Alija Izetbegović was born on August 8. He was the first president of the internationally recognized state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, president of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian state and the supreme commander of the Bosnian army in the hardest period of its history.
Alija Izetbegović was born in 1925 in Bosanski Šamac. He grew up and went to school in Sarajevo, where he graduated from the Faculty of Law. He worked in several enterprises in Sarajevo as a legal advisor. He was incarcerated and sentenced twice for his political beliefs and activities. Izetbegović was sentenced to 14 years in prison in the politically mounted “Sarajevo process”, as one of thirteen Muslim intellectuals.
Izetbegović launched the establishment of the SDA and at the first assembly of SDA on May 25, 1990 he became the party’s first president. After the triumph of SDA in the first multilateral parliamentarian elections in 1990, Izetbegović was elected the first president of the Presidency of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
After the first post-war elections in 1996, Izetbegović was elected the member of the Presidency of BiH and then the Chairman of the Presidency of BiH. After ten years of functioning as a member of the Presidency of BiH, due to health reasons Izetbegović resigned in 2000.
A statement by Richard Holbrooke, the creator of the Dayton Peace Agreement, will be remembered forever: “If it were not for Alija Izetbegović, there would be no Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
Alija Izetbegović passed away on October 19, 2003 and he was buried at the Martyrs’ Cemetery Kovači in Sarajevo.
