* 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.