Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

AP/ABC News: Study Questions US Strategy Against Al-Qaida, July 29, 2008

The United States can defeat al-Qaida if it relies less on force and more on policing and intelligence to root out the terror group’s leaders, a new study contends.

“Keep in mind that terrorist groups are not eradicated overnight,” said the study by the federally funded Rand research center, an organization that counsels the Pentagon.

Its report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term “war on terror” and replace it with “counterterrorism.”

“Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism,” said Seth Jones, the lead author of the study and a Rand political scientist.

“The United States has the necessary instruments to defeat al-Qaida, it just needs to shift its strategy,” Jones said.

Nearly every ally, including Britain and Australia, has stopped using “war on terror” to describe strategy against the group headed by Osama bin Laden and considered responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide attacks at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.

Karadzic Sent to Hague for Trial Despite Violent Protest by Loyalists - NYTimes.com, July 30, 2007

BELGRADE, Serbia — Long one of the most-wanted fugitives in the world, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader blamed for inciting his followers to join him in a brutal ethnic war, was en route to The Hague early Wednesday, according to the Serbian war crimes prosecutor.

Radovan Karadzic arrived in Rotterdam on Wednesday before being transferred to a prison in the Netherlands.

About 15,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade on Tuesday night to support the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is facing war crimes charges.

A motorcade carrying Mr. Karadzic to the airport left hours after stone-hurling nationalists clashed with the police in central Belgrade at a rally to protest his arrest last week on war crimes charges, and his likely extradition to stand trial before an international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Mr. Karadzic was escorted by masked Serbian security officers and taken from the Belgrade war crimes court at roughly 3:45 a.m., according to the prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic. Soon after, his plane was in flight, and it landed in Rotterdam, not far from The Hague, about two hours later.

He is the highest-level politician from the former Yugoslavia to be transferred to the court since Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, who was arrested in 2001 and died in his cell there in 2006 while awaiting a verdict.

The indictment of Mr. Karadzic charges that as president of the Bosnian Serb republic in the early 1990s, he helped orchestrate a 43-month siege of the city of Sarajevo, devised a systematic campaign to kill or drive out tens of thousands of non-Serbs from Serbian towns and villages, set up concentration camps and was an engineer of the massacre of nearly 8,000 unarmed men and boys captured at the United Nations-protected enclave of Srebrenica, in Europe’s worst mass execution since World War II.

While Serbia waited to hear whether Mr. Karadzic had filed an appeal against his arrest, and supporters celebrated him as a hero, officials were preparing to transport him to The Hague. About 15,000 supporters, some bused in from across Serbia and Bosnia by the far-right Radical Party, gathered on Tuesday to protest the new government that arrested him on July 21.

Loyalists wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Karadzic’s image waved Serbian flags and chanted “Long Live Radovan!” and “Uprising! Uprising!” About 100 ultranationalists wearing masks, who had separated from the group, burned flares, attacked traffic lights with clubs and hurled stones at storefront windows. The police responded with tear gas, and the Serbian news media said more than 45 people suffered minor injuries.

“Karadzic is a hero because he defended Serb lives during the terrible wars of the 1990s,” said Elena Pavovski, 24, a supporter of the Radical Party, whose members sang patriotic songs next to a banner on Republic Square that threatened Serbia’s pro-Western president, Boris Tadic. “Everyone knows that the war crimes tribunal in The Hague was designed to try Serbs while the war criminals who killed Serbs are set free.”