NEWS ANALYSIS: Kosovo stirs European Christian fears of Islam

c. 1999 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ The air campaign against Yugoslavia may look like just another modern push-button techno-war, but it has plunged the United States and NATO into a maelstrom of centuries-old ethnic and religious passions and terrors. Prime among the often-overlooked facts of the Balkans’ latest war: The ethnic Albanian rebels in […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ The air campaign against Yugoslavia may look like just another modern push-button techno-war, but it has plunged the United States and NATO into a maelstrom of centuries-old ethnic and religious passions and terrors.

Prime among the often-overlooked facts of the Balkans’ latest war: The ethnic Albanian rebels in Kosovo, fighting for their independence from Serbia, are overwhelmingly Muslim _ and that sends a chill up the spine of European Christians from Orthodox Belgrade to Roman Catholic Warsaw and beyond.


These currents are likely to make the main actors in this conflict more intransigent _ and the conflict itself far more risky and difficult to resolve, analysts say.

After all, it was only 600 years ago that Islamic fighters from the Ottoman empire swept through Europe, conquering and occupying Kosovo, among other places. In 1912, Serbia seized Kosovo and other territory from the crumbling Turkish Ottoman empire.

Christian Europe’s concern about a new Islamic state arising in Kosovo, some analysts believe, explains why Europe was so slow to intervene on behalf of the Kosovars, who attempted to declare their independence from Serbia in 1991.

It also explains why NATO has sought to cool Kosovo’s demands for independence from Serbia-dominated Yugoslavia, and instead has tried to steer Kosovo toward a tricky and perhaps unworkable autonomy arrangement, analysts say.

But as attitudes harden, both Christian Serbs and Muslim Kosovars are likely to become more radical under the annealing heat of war. For the battered Kosovars, this could mean the vision of a militant Islamic state to protect them will burn increasingly bright.

“The Europeans are obviously very uneasy. Europeans have feared this for a long time,” said Paul Mojzes, academic dean of Rosemont College and author of “Yugoslavian Inferno,” a history of ethnic and religious warfare in the Balkans.

“This whole bogeyman of a Muslim state in Europe is designed to deflect attention from (Serb) aggression and ethnic cleansing,” countered Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington.


“You often hear this from the Serbs, that the Muslims want to take over Europe, while in fact they are being slaughtered and raped,” Hooper said.

Concern among the NATO allies about a rising Islamic state in Europe “is there, but it’s not high on the agenda,” said David Steele, an expert in conflict resolution and religion in the former Yugoslavia.

Steele, a fellow at the private Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Muslims in the Balkans are generally not as militantly fundamentalist as Muslims in such former Soviet republic as Chechnya or Takjikistan.

The European allies, he added, are far more concerned about the war in Kosovo destabilizing neighboring countries than they are about the effects of Islam.

But Abdul Malik Mujahid, national coordinator of the private, Chicago-based Kosovo Task Force USA, said Europeans were deeply concerned during the war in Bosnia when fears were raised about radical Islam making inroads in Sarajevo.

“Europeans were scared of a Muslim state,” Mujahid said, adding that he sees the same pattern in Kosovo. “We have seen up to 400,000 refugees in Kosovo, we know that for 10 years (Muslim) children have been unable to attend school, and we know the Kosovars were denied an opportunity to defend themselves back in 1991,” he said, adding that the NATO attacks “are long overdue.”


Although authorities in Bosnia are struggling to build a secular state, he added, “it may take a long time” to soften European fears about Bosnia becoming an Muslim nation.

President Clinton, in his address to the nation as the air strikes were underway Wednesday (March 25), touched on the religion issue.

“Kosovo is a small place,” he said, “but it sits on a major fault line between Europe, Asia and the Middle East, at the meeting place of Islam and both the Eastern and Orthodox branches of Christianity … all the ingredients for a major war are there.”

Growing religious and ethnic hatred in Kosovo “is a genuinely intractable problem that will not go away no matter how this particular thing is resolved now,” Mojzes said, speaking of the NATO air strikes.

“Two years, 10 years later, somebody who lost this round will have a grievance they will try to settle. Old scores are being settled. It’s not the end, yet,” he said.

Inside Kosovo, relations between Muslims and Christians have been hostile, and worsening, for years.

“These are tensions that have run for years, with very deep suspicions on both sides,” said Mojzes.


“Our bishop and the Orthodox bishop live about 100 yards from each other and they’ve never met,” said Jack Cullinan of the United States Catholic Conference.

Ironically, Cullinan and other experts said the actual practice of religion is not pronounced in Kosovo; the hostility is actually more ethnic and territorial than purely religious.

“Many of them know very little about what their religion actually teaches,” Cullinan said. “But it’s a lot easier to become a fanatic if you don’t have a grasp of the basics.”

IR END WOOD

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