The Mujahideen in Bosnia: the foreign fighter as cosmopolitan citizen and/or terrorist

Abstract

This article explores the idea of the Mujahideen in Bosnia as ‘cosmopolitan citizens’. During the Balkan War in the early 1990s, these foreign fighters flocked to Bosnia in order to take up arms alongside those whom they understood to be their besieged Muslim brethren. Although this act of transborder mobilization can be framed as an act of cosmopolitan citizenship, the subsequent ‘problem’ of the Mujahideen in a post-9/11 context destabilized their original cosmopolitan act through a re-enactment of borders and the revocation of their (literal) citizenship. Within the larger post-9/11 narrative, where the Mujahideen must necessarily be understood as terrorists/potential terrorists, they are an interesting point of study in an examination of what can be seen as the sinister side of transnational citizenship, and they expose what Appadurai (A. Appadurai, 2006. Fear of small numbers: an essay on the geography of anger. Durham: Duke University Press.) calls our ‘fear of small numbers’. Particularly compelling is that the post-9/11 Mujahid is an unsympathetic figure, and is always already a questionable candidate for ‘citizenship’ as it is commonly understood. Furthermore, his (sic) original ‘cosmopolitan’ act suggests that, although the ‘cosmopolitan ideal’ is the achievement of a citizenship that transcends or escapes borders, the cosmopolitical must nevertheless be assigned value in order to be ethically intelligible.

Keywords::

• borders
• friend/enemy
• identity
• ‘war on terror’
• stateless

Notes

^1. In this article, the term Mujahideen is used interchangeably with the term ‘Muslim foreign fighter’.

^2. There remains, even in official accounts that are available, a discrepancy in the reported number of foreign fighters who originally descended upon Bosnia, as well as the number of foreign fighters who were eventually granted Bosnian citizenship. Estimations are anywhere between 300 and 3000 foreign fighters who had fought in the Bosnian war and anywhere between 100 and 1000 who were subsequently granted citizenship. Based on this range, it is probably safe to assume that the number of foreign fighters were in the hundreds, and that at least a third of the original number were subsequently offered citizenship.

^3. The Mujahid is a distinctly masculine figure. Probably without exception, all of those foreign fighters who arrived in Bosnia were men.

^4. It is important to note that this is an observational conclusion and not a normative claim. Arendt saw this linkage, which (rightly or wrongly) does exist, as fundamentally problematic.

^5. In this case, ‘death’ as cosmopolitical act becomes problematically bound up in contentious notions of martyrdom – while ‘dying for one's country’ is a familiar and often valorized trope for the modern political subject, what does it mean to ‘die for one's religion’ or to ‘die in service to one's co-religionists’? Suddenly we are compelled to sort through a vast array of contingencies in order to interpret the act as virtuous/not virtuous.

^6. There is no real evidence to suggest that all of the Mujahideen practiced or espoused a monolithic view of Islam. Most subscribed to more conservative, traditionalist, and reactionary doctrines than the Bosniaks do, to be sure, but the Mujahideen were not a religiously homogenous group of people.

^7. During the Balkan wars, it was not uncommon for houses left behind by those fleeing ethnic violence to be taken and used by members of other ethnicities. After the war, there were Serbs living in houses vacated by Croats and Bosniaks, and Bosniaks living in houses vacated by Serbs and Croats, and Croats living in houses vacated by Bosniaks and Serbs. Efforts were subsequently made by the international community and the Dayton accords to return people to their rightful properties.

^8. They were summarily classified as enemy combatants and were transferred to the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (Pena 2005, p. 67).

^9. 1998 BH Citizenship Law, supra note 3, art. 41(4).

^10. During the same period, both the Croatian and Serbian media had always been highly critical of the Mujahideen, and have ultimately taken to using the war on terror discourse as justification for actions taken against Muslims during the Bosnian war.