Alija Izetbegovic, the first president of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has died aged 78 in Sarajevo’s Kosevo hospital, which overlooks the graves of so many of that city’s siege victims. His was a short – and a late – political career, and one to which he always seemed ill-suited, as if history had played a cruel joke in casting him in a key role in the sad and brutal war disfiguring the Balkans.
Izetbegovic, a Slav Muslim, survived first Serbian and then Croatian assaults on his people and their ancestral lands, Yugoslav army arrest, Serbian rocketing and sniper fire of his offices, the backstabbing of rival Muslim leaders, and the contempt of western mediators before dying of a heart attack in the city he had inhabited since his youth.
Always an improbable national leader, devout and mild-mannered, he chalked up just over five years as president of Bosnia (1990-96) and after that, four years as co-president (1996-2000) in the wake of the Dayton peace treaty of December 1995.As president, he spent most of that time leading the fight for his country’s very survival.
In a former Yugoslavia destroyed by misrule and betrayed by a host of treacherous, power-hungry leaders, Izetbegovic stood out as a decent sort. Even so, he blundered and schemed to the detriment of the cause he professed to be serving – that of an integrated Bosnia. He was more sinned against than sinning, but in the political, military, and diplomatic games of the Balkans, he was no angel either.
Izetbegovic emerged from obscurity at the end of the 1980s, just as the political battles that accompanied the collapse of communism and the nationalist ascendancy were being played out. In the spring of 1990, he helped form and was chosen leader of the Democratic Action Party.
In the first modern multi-party elections in November of that year, the Muslim party was strongest, by virtue of representing the biggest single national group, 44% of the pre-war population. By this time, the Bosnian political spectrum had already split along ethnic lines. President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia sponsored the creation of the Bosnian wing of his Croatian Democratic Union, while Radovan Karadzic’s Serbian Democratic Party, controlled by Belgrade, became the other main force. Such a politics of ethnic exclusiveness made the war predictable. In opting for ethnic politics, Izetbegovic was as guilty as the Serbian and Croatian fanatics who hated him so viscerally.
As head of the strongest party, Izetbegovic became president, or rather first among equals in the collective presidency. Of all the heads of state in the six republics of former Yugoslavia, Izetbegovic uniquely had been a lifelong anti-communist. All the other leaders had been senior apparatchiks in the communist regime, although Tudjman swapped his communism for nationalism at the end of the 1960s.
By the summer of 1991, war was raging first in Slovenia, then much more seriously in Croatia. In a vain attempt to avert the looming bloodbath, Izetbegovic backed a new, looser structure for Yugoslavia, and sought to sweet-talk the (Serb) Yugoslav army, with its considerable stockpiles of arms and garrisons in Bosnia, into reason. However, he did little to prepare his people for what was about to befall them.
When western Europe bowed to German pressure and recognised Croatia’s independence at the beginning of 1992, the Bosnian die was cast. Izetbegovic was forced to decide whether to request international recognition, too, or opt to remain as what would be an appendage of a Greater Serbia run by the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. The choice between following Tudjman or running with Milosevic, both of whom were scheming in secret to carve up Bosnia between them, was like having to choose between leukaemia and a brain tumour, he once memorably remarked.
Following an independence plebiscite, European recognition of a state called Bosnia-Herzegovina came on April 5 1992, and the Serbs launched their partitionist war the next day. The Serbs instituted the Sarajevo siege, and Izetbegovic looked to the wider Muslim world for financial support and hundreds of troops. There followed long weeks bunkered in the Sarajevo presidency where Izetbegovic veered between panic and other-worldly serenity, punctuated by endless negotiating sessions in Geneva, Vienna, London, and Ohio, culminating in the Dayton deal in 1995.
