BOSNIA - The Sarajevo Mosque

"Is Saudi-funded mosque in Sarajevo threat to Bosnia's moderate Muslims?" PBS NewsHour 5/16/2016

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SUMMARY:  International officials are convinced that Bosnia's brand of Westernized, moderate Islam is the best possible bulwark against radicalization.  The nation's official Islamic Community is cracking down on rural mosques that it says are too in line with Islamists — but some say the true extremist threat lies in the heart of the capital itself.  Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports.

MALCOLM BRABANT (NewsHour):  I'm in Central Bosnia, about 100 miles from the capital, Sarajevo.

I'm heading up to a remote mountain village called Osve, which is a place where, supposedly, there are some supporters of the so-called Islamic State.  There have been people who've gone from this village to fight in Syria.  Some have reportedly been killed.  And we're going to meet somebody who used to play rock ‘n' roll, but is now labeled by the head of the Islamic community in Bosnia as someone who is a terrorist.

Izet Hadzic used to be lead guitarist in a band called Black Lady.  After fighting in the Bosnian War, he abandoned what he thought was a decadent lifestyle and sought peace in religion.  He leads one of these so-called radical mosques.  While he's in dispute with the Islamic establishment, he insists he's no terrorist.

IZET HADZIC, Mosque Leader (through interpreter):  Where does it come from to call us terrorists?  It is because that people who look like us, have these beards, are doing such acts in the world, specifically ISIS and this cretin Baghdadi.

MALCOLM BRABANT:  Two doors away from Hadzic's small holding is the father of a young man killed in Syria.  Next door is a family Hadzic regards as extreme.  Bosnian intelligence officers are frequent visitors.

Hadzic unequivocally condemns Islamic State.

IZET HADZIC (through interpreter):  You can't call this jihad.  To take a gun while someone is walking down the street with his family and begin to shoot?  Can you imagine soldier doing this?  These people are equal to cowards.

MALCOLM BRABANT:  We had a polite, but frosty reception in Bocinje, a nearby village that was a stronghold of foreign mujahideen during the Bosnian War.  We hoped to interview a man who returned from Syria in 2014, but he didn't want to be filmed because of an impending court case.  His name is Ibrahim Delic.

Dozens of other Bosnians now in Syria are said to want to return because they are horrified by ISIS atrocities.  Crippled and radicalized during the Bosnian War, Delic recently talked to the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.  Significantly, he criticized the Free Syrian Army, who are enemies of ISIS.

MUSLIM WORLD - Bosnia, Symbol of Reconciliation

"A historic Bosnia mosque is rebuilt in powerful symbol of post-war reconciliation" PBS NewsHour 5/9/2016

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SUMMARY:  Twenty years ago, the vicious civil war in Bosnia between Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosnians left more than 100,000 dead, and the country remains segregated along religious and ethnic lines to this day.  Now, both sides are taking steps toward reconciliation with the rebuilding of a historic mosque in Serbian Bosnia, but skepticism abounds.  Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  The nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina remains bitterly divided more than 20 years after a vicious civil war.  Tens of thousands died, and millions were made refugees.

Bosnian Serbs were largely responsible for driving Muslim families from their homes during the early stages of the war.  Now many hope the reopening of a United Nations Heritage Site, a mosque, in the Serbian town of Banja Luka is a big step on the road to reconciliation.

Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant has the story.

MALCOLM BRABANT (NewsHour):  The Muslim call to prayer rang out from the 16th Century Ferhadija Mosque 23 years to the day that Serb militiamen blew it to pieces; 10,000 Muslims traveled to Banja Luka to witness this act of renaissance, a generation after the Serbs had attempted to systematically erase not only the population, but also their culture and heritage.

Ibrahim Ahmedbasic lost his legs in one of the worst single attacks of the war.  He was 21 when a Serb mortar exploded in the town of Tuzla, killing 71 and injuring 250.

IBRAHIM AHMEDBASIC, Bosnian Muslim (through interpreter):  When the mosques began to be reconstructed, people started to coexist again.  So you can see, people are capable of living normally.

MALCOLM BRABANT:  The Bosnian War was the most vicious of those that accompanied the break up of former Yugoslavia, largely because of the population’s complicated ethnic and religious mix.  The conflict began in a wave of nationalism in 1992, when the Christian Orthodox Bosnian Serbs attempted a land grab and attacked areas occupied by predominantly Catholic Bosnian Croats and Muslims.

In 1993, the country fragmented still further, when the Croats launched an offensive against the Muslims.  Peace finally arrived in 1995 with a deal signed in Dayton, Ohio.  The accord preserved Bosnia as a single state, but as two separate entities, a Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb Republic; 21 years later, the divisions are as entrenched as ever.

Banja Luka is the capital of the Serb Republic, which makes the restoration of the mosque so symbolic.  It took 15 years to reconstruct.  Craftsmen employed 16th century techniques and recovered 75 percent of the original masonry that had been discarded in city dumps and in nearby lakes.

WAR CRIMES - Balkan War Criminals (NewsHour Bookshelf)

"How Balkan war criminals were hunted down and brought to justice" PBS NewsHour 3/28/2016

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SUMMARY:  Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić is the latest perpetrator to be convicted of war crimes committed during the 1990s Balkan wars.  In "The Butcher's Trail," author Julian Borger examines how tough it was to hunt down those responsible for the most grotesque atrocities of the conflict.  Borger sits down with chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner.

WEN IFILL (NewsHour):  Last Thursday, a U.N. tribunal convicted former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić of war crimes and genocide in the 1990s Balkan wars.

A look at how tough it was to hunt down those indicted is the focus of the newest addition to the “NewsHour Bookshelf."

Margaret Warner has that.

MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour):  The genocidal crimes of the 1990s Balkan wars stunned the world, mass killings, concentration camps, systematic rape.

Many, but by no means all of the perpetrators were the majority Serbs, starting with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.  The U.N. set up an international tribunal to investigate and indict some 161 people it found most responsible.

The challenge was to actually apprehend them.  How they did so is captured in a gripping new book by Julian Borger, longtime correspondent and editor at The Guardian newspaper, titled “The Butcher's Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World's Most Successful Manhunt.”

Julian Borger, welcome.

You open this book with a really vivid account of the capture of the last of these criminals in a forest in Serbia.  Who was he and what had he done?

JULIAN BORGER, Author, “The Butcher's Trail”:  He was Goran Hadžić.

And he used to run a Serb statelet inside Croatia which had been carved out of Croatia by what was called ethnic cleansing, a euphemism for mass killing of other ethnicities.  So he had overseen that killing on a large scale.