Attack on mosques in New Zealand inspired by historical and present-day European violence, from the Balkans to Norway

News server Balkan Insight reports that the Australian gunman who murdered 49 people today in terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand was apparently an admirer of Balkan fighters and of nationalists who have attacked Muslims in the past, including King of Bohemia Zikmund Lucemburský (1368-1437). Before committing the shooting, the terrorist listened to a song in his car celebrating former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, who is currently on trial in The Hague.

A user of the Facebook social networking site named Brenton Tarrant is by all accounts the person who murdered dozens of people this morning in two mosques in Christchurch and who had posted Balkan nationalist symbols to the Internet prior to the attack. In addition, he had posted a statement online criticizing the US involvement in Kosovo, Balkan Insight reports.

A 73-page “manifesto” was also published online prior to the murder by the user of the Facebook social networking site named Brenton Tarrant. The document states that the motivation for the attack was to “cause fear”.

The text includes hateful insults against migrants, calls for Muslims to be murdered, and includes expressions such as the “superiority of the white race”. The “manifesto” also includes a part dedicated to the conflict in Kosovo at the end of the 1990s.

“Balkanization is also lowering the ability of the USA to project power worldwide and is thereby ensuring that a situation such as the involvement of the USA in Kosovo (where the forces of the USA and NATO fought alongside Muslims and massacred Christian Europeans attempting to remove the Islamic occupiers from Europe) could never be repeated again,” Balkan Insight cites the terrorist’s document as alleging. The NATO intervention of 1999, including airstrikes on targets in Serbia, closed the bloody conflict in Kosovo and forced Serbian armed forces to withdraw.

As a consequence, Serbia de facto lost control over the region. Kosovo Albanians then unilaterally announced the independence of the formerly autonomous region in the year 2008.

The armaments used by the attacker during today’s murder, which were captured in photographs, are inscribed with different Slavic names, including, for example, the King of Bohemia who later became Holy Roman Emperor, Zikmund Lucemburský (Sigismund of Luxembourg). That son of Charles IV pulled an army into war against the Ottoman Turks during the 1390s.

Other parts of Tarrant’s weaponry are inscribed, for example, with the name of the Montenegrin chieftain Marko Miljanov Popović, who fought the Turks in the 19th century, and the name of Bajo Pivljanin, a military commander in battles against the Ottoman Empire waged in Bosnia. Tarrant apparently wrote “Vienna 1683” on the magazine of the firearm, a reference to the victory of Polish King Jan III. Sobieski over the Turks, and also inscribed the phrase “Akko 1189” on the weapon, a reference to one of the most important events of the Third Crusade to the Holy Land, the siege of Akko, which the Crusaders finally conquered in 1191. 

Breivik of Norway another inspiration to the murderer

The 28-year-old Australian citizen also said in his posts that he was inspired by Anders Behring Breivik, the assassin from Norway who is an ultra-right fanatic. The author of the manifesto describes himself as an “ordinary white man from the working class, from a low-income family”.

The manifesto says the aim of his violence was to revenge “the thousands of victims of this foreign invasion”. The author then specifically mentions, for example, 11-year-old Ebba Akerlund, who died during an assassination in Stockholm, Sweden committed by terrorists in 2017.

Rakhmat Akilov, an adherent of the so-called Islamic State network of terrorists and a citizen of Uzbekistan, has been convicted and sentenced to life in prison for that attack, which murdered five people. The main model for Tarrant, apparently, was Breivik, the extremist from Norway who is a right-wing fanatic and who, in July 2011, murdered 77 people during assassinations in the Norwegian capital of Oslo and its surrounding environs.

On 22 July 2011, Breivik first set off a bomb in the Government quarter of Oslo, murdering eight people. Shortly thereafter he shot to death 69 members of the Labor Party attending a summer camp for their youth wing on the nearby island of Utöya.

Breivik criticized the then-governing Labor Party for supporting multiculturalism and allegedly endangering “Norwegian identity”. In 2012 he was sentenced to 21 years in prison for terrorism.

“I read the texts of Dylann Roof and many others, but the actual inspiration came from Anders Behring Breivik,” the manifesto says. Roof shot nine African-American believers to death in 2015 in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, USA.

Tarrant apparently posted online that he had moved to New Zealand temporarily in order to plan and prepare his attack, and eventually decided to remain in the country. According to media reports, he is from Grafton in New South Wales, Australia, and worked as a personal trainer in 2010 in a local fitness center before allegedly deciding to travel abroad.