In Lukavica on Monday evening, on the 23rd anniversary of the death of the first president of the Presidency of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegović, billboards appeared with his photograph and a message accusing him of crimes against the Serb people.
The billboard featured text written in Serbian and English.
“23 years later – the blood-stained hands haven’t been washed clean by death, nor have those responsible for the crimes committed against the Serbian people been forgotten with the passage of time,” is written in Cyrillic, followed underneath in the Latin alphabet in English.
Next to Izetbegović’s photograph, the dates October 19, 2003 – October 19, 2026 are inscribed, – the date of his death and today’s date.
One billboard was set up next to an apartment building near Sunce Park and the State Investigation and Protection Agency building. Another billboard is located in the city center, and several more have been placed across the City of East Sarajevo.
The billboards do not state who put them up, and that information is still unknown.
We called the Mayor of East Sarajevo, Ljubiša Ćosić, to check what information he has about it. However, Ćosić did not know about the billboards, and when we explained to him what was written on them, he was delighted.
“I went straight to work this morning so I didn’t see billboards, but if someone put them up, they did a good job. That’s a local government; I have nothing to do with it, but good job,” Ćosić said.
He then explained why he thinks Izetbegović bears responsibility for crimes against Serbs.
“His death prevented his processing for crimes against Serbs. He organized almost everything bad that happened to us. He probably did not know about a lot of it, but command responsibility applies to him as well. In the end, I remember him for rejecting the peace according to which we in Bosnia were supposed to remain in a truncated Yugoslavia. He accepted it by noon and then rejected it. I have nothing nice to say about him,” Ćosić said.
Billboards were put up in the area of the Municipality of East Ilidža, but Mayor Marinko Božović has not seen them either, and as he told Klix.ba, he does not know who ordered them.
Alija Izetbegović passed on October 19, 2023, in Sarajevo. He was the President of the Presidency of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following the signing of the Dayton Agreement in November 1995, Izetbegović stated: “This is not a just peace, but it is more just than the continuation of the war. In the situation as it is, in the world as it is, a better peace could not have been achieved.”
Even during the war, he did not give up on an integral Bosnia and Herzegovina “where no one will be persecuted for their religion, nationality, and political belief.”
He didn’t like being referred to as someone who rules the state and one of his most famous sentences goes: “No one has ever managed to rule Bosnia; it always just seemed to them that they did.”, Klix.ba writes.
