KEY POINTS:
* An earlier version of this article wrongly said US columnist Daniel Pipes had argued that Europe's next Holocaust victims would be Muslim migrants and they deserved such slaughter. The author, Irfan Yusuf, and the Herald accept that Mr Pipes has never predicted nor has he ever endorsed a Holocaust of European Muslims and they unreservedly apologise to him for the errors.
Having Radovan Karadzic finally in custody after more than a decade on the run is a good time for a better look at Bosnia's makeup.
Karadzic was the architect of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II. His forces set up concentration camps where supporters of the Bosnian Government of all ethno-religious groups were tortured, raped and butchered.
The bulk of Karadzic's victims were indigenous Bosnians who did not fit into the categories of Serb or Croat and whose ancestral faith was Islam. Of course, this did not make Bosnia a Muslim state in any theocratic sense.
To be Muslim was more an ethnic than religious feature. Hence, the expulsion of Muslim and Croat populations by Karadzic's forces was appropriately referred to as ethnic cleansing.
Indeed, when it declared its independence from the Yugoslav federation on March 1, 1992, Bosnia was a country of three large ethnic minorities - Muslim, Serb and Croat. Members of all three communities supported Bosnian independence. Politicians from all three communities formed the Bosnian Government. Soldiers from all three communities fought to defend Bosnia's independence and territorial integrity.
To describe Bosnia as a Muslim country was an absurdity given that at least 30 per cent of Bosnians had ethnically and religiously mixed parentage.
One tragic image of the war was two young lovers, a Bosnian Serb, Bosko Brkic, and his Bosnian Muslim girlfriend, Admira Ismic, gunned down by Serb snipers while attempting to flee Sarajevo. They died in each other's arms.
Yet for many Western Muslims outside Bosnia, this war produced mixed emotions. For the first time, many Muslim migrants learned of the existence of an indigenous Islamic presence in the heart of Europe.
It's ironic that, for many of us, Bosnian Islam became a reality at a time when it faced extermination. In his memoir Enemy Combatant, former British Guantanamo inmate Moazzam Begg describes meeting a Bosnian Muslim refugee gang-raped in the presence of her husband and with their 3-month-old baby screaming. Soon after the rape, her husband was shot and her baby decapitated, all in her presence.
If only many migrant Muslims would be equally appalled by so-called honour killings, some of which are accompanied by the sexual assault of the victim.
For Western Muslims, perhaps the most disturbing and embarrassing reality was the complete political and military impotence of the 50-plus states that made up the Organisation of Islamic Conference. Despite numerous emergency summits and passionate resolutions, the OIC was powerless to stop the carnage.
Yet perhaps the most dangerous legacy of the Bosnian conflict was some Western Muslims becoming disillusioned in liberal democracy. This was understandable - here was a nation of indigenous European Muslims who looked and smelt and drank and lived like Europeans.
They had established a pluralist secular liberal democracy. They had declared their independence without shedding any blood or through mass expulsions of indigenous populations.
Bosnian Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews had lived together for centuries. The town square of Sarajevo housed a mosque, a Catholic cathedral, a Serbian Orthodox church and a synagogue. Muslims showed their commitment to European values and liberal democracy.
And for this, they were rewarded with genocide and an arms embargo that crippled this young state's ability to defend itself.
For some Western Muslims, the message was clear. What point is there in trying to culturally integrate into Western societies? Integration didn't stop Bosnian Muslims from being raped and butchered. Muslims felt they were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.
Ironically, among the strongest voices for European Muslim integration is Bosnia's most senior Islamic religious leader.
Dr Mustafa Ceric told Australian audiences in March 2007 that Muslims in Europe and the West must stop behaving like a maze of ethnic and cultural entities unfamiliar to their non-Muslim neighbours and their nominally Muslim descendants.
He argued there was no point in migrant Muslims transplanting the ways of 1970s Karachi or Beirut or Istanbul to 21st-century Sydney or Paris.
"It is not easy these days to be a Muslim in the West," he said at a Sydney mosque. "We are caught between extremist Muslims who treat us as traitors. Then we have some far-right extremists who say we are not loyal to Europe and don't adopt Western values. God promises He will protect Islam. And I believe Him. If stupid words and actions of Muslims themselves cannot destroy Islam, what hope do non-Muslims have?"
The Bosnian war represented one of Europe's darkest hours. The leader of a militia that murdered over half a million people and set up Europe's first concentration camps since World War II has finally been captured.
No doubt he will receive a much fairer trial than Guantanamo Bay inmates whose actions may have killed only a fraction of that number. If Karadzic does not face justice, it will only serve the cause of Muslim non-integrationists and Muslimphobic bigots in the West.
The result could be disastrous for all of us in the long run.
* Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and writer.
