[Nettime-bold] From planes to buses

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>]

100,000 airline employees were fired after the September 11 
disaster, and most of the airline companies are on the brink of 
bankruptcies. Two of them - both European - already folded one 
after another in past two days - Swissair and Sabena. And this 
won't get better with this latest hijacking in India.

In the US people re-discovered railways and buses. So, more 
people are travelling by Amtrak and Greyhound than ever. And a 
Greyhound bus was promptly hijacked and lead to an accident. 
The attacker lost his life in the process. Now, the ugly part comes: 
CNN declared that the attacker held Croatian passport. This is very 
disturbing to me who lived the largest parts of my life in Croatian 
capital.

Now, did Croatia also dispensed with their passports to various 
suspicious types like Bosnia did? Or did Al Qaeda actually co-
opted a Croatian national to do its bidding, although not many 
Croatians are of Islamic faith? Or was the passport stolen? Or was 
this attack unrelated to the terrorist network and rather a more 
"regular" type of crime? 

During seventies, Croatian terrorism was active - Croat terrorists 
hijacked a US airplane once, too. They did it with a fake bomb. 
There was no dead. Demands of terrorists were made (New York 
Times was humiliated into publishing a separatist rant). The act 
was a part of a coordinated terrorist attack (the second act - on the 
UN - killed Yugoslav military attache with a real bomb) resulted in a 
unique law that allowed US to try them for attack on UN 'territory' - 
all of them were caught and imprisoned and one of them is still in 
federal prison. Tudjman plead with US government to get him out - 
but US government was unimpressed with Tudjman's lack of 
repentance for the deed in the request and the letter ended up in 
some Foggy Bottom shredder, I guess. The rest of the 'team' 
became succesful construction contractors in New York city upon 
their release from prison. One of them was arrested again for trying 
to smuggle weapons to Croatia during the war of 1991. He was 
eventually deported to Croatia where he died of lung cancer (Phillip 
Morris finally proved to be much more dangerous adversary than 
the FBI).

ivo

More on terrorist camps in the Balkans:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/index/bosnia/feb96/nbos156.htm


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