aside from Bosnia, you have radical Islamists who are living in Western Europe who might be wanted by the police in countries like France or Spain, who tried to go underground in the Balkans.
And this is one of the concerns for now and for the future that the that the region could be used as this kind of terrorist transfer zone because of the incursions of foreign money and foreign influence.
Well, what about all the United Nations and NATO and so-called authorities around the place?
Why don't they do anything about this?
Well, you have to understand the UN in Kosovo is a perfect disaster.
And I think a lot of times, you know, the average citizen will just think, you know, that the good guys, the altruists, the blue helmets out there, you know, keeping the peace so everybody is safe on the the real side of the story.
Actually, most of these UN people are contractors or career diplomats or people sent even, you know, the soldiers are rotated in and out every six months or every year.
And so there's not a whole lot of vested interest for anybody to put their life on the line, first of all.
And certainly there's not any it's not in anybody's interest to go out looking for terrorists.
And this was a big part of the book.
Let me think.
I think Chapter five, six and to lose it.
Yeah.
Chapter no, Chapter six.
I'm sorry.
Chapter six of the book where I have interviews with a lot of these former and present workers and security in the UN administration.
And, you know, the people I talked to were the frustrated ones who wanted to speak out because, you know, they said there's tangible evidence that we have these banned charity groups or that we've seen, you know, Islamic movements growing and nobody was interested in, you know, the State Department wasn't interested.
The FBI wasn't and people deliberately tried to suppress this and, you know, they would fire people if they spoke out against it.
So, you know, the UN administration is typified by the phrase, don't rock the boat.
You know, everybody just go in, get your paycheck, try to get promoted to someplace nicer and, you know, just keep your mouth shut.
So there's no kind of patriotism who's going to fight for the, you know, the UN flag.
It's there's, you know, even the US army in Iraq is in a better state of morale than the UN would have been ever.
Well, in the book, you comment about how democracy is actually kind of a weak system for the current problem in that the Wahhabists, with their Saudi millions and their mission to integrate themselves into this society, continues unabated.
No administration ever lasts.
There's always an election every few months all over the place.
Nobody has any long term responsibility.
I guess if you're a UN employee and you're in and out in six months, you have even less responsibility and accountability for how you administer the place.
None.
And this is the scariest thing about the UN.
And I think that we will see now with the Kosovo independence setting a precedent and for all these other secessionist areas around the world, I have a feeling we're going to see a lot more of these breakaway provinces and a lot more UN peacekeeping missions, which is very, very lucrative business.
And, you know, they would like to keep as many of these going as public money to pay for people to be unaccountable and to not make things better.
You know, in Kosovo now it's eight, nine years since the UN came and there's still no electricity and streets are, you know, filled with potholes.
So it was Kosovo is a corporation, it's not a country, and it's a very corrupt one.
And I think that history will probably look back on it if they, you know, the records are not all destroyed, that this was the single biggest act of organized corruption and money laundering in Europe in the last 50 years is just a joke.
Now, part of your story is about six Albanian Americans.
Of course, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed earned his stripes.
The ringleader of the 9-11 attacks earned his stripes fighting in Bosnia.
And another Balkan connection here, six Albanian American imams landed in Macedonia, was it?
No, no, no, in Kosovo.
In Kosovo and had foreknowledge of the attacks.
Tell us that story.
Well, this is one of the intriguing details that emerges from research, which we would dearly love to know more about.
But unfortunately, it looks like that the trail is cold on that one.
According to one of the sources I interviewed in the UN mission reporting on a police meeting from September of 2001, there had been a group of six Albanian American radical imams who were touring some of these villages in Western Kosovo, you know, saying, you know, death to America and, you know, down with Israel and all that.
And they had been predicting in August that America would soon be hit.
Now, in and of itself, that is not, you know, smoking gun proof, but it is very, very interesting.
Now, the local villagers, for the most part, you know, were not in favor of this kind of rhetoric and they tried to expel them.
The police believe they had some connection with a wealthy, wealthy mafioso from South Mitrovica, the Albanian populated part of the city that's divided by the river.
But inexplicably, the UN authorities questioned these people and apparently just let them go.
And I would think, you know, in that time, especially the week after September 11, everybody is, you know, scrambling and struggling for any clue they can find.
And to have this happen is just mind blowing.
This is what I'm saying about no accountability.
Yeah, it sounds like the perfect, you know, kind of like Alaska, everybody up there is running away from something.
Sounds like the Alaska of Europe or something like that.
Now, tell me this.
It seems like a bunch of Saudi Wahhabis would at least have an uphill battle in front of them here when they're trying to turn a European society into an Arab one.
Has it just come down to how much money they have versus nobody else?
Well, I mean, everybody has money.
It comes down to how persistent they are going to be and to, you know, whether other people will take up the slack.
As is fairly common throughout the Balkans, one of their tactics has been to to pay people a monthly salary to go to the mosque and to grow beards and to veil their wives and so on and to join the sort of the sect.
And after that, then you're only supposed to marry your children to someone in that sect as well.
But, of course, maybe in their heart of hearts, they don't feel particularly devout in the Saudi way.
But over time, this could be a problem, and it has been considered as a problem by intelligence services.
And yesterday, the EU police commissioner Frattini from Italy said that the EU was very concerned about radical Islam in Bosnia, which is the largest area of radicals.
In the long term, it is like in a place like Kosovo, the EU has promised to pump a lot of money into it.
But the inattention of the last eight years allowed the Saudis to get an inroads, especially in the most poor and rural parts of the province that have always historically been prone to radicalism, usually for nationalism.
But now they would like to reroute that nationalism into a religious based fanaticism.
And, you know, the skeptics out there, their argument is always the same, which is that, you know, these people, by and large, are secular Muslims.
You know, they say they're pro-American and everything, to which you could say what happened if America changes policy tomorrow and said, you know, we don't think it's a good idea to support Kosovo independence.
We'll see how fast they turn from being pro-American.
That's another story.
Let me ask you this.
You talk about in your book how Albania was basically first and then Bosnia and then Kosovo was in the middle there.
And so they finally got taken over more and more by this kind of extreme form of Islam.
Is Montenegro next?
Just looking at the map here.
Montenegro is interesting because there's this area that straddles the border of Montenegro and Serbia.
It's called the Sanjak, which was an Ottoman Turkish term for an administrative unit.
And this area is populated by a combination of Serbs and Montenegrin Christians and Bosniak Muslims.
And especially in the larger towns like Novi Pazar is majority Muslims.
And it's always been that way.
But radical Islam there is considered to be one of the biggest threats in the Balkans, even though it's a very small area.
In 2007, the Serbian police discovered in a cave not far from Novi Pazar, an arsenal of weapons and training camp and so on.
And they arrested a bunch of local people who believed to have connections with outside, you know, radical interests.
Montenegro, there was a report a month or two ago from an intelligence chief in Montenegro who said that they had similar problems.
And there's youth groups that are also formed, which is a great way for disseminating propaganda.
You know, for example, in Montenegro, they would go on an island, a touristic place or something.
In Macedonia, they would go on the beach on Struga just to sort of make a show of force.
You have a hundred guys and beards and youth on a beach.
And it's a very striking thing, which from people that I talked to who were there said this made them feel very uncomfortable.
Just, you know, so these sort of very subtle, slight displays of organized religion, as I said, as you mentioned about the different timelines, the West is always thinking on a four year timeline for the government changing and everyone has very limited priorities.
And of course, there's between all the intelligence services, as we've seen so much, a lack of intelligence sharing and so on and different feuds and so on.
But for this Islamic movement, there's no timeline and people seem to forget that they're very patient and that they're willing to take as long as it takes to make progress.
And when the time is not right, they are not going to act.
They will wait until they have strength in numbers enough to to force a greater change, which is basically a danger for the moderate Muslim community as a whole.
All right, everybody, it's Christopher DeLiso from Antiwar.com and Balkanalysis.com.
The book is The Coming Balkan Caliphate.
Hang tight right there, Chris.
We're going to take a short break and come back on Antiwar Radio Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
