On this day in 1925, Alija Izetbegović, the first President of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was born.
His political career was marked by two trials, the first in 1946, in which he was sentenced to three years in prison, and the second, known as the Sarajevo Trial, in which he and a group of Bosniak intellectuals were sentenced to 14 years in prison. In the second year after his release from prison, in May 1990, Izetbegović founded the Party of Democratic Action with a group of like-minded people.
He was a key figure during the war in Bosnia when about 200,000 people died and more than two million were forced out of their homes.
He won worldwide sympathy by running the government from sandbagged buildings during the three-and-a-half-year-long siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serbs, under constant threat from their artillery and sniper attacks.
The short, blue-eyed Muslim walked to his office through the bombardment, believing, according to those who knew him, that death would come when Allah willed it.
Together with the then Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, Izetbegovic participated in marathon peace negotiations in the US city of Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, led by the US diplomat Richard Holbrooke. These resulted in a peace accord for Bosnia.
The deal split the country into the two highly autonomous entities of the Serbs’ Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation and brought in NATO-led peacekeepers to maintain security.
“This is not a just peace, but it is more just than continuation of the war,” Izetbegovic told his people after signing the accord. “In the situation as it is, and in the world as it is, a better peace could not be achieved.”
After the elections, Izetbegović was elected President of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in that position he welcomed the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He was one of the signatories of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Alija Izetbegović died in 2003, and his funeral was attended by tens of thousands of citizens and numerous world delegations.
