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 “manifesto” 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.
A look through Mr Breivik’s 1,500-page 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, which he published under the pseudonym “Andrew Berwick”, shows that he had a strange obsession with the Balkans. A word search for “Kosovo” comes up with 143 matches, “Serb” yields 341 matches, “Bosnia” 343 and “Albania” 208. (“Srebrenica”—the site of a Bosnian Serb massacre of some 8,000 Bosniaks in 1995—does not appear in the document.)
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.
In one section Mr Breivik says he would like to meet Radovan Karadžić, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs who is currently on trial at the UN’s war crimes tribunal in The Hague. “But isn’t Radovan Karadžić a mass murderer and a racist?!” he asks. “As far as my studies show he is neither.”
The document goes on to claim that for decades Muslims in “Bosnian Serbia” andAlbanians waged deliberate demographic warfare, or “indirect genocide”, against the Serbs. This echoes an infamous draft memorandum by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which was leaked in 1986 and widely regarded as a key influence on Serbian nationalists at the time.
The section goes on to display the extent of Mr Breivik’s delusions. Mr Karadžić, he says, “offered the Muslims in Bosnian Serbia the chance to convert or leave the country”. He continues:
…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.
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.” 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.
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 “several centuries”, he says, “they 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.”
As Europe is cleansed of Muslims, Albania is designated by Mr Breivik as the official “transit zone for the Balkans”. After that, the local map is to be completely redrawn. Once all Muslims have been deported from Europe, Kosovo will be “reunified with Serbia once again.”
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 “the Serbian/Croatian territory currently known as Bosnia Herzegovina.” It will be divided into a “Serbian (60-70%) and Croatian (30-40%) part… after historical ethnic lines. All Muslim individuals (Bosniaks and Albanians) will be deported to the nearest transit area (Albania) awaiting deportation from Europe.”
His geography gets a little wonky when it comes to the country he refers to as “the Greek/Croatian/Serbian territory currently known as Albania”: Albania 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. “All Muslim Albanians will be deported to central Anatolia.” The resulting “rather large” unpopulated areas in Albania could be offered as a “permanent home (territory) to several Christian minorities” coming from the Middle East.
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 “for assisting to drive out Islam from occupied territory belonging to Serbia and Croatia (Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina).” There are similar prizes for Macedonia and Albania.
Interestingly, Mr Breivik claims that it was Norway’s “involvement in the attacks on Serbia” (the NATO bombing of the country during the Kosovo war) that led him to want to “move on with the assault”. He writes:
It was completely unacceptable how the US and Western European regimes bombed our Serbian brothers. All they wanted was to drive Islam out by deporting the Albanian Muslims back to Albania. When the Albanians refused, they really didn’t 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’s would eventually will be created in every Western European capital. This is unacceptable, completely unacceptable.
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”—presumably extreme nationalists—on the internet. He met others from all over Europe, but notes:
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.
www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches, Jul 25th 2011
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