Alija Izetbegović died on this day in 2003. He was a Bosniak writer and politician, founder and honorary president of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) and the first president of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He was born on August 8, 1925. in Bosanski Šamac in a respectable but impoverished Bey family. Izetbegović’s father Mustafa, a merchant by profession, fought in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Italian front in the First World War, where he received serious injuries that left him in a semi-paralyzed state. Because of this, Mustafa decided to move to Sarajevo in 1928 with his family. Mustafa Izetbegović had two sons from his first marriage and three daughters and two sons from his marriage with Alija’s mother Hiba. He was named after his grandfather Alija Izetbegović, who was the mayor of Bosanski Šamac.
In Sarajevo, he enrolled in the First Sarajevo Gymnasium, and even then, as a minor, he began to face problems surrounding the issue of “social justice and injustice”, on the one hand, and faith in God, on the other. He read a lot during his days at the gymnasium, and many works he read during the final grades of high school played a very important role in his further education and maturation. In literature, they were novels by Dostoyevsky, and in philosophy Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution.
During the Second World War, he joined the organization Mladi muslimani. He graduated in 1943 from Sarajevo’s First Gymnasium. When the Young Muslims split into supporters of the Hanjar division and the communist movement, Alija remained neutral. He spent the entire war in Sarajevo, which was under Ustasha occupation, and successfully avoided being mobilized into the Armed Forces of the Independent State of Croatia. He was arrested by the Chetniks in 1944, but was soon released by the Chetnik duke Dragutin Keserović in gratitude for his grandfather’s role in securing the release of forty Serbian prisoners in 1914. As part of the Young Muslim Movement during the Second World War, he also engaged in humanitarian work, helping the exiled civilians of Eastern Bosnia. There he also met his future wife, Halida Repovac.
In 1946, while he was serving his military service, he was arrested by the newly established communist government, which saw a danger in the Young Muslim movement. After the trial at the Military Court in Sarajevo, he was sentenced to three years of rigorous imprisonment.
In 1949, after being released from prison, he enrolled in the study of agronomy and started a family. He spent the following years working on construction sites, mostly in Montenegro. He left his study of agronomy and enrolled in law at the University of Sarajevo. He graduated in 1956, just two years after he began his studies, and in the meantime he had three children, two daughters and a son. He passed the bar exam in 1962.
In 1970, he published his first book, a manifesto called the Islamic Declaration, in which he tried to reconcile Western technological progress with Oriental, Islamic tradition. Although at first this shorter work went unnoticed, it came into the spotlight only after the so-called Sarajevo Process, in which Alija Izetbegović, together with twelve Muslim intellectuals, was accused of anti-state activities, Islamic fundamentalism and the establishment of an “Islamically pure Bosnia and Herzegovina.” In April 1983, Izetbegović and twelve other Bosniak activists (among whom was Melika Salihbegović , Edhem Bičakčić, Omer Behmen, Mustafa Spahić and Hasan Čengić) were sentenced. Although the prosecution did not submit any concrete evidence for its claims, Alija Izetbegović was sentenced to 14 years in prison for subverting state order. He remained in prison in Foča for six years, and was released in 1988, when political prisoners convicted of verbal offenses were released from prison.
In the second year after being released from prison, in May 1990, Alija Izetbegović founded the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) with a group of like-minded people. The program goals of the Party envisaged the affirmation of the universal values of freedom, democracy, equality and human rights. At the Founding Assembly of the SDA on May 25, 1990, he became its first president. In the first democratic elections on November 18, 1990, the SDA won a convincing victory, obtaining 86 mandates in the Assembly of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Alija Izetbegović was elected president of the Bosnian Presidency.
On June 17, 1991, the ten-day war broke out in Slovenia, which marked the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Soon the conflict was transferred to Croatia and culminated with the brutal attack of the Yugoslav People’s Army on Dubrovnik and Vukovar. Alija Izetbegović was of the opinion that Bosnia and Herzegovina will not remain in the “truncated” Yugoslavia without Slovenia and Croatia, arguing that it is not Yugoslavia anymore, but Greater Serbia. He publicly opposed the mobilization of Bosnian young men for the war against Croatia, and his views were supported by the majority of Bosnian intellectuals. On December 1, 1991, the First Congress of the SDA was held. The congress lasted three days with the attendance of 600 party delegates. In his speech, Alija Izetbegović described the situation at that time, although he personally did not want it, war seemed inevitable to him. At that time Bosnia and Herzegovina is also on the path to independence. The independence referendum of Bosnia and Herzegovina was held on February 29 and March 1, 1992. 63% of citizens responded to the referendum, of which 99% voted for independence. Bosnian Serbs, led by the Serbian Democratic Party, boycotted the referendum and declared their own state within the borders of the Bosnian Republic called Serbian Republic in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Shortly after the international recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the first attacks by Serbian extremists and JNA forces on the towns and villages of independent Bosnia and Herzegovina began, as well as the persecution of the Bosniak and Croat population.
Being the President of the Presidency of the Bosnian Republic, he carried the burden and responsibility of being the Commander-in-Chief of the Bosnian army. He insisted on observing international conventions and the laws of war, and especially on the protection of the civilian population and cultural and religious buildings. He constantly repeated the thesis that it was an aggression against an independent country, which “was not preparing for war, but for peace”. He detailed the strength of the JNA, the political context of the aggression in Bosnia and Herzegovina, spoke about its genocidal character of the aggression, the objective situation in the country, warned about the absurdity of the arms embargo imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina by the UN, and the humanitarian disaster that threatened to destroy an entire nation. Through four years of war, during the most difficult moments of aggression, he was with his people. The war ended on November 25, 1995 with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement. Alija Izetbegović was one of the signatories together with the then presidents of Serbia and Croatia, Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman. The creator of the agreement, Richard Holbrook, said that Bosnia and Herzegovina would not have survived if Alija Izetbegović was not the president. He was elected as a member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina twice more: in the first post-war elections in 1996, when he was also elected as the President of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina for a period of two years, and in the second general elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina in September 1998. On October 15, 2000, he retired from the position of President of the Presidency. of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He died in Sarajevo on October 19, 2003 and was buried at the Kovači Martyr’s Cemetery in Sarajevo.
