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Leader of Bosnian independence Alija Izetbegovic dies
.:: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...0/ixportal.html
Alija Izetbegovic, the former President of Bosnia Herzegovina who died yesterday aged 78, was poised at the beginning of 1992 to lead his people out of 40 years of communism to an era of freedom and market reforms, at the helm of a new country with fine ski slopes, good wine and some of the better performing industries of eastern Europe.
But within months, the territorial ambitions of Serb and Croat nationalists had plunged the republic into a bitter and protracted civil war which cost some 250,000 lives and culminated in a three and a half year blockade of its capital, Sarajevo, by Bosnian Serbs.
Throughout the conflict, Izetbegovic, a Muslim, refused to play the nationalist card and to begin with adopted an almost Gandhi-like pacifist line. During the siege of Sarajevo, he lived in a cellar, dodging snipers' bullets and listening with brave hopes to demands by the West to an end to Serbian ethnic cleansing.
Mr Izetbegovic has sought a multi-ethnic alliance to preserve Bosnia
Izetbegovic placed his fate in the hands of the West, hoping that it would respect his country's right to self-defence and raise the arms embargo that was imposed at the beginning of the hostilities; or that it would come to its aid with direct military intervention. But help - other than humanitarian aid - was not forthcoming. Instead, Izetbegovic came under increasing pressure to accept the de facto partition of Bosnia Herzegovina.
During the United Nations-sponsored peace talks which dragged on from the early days of the conflict until the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995, Izetbegovic rejected peace plan after peace plan, calculating that if he held on the West would eventually be forced to act against the Serbs.
He refused to accept the reality of Serb military success which reduced the area of the country under his control to a mere 10 per cent, despite the fact that the Muslims constituted some 45 per cent of the pre-war population. Towards the end of the war, as Croats and Muslims joined forces to repel the Serb advance, Izetbegovic's troops began to make some headway. But by November 1995, war weariness and the Bosnian army's failure to break the Serb blockade of Sarajevo persuaded Izetbegovic to agree to a permanent cease-fire.
In the propaganda of Belgrade and Zagreb, Izetbegovic was a closet ayatollah, scheming to introduce an Islamic theocracy into the Balkans. Although he was a devout Muslim, before the war there was little evidence to support this claim and he repeatedly avowed his adherence to a secular multi-ethnic Bosnia.
But the failure of the West to come to the aid of Sarajevo forced liberal Muslims into the arms of their distant co-religionists in Iran and Saudi Arabia, which provided money, weapons and some tough soldiers. As the war proceeded, the national and religious emphasis of Izetbegovic's Party of Democratic Action increased accordingly.
While most in the West sympathised with Izetbegovic, there were some who believed that he was ultimately to blame for the tragedy of his country. Izetbegovic, they pointed out, had pressed on with moves to independence despite clear warnings from the Bosnian Serbs that independence would inevitably lead to civil war. They also blamed him for his misjudgment in supposing that the West would ever intervene on his behalf, a misjudgment that prolonged the war.
Alija Izetbegovic was born on August 8 1925 into a devout Muslim family in the north Bosnian town of Bosanski Samak, in what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes under the rule of the Serb royal house. In the mid-19th century, his ancestors had been banned from Serb-dominated Belgrade after a constitutional clause was introduced banning Muslims, Jews and gipsies from living in the city.
Izetbegovic moved to Sarajevo as a youth. During the Second World War, he witnessed Serb massacres of Muslims and in later years liked to contrast the behaviour of the Serbs with that of the invading Germans, who had seized the city and its important facilities, but left the civilian population alone.
After the war, as Yugoslavia embraced Communism, Izetbegovic became a religious activist and, at the age of 20, had a brush with the Communist authorities for which he received a three-year jail sentence. On his release, he completed his studies in law at Sarajevo University, then worked as a legal adviser for two large Bosnian companies.
In 1970 he published his Islamic Declaration, in which he argued that Islam is incompatible with non-Islamic systems and called for political and religious revolution. The book was later cited by Izetbegovic's enemies as evidence of his fundamentalist leanings. But sympathisers pointed out that it made no reference to Bosnia and was more concerned with the place of Islam in the modern world, reflecting the plight of a lay religious thinker living under a Communist regime.
In 1982 he published Islam between East and West, an attempt to define the curious status of Bosnia's Muslims, and sought to reconcile European democratic principles with Sunni Islamic teaching. He was arrested and jailed for 14 years, of which he served five, in Foca, south-east of Sarajevo.
When he came out of prison in 1988, both Yugoslavia and Communism were disintegrating. In May 1990, he founded the Muslim-based Party of Democratic Action, which won the most seats in the republic's first free parliamentary elections in November 1990. He became President a few months later.
Within weeks of his taking office, Yugoslavia was being dismembered and war was looming in Croatia. During the conflict, Izetbegovic was disinclined to take sides out of an anxiety to preserve Bosnia Herzegovina's traditions of co-existence. Bosnia's ethnic mix he compared to a painting by Jackson Pollock, and the choice between the aggressive politicians of Belgrade and Zagreb to that between leukaemia and a brain tumour.
But the break-up of Yugoslavia convinced him of Bosnia's destiny as an independent democratic state: "Our home is in Europe and not in a fundamentalist state," he said. "My aim is to have an independent, democratic republic which conforms to European standards."
But in early 1991, the Bosnian Serbs warned Izetbegovic that they would refuse to accept an independent Bosnia dominated by Muslims, and that summer Serb and Muslim leaders negotiated an agreement on power-sharing. But the chief Muslim negotiator, Zulfikar Pasic, was a rival for the presidency, so Izetbegovic repudiated the agreement.
In February 1992 when the majority Croats and Muslims voted in a referendum for independence, the referendum was boycotted by the Serbs; Izetbegovic misread the gathering war clouds and insisted peace would prevail. Civil war broke out in April with clashes between the three main ethnic groups. Izetbegovic appealed for UN help and ordered full mobilisation of territorial and police reservists.
In the first month of the war, hundreds of people were killed and nearly half a million lost their homes, as Serb forces, backed by Serbia and armed by the federal army, launched an offensive to carve out a Serb state in Bosnia. At the same time, Croat paramilitary groups responded by attempting to secure Croat-populated regions in the west.
As Sarajevo came under siege in June 1992, Bosnia and Croatia announced a military alliance against Serbia, and Bosnian Croats and Muslims combined to defend the city. But by August, Izetbegovic had lost 70 per cent of his territory to the Serbs, after militiamen led by Radavan Karadic launched a blitzkreig through non-Serb held areas.
During the autumn, relations with the Muslims' nominal allies in Zagreb became increasingly strained. "The world has discerned," announced Croatia's President Franjo Tudjman, "that on the territory of Bosnia Herzegovina, there are tendencies to create an Islamic state."
Mate Boban, chosen by Tudjman to lead the Croats in their heartland in western Herzegovina, declared the region autonomous. In early 1993, during an attempt to take the Muslim enclave of Mostar, thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians were killed.
Izetbegovic pleaded in vain for a relaxation of the arms embargo to allow the Bosnians to fight on an equal footing with their foes. Instead, foreign ministers of the EU pressed him to accept a deal based on the de facto partition of the country into three areas.
In February 1993, Izetbegovic told an angry crowd of relatives of people from the starving, besieged city of Zepa, eastern Bosnia, "I cannot help you. I have no means to help you. We have found ourselves, we the Bosnian people, between a cruel enemy and a hypocritical friend."
Even Izetbegovic's allies advised him to make peace. "Take that piece of land and get your people back into the country, dear Alija," advised Yasser Arafat, "or else your people will melt away as the snow in the springtime." In July, under pressure from mutinous elements in the Bosnian collective presidency, Izetbegovic accepted for the first time that the country could become an ethnic federation if the Serbs and Croats insisted. But progress towards an agreement continued to be frustrated by disagreements over the map. Increasingly, Izetbegovic found himself being accused not just by his enemies, but by the EU and UN negotiators, David Owen and Cyrus Vance, of being unreasonable in his demands.
Things began to look more hopeful in March 1994, when Tudjman, under pressure from the Americans, executed an abrupt volte face and committed himself to a Muslim-Croat federation. Peace with the Croats allowed more arms to flow through to Muslim forces, breaking the pattern of Serbian gains.
In 1995, Croat-Muslim forces continued to make gains at the Serbs' expense and, in May, Izetbegovic felt confident enough to predict that the blockade of Sarajevo would be broken by November. But a Bosnian army offensive in June met a bloody carpet of Serb mines and petered out amid furious recriminations among politicians and soldiers.
The growing seriousness of the fighting prompted a renewed American attempt to broker a cessation of hostilities, which culminated in the Dayton Peace Accords of November, bringing the four-year war to an end.
Under the Dayton Accords, most responsibilities were devolved to the two entities, one Serb, the other Muslim-Croat, with joint institutions under a three-man presidential council, responsible for some common areas including trade, finance and foreign policy.
In the elections held in September 1996, Izetbegovic - who campaigned under the explicitly nationalist slogan "In our country, with our religion" - was elected as chairman of the new three-man presidential council. He was re-elected in September 1998.
But co-operation between the three members of the collective presidency remained difficult to achieve, and sometimes had to be imposed from above by the UN high representative in Bosnia, Carlos Westendorp. It was clear that only the presence of the Nato-led Stabilisation Force was preventing a resumption of hostilities.
In June 2000, Izetbegovic announced his intention to resign from the collective Muslim presidency. Summarising his achievements, he claimed that without him, Bosnia would have become part of greater Serbia. He regretted, however, that he had failed to establish a "unified, democratic and prosperous Bosnia".
Alija Izetbegovic was married and had a son and a daughter.
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By Tracy Wilkinson
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Alija Izetbegovic, a devout Muslim whose religion and politics landed him in Yugoslavian jails but who went on to lead the Bosnian people through a cataclysmic war and eventually into independence, died Sunday in a Sarajevo hospital. He was 78.
Izetbegovic, who suffered from chronic heart disease, was admitted to the hospital Sept. 10 with broken bones and contusions from a fall.
His condition deteriorated and became critical Friday when doctors were unable to stop bleeding in his left lung, the hospital said.
He was in many ways the father of today's Bosnia, proclaiming its sovereignty from Yugoslavia in 1992 before the federation collapsed, austerely waging a largely defensive and losing war, and finally serving in the new country's first postwar, three-member presidency.
But his enemies questioned his skill and attacked his motives, suspicious that he harbored desires to install an Islamic state in the Balkans.
Izetbegovic made no secret of the importance to him of his Muslim faith. Yet he said repeatedly that he favored a Bosnia that was both multiethnic and democratic.
Citing his bad health, Izetbegovic stepped down from Bosnia's political leadership in October 2000, five years after the U.S.-brokered Dayton accord ended the war.
He was the last of the three wartime leaders to leave power: Weeks earlier, Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic was ousted in a popular uprising in Belgrade, and several months before that, Croatia's nationalist President Franjo Tudjman died in Zagreb.
Bosnia plunged into war after Izetbegovic declared independence. Serbs led by Radovan Karadzic, now a fugitive war-crimes suspect, revolted and, backed by the Yugoslavian army, launched a village-by-village campaign of burning and looting.
More than a quarter million Bosnians were killed in a conflict that put the term "ethnic cleansing" into the global lexicon and witnessed the bloodiest atrocities in Europe since World War II. Nearly 2 million Bosnians were driven from their homes.
As the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo was surrounded by besieging Bosnian Serb forces, battered by enemy artillery, and its residents picked off by snipers, Izetbegovic captured the world's sympathy by running the government from sandbagged buildings pocked and shaken by mortar and gunfire.
Unlike Milosevic and Tudjman, Izetbegovic was never a member of the Yugoslavian Communist party. Where they traded communism for nationalism and shifted with the winds of public opinion over the years, Izetbegovic remained true throughout his life to Islamic-inspired political activism.
Former U.S. special Balkans envoy Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the Dayton accord, described Izetbegovic as a strange and remarkable figure.
"He saw politics as a perpetual struggle," Holbrooke recounted in his memoir, "To End a War." "He had probably never thought seriously about what it might mean to run a real country in peacetime. ...
"He was a devout Muslim, although not the Bosnian ayatollah that his enemies portrayed. But although he paid lip service to the principles of a multiethnic state, he was not the democrat that some supporters in the West saw. He reminded me a bit of Mao Zedong and other radical Chinese communist leaders -- good at revolution, poor at governance."
After the war, Izetbegovic came under harsh criticism for having allowed Islamic fundamentalist fighters, who flocked to Bosnia during the conflict, to remain in the country and serve as a springboard for international jihad.
Izetbegovic refused repeated requests from U.S. officials to rein in these "mujahedeen." He argued that they had come to Bosnia's rescue when no one else would.
Izetbegovic was born in the northern Bosnian town of Bosanski Samac in 1925, one of five children. Two years after his birth and his father's bankruptcy, the family moved to Sarajevo.
From the early days of his youth, Izetbegovic was a member of Young Muslims, an organization advocating a purer form of Islam that was outlawed after World War II by the new communist government of Josip Broz Tito.
In 1946, Izetbegovic was arrested and put in jail for three years, at least in part for statements against the Soviet Union, with which Tito, at the time, was aligned.
After his release in 1949, Izetbegovic went about studying and eventually graduated with a law degree from Sarajevo University in 1956.
His most famous writing, which came back to haunt him in later years, was the 1973 "Islamic Declaration." Another work, published in the United States in 1984, was similarly controversial: "Islam Between East and West."
Both spoke of the importance of Islam and the need to serve God. His Serb and Croat enemies maintain that these writings proved Izetbegovic's fundamentalist intentions aimed at establishing an Islamic state in the Balkans.
In 1983, Izetbegovic was sentenced again to 14 years in prison along with a group of Muslim intellectuals. Often crowded in cells with dozens of other men, he contracted bronchitis that would plague his health for the rest of his life.
He was pardoned in 1989 and set free. The next year, he founded Bosnia's first nationalist, ethnic-based political party, known as the Democratic Action Party.
Bosnian Serbs and Croats would soon follow suit, forming their own ethnic-based parties. All three would become the political faces of ethnic warfare.
Izetbegovic is survived by his wife, two daughters and his son, Bakir, a powerful businessman and politician. |
| quote: | (CNN) -- Former Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, who led the former Yugoslav republic to independence in 1995 after a bloody three-year civil war, died Sunday at age 78, state media reported.
Izetbegovic, who left office in 2000, was hospitalized last month after a fall at his home, said Predrag Curkovic, a reporter for Bosnian television network ATV. Izetbegovic suffered four broken ribs in that fall, which caused bleeding in his lungs, Curkovic said.
He was one of the signers of the Dayton Accords, which ended the Bosnian war in 1995. He was chosen to lead Bosnia's three-person, multi-ethnic presidency in elections overseen by NATO peacekeepers in 1996, but resigned the post in 2000.
Izetbegovic stepped down in 2000, citing health concerns but also complaining that Western powers were pressing for changes "at the expense of the Muslim people."
He became president of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1990 after a career as a lawyer, a Muslim political activist and founder of the Democratic Action Party.
His 1982 book, Islam Between East and West, described the problems of Muslims living in a Slavic country with Western values and led to a five-year prison term under Yugoslavia's communist government for advocating "pan-Islamic activity."
Yugoslavia began to break up in 1991, when Croatia and Slovenia seceded, sparking a decade of ethnic conflict. When Bosnia declared its independence in 1992, the result was a bitter civil war among its Muslim, Serb and Croatian populations.
Bosnian Serbs -- backed by the Yugoslav army -- seized more than half of the country and launched a campaign of expulsions and genocide against Muslims known as "ethnic cleansing."
NATO intervened in 1995 with a round of air strikes against the Serbs, which led to the signing of the Dayton Accords in November of that year.
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Izetbegovic died in hospital on Sunday, 19 October after becoming ill following a fall at his home in September. His funeral, attended by 200,000 Bosnians, was on Wednesday, 22 October. Turkish President Suleyman Demirel and former Slovenian President Milan Kucan were among representatives from 80 foreign delegations attending the emotionally charged ceremony...
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More info >
.:: http://www.angelfire.com/dc/mbooks/izetbegovic.html
.:: http://news.google.ca/news?hl=en&ie...=N&tab=wn&meta=
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