thallub,
the Balkans have been Europe's tinderbox for the last fifteen hundred years, and the Christians and Muslims of the region are equally guilty in trying to exterminate the other side, so please don't make it sound like it's an "evil Muslims vs. good Christians" issue. One genocide does not excuse another, and I really don't care for your implication that the Bosnian Muslims somehow deserved what happened to them at places like Srebrenica because some other Muslims joined the SS seventy years ago. I suppose the Dutch and Scandinavians deserve to have a genocide visited upon them because there were Dutch, Flemish, and Scandinavian volunteer SS divisions?
Oh, and the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS ("Handschar Division") was indeed recruited from Bosnian Muslims, but it included Croatian Christians as well. And you have your history wrong--the Mufti of Jerusalem was recruited by the Nazis prior to the formation of the
Handschar division to convince the Bosnian Muslims that the proscription imposed against collaboration by the local imams was not valid. The riot in France was an attempt by a few division members to desert to the Allied forces, and the unit imam was the one who assisted with putting down the revolt.
After training was over the Handshar division was sent back to Yugoslavia to fight Tito and Mihalovich (sp). They refused to fight and proceeded to terrorize their Christian neighbors instead. In the end the German army sent troops into Yugoslavia and disarmed the Handshar division.
The Handschar division didn't "refuse to fight". They were used to fight both Muslim and Serbian partisans in operations
Wegweiser, Save, Osterei, Maibaum, Maiglöckchen, Vollmond, Fliegenfänger, Heidrose and
Hackfleisch throughout most of 1944. By all accounts, the division performed well in combat, and fighting armed partisans is hardly "terrorising their Christian neighbors."
Also, the Germans didn't "send troops into Yugoslavia to disarm the Handschar division." They wouldn't have needed to send troops to a place that was already occupied by the German Army anyway (the Handschar was only one of many SS and Wehrmacht divisions in Yugoslavia), and even the most casual research on the unit will show you that the Handschar division fought in the german retreat all the way back to Austria, where its remnant surrendered to the allied forces in May 1945. Your information is not only biased, but also inaccurate.
Half the population of the former Yugoslavia collaborated with Nazi Germany in order to try and wipe out their ethnic Balkan rivals. The
Ustasa, for example, was a Croatian militia, and they were in charge of the Jasenovac concentration camp, where they executed Jews, Roma, and mostly Serbs. Croatians and Serbs are both predominantly Christians, by the way--Croats are mostly Catholic, and Serbs are mostly Orthodox.
The fault lines of conflict in the Balkans are ethnic just as much as religious, and Christian has raised hand against Christian just as Muslim has raised hand against Christian and vice versa. There are old ethnic grudges at play here. The issue is far more complex than "Muslims are evil", as disappointing as it may be for some.