FRANCAISHaramayn (Mu’assasat al-Haramayn al-Khariyya) - History
1990-1999
-From 1991 on, Comoros: the AHF begins to fund the Koranic schools (madaris al-Iman) of Sheikh Swadiq Mbapandza in Moroni and Mndé. A fundamentalist imam of the Islamic university of Medina in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, Swadiq Mbapandza is also sponsored by Sheikh Ibn Baz, a former mufti of the Saudi Academia of Fatwa (Dar al-Iftá). Unlike his Kuwaiti counterparts of the African Muslim Agency, the AHF thus supports schools that teach only in Arabic and do not follow the syllabus set by the Comorian state, especially in the district of Hadoudja in Moroni.
-1992-2004, Somalia: after Siyad Barre’s dictatorship falls down in 1991, the AHF shares out food to the victims of famine and civil war. With a budget of three millions dollars for Somalia and its refugees at the end of the 1990’s, the organization mainly works in Mogadishu, where it runs two private clinics and provides 12,000 pupils with education in Koranic schools. It particularly takes care of orphans, who are accommodated in closed houses and who are suspected of being trained for a holy war (jihad). The organization manages eight of these institutions: five in Mogadishu, one in Merka, one in Burao, and one in Hargeisa. The Sufi local religious authorities condemn these practices because they do not follow the kafala traditional system which consists in sponsoring or adopting an orphan. But in Mogadishu, the Foundation can rely on the support of Somali Wahhabi students and traders who created radical groups such as Salafiyya and Ansar-e-Sunna. The AHF then has to suspend its activities in March 2002 because its staff is accused by the United States of being involved in the murder of western humanitarian workers and facilitating the transfer to Saudi Arabia of al-Itehad Islamist fighters in December 2001. In May 2003 and February 2004, the Foundation has to abandon 3,500 orphans and close down its Mogadishu offices again when the government of Riyadh orders its expatriates to be evacuated. In April 2005, the police in Somaliland eventually arrests an employee suspected of participating in the killing of Western humanitarian workers.
-July 1993, Croatia: the police search the Zagreb and Rijeka offices of the AHF and suspects the Foundation of hiding arms and supporting Muslim fighters in Bosnia.
-1994-2002, Bosnia: the AHF, which intervened to help the Muslims surrounded by the Serbians, is quickly suspected of supporting the Bosnian combatants. On the 11th of March 2002, its offices are closed under pressure of the United States, who accuse the Foundation of having links with the Islamist terrorists of Gamaat Islamiya in Egypt. Investigators find that 1.59 million dollars are missing in the financial records of the AHF for 1999-2001; the amount of money that vanished even reaches 3.5 million dollars in its sister organisation, the al-Haramaynwa wa al-Masjed al-Aqsa Charity Foundation. In August, al-Haramayn is then re-formed under the name of Vazir, an association led by Safet Durguti, a teacher in a medersa in Travnik. But the Bosnian authorities officially ban the AHF in November 2002.
-1995-2003, Kenya: based in Nairobi, the AHF mostly works in provinces where Muslim communities are predominant, i.e. the Somali Northeast and the Swahili Coast. In the Northeast, to start with, it helps Somali refugees in Dabaab and Somali victims of the drought of 1992 in Garissa. In the camps of Dabaab in 1997, for instance, it runs ten Koranic schools that teach a rigorist Islam, along with a few courses in mathematics, and do not follow the Kenyan syllabus. In Mombassa on the Coast, the AHF also funds the Sakina Mosque of Sheikh Ali Shee, the chairman of the Council of Imams of Kenya and a supporter of a banned political party, the IPK (Islamic Party of Kenya) of Sheikh Khalid Balala. Besides, the al-Hamarayn Foundation welcomes preachers like Muhammed Hussein Malik, a Pakistani who was expelled from Tanzania because of his radical stands on the teaching of Islam. After a bomb attack on the American embassy in Nairobi in August 1998, the AHF has to suspend its activities, for it is suspected of infringing immigration laws and helping the armed struggle of a fundamentalist group in Somalia, al-Itehad. According to journalist Gregory Pirio, there is no doubt that the Foundation supported the terrorist “base” (al-Qaeda) of Osama bin Laden and funded a fishing cooperative near Mombassa to cover arms importations for the Islamist movements in the region. The Kenyan branch of the AHF is finally closed down at the end of 2003.
-From 1996 on, Afghanistan: the AHF intervenes in various provinces thanks to the military victory of the Taliban fundamentalists who seized Kabul on the 26th of September 1996 and imposed a strict application of the Koranic law, the sharia. Unlike western secular NGOs which oppose the separation between men and women in medical and school structures, al-Haramayn preaches a rigorist Wahhabi Islam. The Foundation even supports the calls for a holy war (jihad) and collaborates with the “humanitarian” office (Makhtab al-Khidemat) of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization.
-From 1997 on, United States: in Ashland, Oregon, the AHF opens a branch to raise funds. Managed by an Egyptian, Soliman al-Buthe, aka Suliman Albuthi, this office is investigated by the authorities after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in September 2001, when the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) accuses the Foundation of supporting the terrorist activities Hamas in Palestine, the Kashmir irredentists in India and the Islamist guerrillas in Chechnya. As a result, the funds of al-Haramayn in the United States are frozen in November 2001 then December 2002. On the 19th of February 2004, the internal revenue services and the Treasury Department also search the offices of the AHF in Ashland because of illegal transfers of money to some Chechen activists; the American branch of the Foundation is eventually closed seven months later. As the administrator of the AHF, Soliman al-Buthe is charged in the state of Oregon in February 2005.
-From 1998 on, former Yugoslavia: the AHF, which worked in Bosnia, tries to help the Muslim Albanians of Kosovo who want to escape from the control of Orthodox Serbians. With Ahmed Ibrahim al-Nagar, a pharmacist from the Egyptian Jihad, the Foundation dedicates 39 millions dollars to religious education and housing from 1999 onwards. According to Xavier Pauly, it hands out 15,000 copies of the Koran, builds mosques and takes care of 1,200 orphans. The objective is first to preach a rigorist Islam in Arabic. The aim is not to preserve the local Muslim traditions, but to purify them and to erase their specificities. Therefore, the AHF does not attempt to rehabilitate the mosques that have been damaged by the conflict: it prefers to complete their destruction so as to build new ones on the Wahhabi model, for instance in the town of Lipjan. In the same vein, explains Roland Jacquard, the Foundation urges Kosovar refugees in Albania to enlist in the Liberation Army of Kosovo, the UCK (Ushtria Clirimtare E Kosoves). In 1998, the authorities of Tirana eventually react to such an activism and extradite to Egypt a supporter of al-Qaeda, Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Nagar, who was an Arabic teacher of the AHF since January 1996 and who will be tried for terrorism.
-1999-2002, Azerbaijan: launched by the AHF in Baku in 1991, the Foundation for Chechnya is accused by the Russians of funding Chechen secessionists and two bases of Wahhabi groups in Dagestan, i.e. the capital city of Makhachkala and the village of Karamakhi near Buinaksk. Closed twice by the Azeri government in January 2000 and October 2001, the Foundation still works within Chechnya under the aegis of two AHF employees, Abd al-Latif bin Abd al-Karim al-Daraan and Abou Omar Mohammed al-Seif, who is killed in October 2002. According to Millard Burr and Robert Collins, it supports the guerrillas of Shamil Basayev and Samir Saleh Abdullah al-Suwailem, aka Ibn-al-Khattab, who is assassinated in March 2002. This very year, the Russian secret services of the FSB (Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti) confirm the links between Abou Omar Mohammed al-Seif and the “base” (al-Qaeda) of Osama bin Laden.
