BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA: Tomorrow, the EU Commission will consider whether Turkey has done enough to start negotiating to join the Union. But Turkey isn't the only Muslim country seeking membership. In the first of two articles, Bridget Hourican looks at two of Europe's largest - and oldest - Muslim communities
The former Bosnian prime minister, Haris Siljadzic, gets seriously shirty on the phone: "What do you mean? We're not a Muslim country."
"You're the most Muslim country in Europe after Turkey."
"No. France is."
Ten per cent of the French are Muslim and most of these are of recent arrival. Bosnia-Herzegovina has a 550-year-old Islamic tradition (the Ottomans arrived in 1463) and currently a Muslim population of about 45 per cent. (There's deliberately been no census since 1991 - they're waiting for the dust of the war to settle).
How is France more Muslim than Bosnia? But I don't like to contradict an ex-prime minister, and himself a Muslim. I explain my interest is in the current undisguised panic in some quarters of the European Union about letting in a Muslim country - Turkey. He agrees to meet. [N.B. We're both wrong; the most Muslim country in Europe after Turkey is Albania.]
Strolling through the Turkish quarter of Sarajevo on the way to the meeting I witness first-hand Islam, Balkan-style. The muezzin wails, mini-skirted girls arm-in-arm with beer-swilling boys trail in and out of betting shops. On the bus from Belgrade a lovely girl (Bosnian with a Croatian father and Macedonian mother) spoke of the recent "Islamicisation" of Bosnia, and claims of Bosnian links to al-Qaeda are spun right across the Web (on which more later), but I can't say I see much evidence of Islamicisation.
The most noticeable thing about Sarajevo is its internationalisation. I have never seen more EU, UN, OSCE signs in my life, not to mention their sub-organisations I never knew existed. Bosnia will remain a UN protectorate for an estimated further five years.
My friend on the bus spoke of burquas and beards. I can't see many; Sarajevo looks less obviously Islamic than parts of Paris, which is maybe what Siljadzic meant.
By the time we meet, the ex-prime minister seems to have got over his bad temper; the famously photogenic looks that helped put Bosnia's case during the 1990s are much in evidence. For a politician he's absurdly handsome.
He makes another surprising statement: "Bosnia will get into the EU before Turkey." I raise my eyebrows: negotiations for Turkey's entry are due to start perhaps as early as January; Bosnia hasn't been accepted as an EU candidate country and isn't even allowed fully govern itself yet. Private bets on Bosnia's entry start at 2013.
He explains: "Europe will begin negotiations with Turkey now, but 65 per cent of the EU population and 55 per cent of member-states will need to ratify membership. They will never do it." He may have a point - Valéry Giscard d'Estaing has been saying the same thing and there are even murmurs from some EU officials that the voting was deliberately rigged to keep Turkey out.
Siljadzic "wishes it wasn't so". Like all the Bosnians I speak to, he's very pro-Turkey and is unimpressed that the economically backward Romania is getting in ahead of the dynamic Turkey.
There are more Bosnians in Turkey than in Bosnia. The links go back to the Ottoman empire and are more cultural and historical than religious. Co-existence and inter-marriage for centuries between Bosnian Muslims and their fellow Catholic and Orthodox Slavs meant that Islam traditionally took its most secular, progressive form in Bosnia.
(Siljadzic: "What do you mean 'progressive'?"
"Well. . . you can drink alcohol."
"Getting drunk is progressive?")
However, the war and its aftermath radicalised an element within Bosnian Muslims, or as Salim Hasan, the tall, willowy, ironic Al Jazeera correspondent tells me: "It [the war] opened their eyes to Islam as an ideology."
This is a sensitive issue. Yasin Rawashde, a Kuwaiti businessman and former adviser to Bosnia's ministry of foreign affairs, insists that "it was Milosevic that radicalised the Muslim population back in 1988. His Serb nationalism made them conscious of themselves as separate."
Others put it down to the Arab influence. When war broke out, something between 200 and 5,000 Mujahideen from different Arab states - Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia - flocked to the cause of their fellow Muslims and fought either very bravely, or very psychotically, depending whom you speak to. One of the preconditions of the 1995 Dayton accord was that all foreign fighters be sent home. However, some had by then married local women and were allowed stay. Their wives had to don the veil, and there are possibly apocryphal stories of Mujahideen accosting local girls in mini-skirts, telling them if they didn't cover up they'd cut off their legs.
Saudi Arabia poured post-war reconstruction money into Bosnia. This took the form of building mosques - most spectacularly the gleaming white King Fahd mosque in east Sarajevo which holds 5,000 and cost $10 million - and of opening NGOs like Active Islamic Youth, which drew in recruits to Wahhabism - the extreme Saudi-based Islamic sect from which Osama bin Laden draws his inspiration - by offering free English lessons and Internet access. They had some success among the young. Post-9/11, such organisations were severely scrutinised and shut down.
Cenad Slatina, political analyst with International Crisis Group (ICG) and formerly one of Bosnia's best wartime reporters, says: "The clampdown was effective - Bosnians were anyway returning to their pre-war secularism."
However, Bosnia remains a target of suspicion. Dragan Cavic, President of Republika Srpska (the Serbian area of Bosnia, established by Dayton), regularly accuses the Bosnian-Croat Federation of Bosnia of being a terrorist hotbed, while conservative US websites like freerepublic.com have headlines like: "Funding al-Qaeda via the Bosnia-Herzegovina model!"
There's scant evidence of this, but there have been a few high-profile cases: one of the accomplices to the bombing of the US ship Cole in Yemen in 2000 had Bosnian citizenship, and in a horrible incident on Christmas Eve 2003, a Croatian family was murdered by a young Bosnian Muslim, who said he "wanted to do something against non-Muslims." He was found to be insane and was handed down the longest life sentence in Bosnian history.
This was in keeping with the Bosnian government's zealous hounding of terrorists and would-be terrorists. So keen was it to show its good intentions that in 2002 it extradited six Algerians with Bosnian citizenship to Guantanamo Bay, although a Bosnian court had cleared them of any suspicion of terrorist activities. Like Turkey, Bosnia is pro-American. It supported the 1999 US bombing of Serbia and there was none of the mass protests against the Iraq war in Sarajevo that there were in other European capitals.
Nevertheless, says Slatina: "America is still focusing its intelligence resources in Bosnia-Herzegovina more on monitoring terrorism than indicting war criminals." He has no problem with this: "You have to ask yourself, is there a weak state where terrorists used to be present which cannot control its borders? And you watch such a state."
Weak, unstable and Islamic - Bosnia is also small, non-practising, and doesn't touch the Middle East; it can't be written off in Commissioner Franz Fischler's words on Turkey, as "too Oriental".
When the time comes for EU membership, it should present fewer problems than Turkey. But until all the Balkan countries with sizeable Muslim populations - Bosnia Herzegovina, Albania, Macedonia - together with Turkey, get into the EU; until, that is, we "enlarge to the Muslim world" (Fischler again), religion will continue to be an issue and we'll continue asking these faintly embarrassing questions.
"How would you like it," barked Siljadzic down the phone, "if I came to Ireland askingabout it as a Christian country?"
I suppose that if the EU were a Muslim club and Ireland one of the few Christian countries trying to get in, I'd have to put up with it.
Tomorrow: Macedonia's Albanian minority