Home > Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity > Izetbegović, Alija

[AUGUST 8, 1925–OCTOBER 19, 2003]

Bosnian Muslim and political leader in the post-independence Bosnia and Herzegovinian government

Alija Izetbegović was a Bosnian Muslim born on August 8, 1925 in Bosanski Šamac, a town in northern Bosnia, in what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. He died on October 19, 2003, in an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia), a state whose creation and survival he did as much as anybody to bring about. However, the Bosnia in which he died was so divided that he would have had extreme difficulty returning to his birthplace, had he so wished. The town of his birth is located in the so-called Republika Srpska, one of two entities into which the country is split, and which is dominated by Serbs.

Izetbegović was jailed twice in communist Yugoslavia for subversion, for three years in the 1940s and five years in the 1980s. His 1980s imprisonment resulted from the publication of his main political statement, the Islamic Declaration originally published in 1970. The government found his viewpoint extremist and dangerous, as in declarations such as: "There can be no peace or co-existence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic institutions. . . . Islamic renewal cannot be . . . successfully continued and concluded without a political revolution." In 1990 Izetbegović helped create and subsequently led the Stranka demokratske akcije (Party of Democratic Action) or SDA, a political party that exclusively represented the narrow ethnic interests of Bosnia's Muslims and whose candidates campaigned behind the slogan "In our land with our faith."

As first Yugoslavia and then Bosnia disintegrated, Izetbegović found himself in an increasingly difficult situation and feared for the very survival of Bosnia's Muslims. Together with Macedonia's President Kiro Gligorov, he tabled eleventh-hour proposals in June 1991 to head off Slovene and Croatian independence declarations and worked to keep Yugoslavia together. Memorably, he compared the choice between Franjo Tudjman's Croatia and Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia to one between a brain tumor and leukemia. As conflict loomed, he became increasingly unsure of himself and seemingly was unable to prepare for war.

The defense of Sarajevo after the outbreak of fighting in April 1992 was initially organized by the city's criminal gangs. In 1998, six years after the events, the Sarajevo investigative weekly Dani published details of crimes allegedly committed by one of the gang leaders, Mušan Topalović-Caco, whom Izetbegović personally knew from prison and who was who was killed in October 1993. The report charged that "Caco" had eliminated Serbs from parts of Sarajevo, revelations which incurred Izetbegović's enduring wrath.

Izetbegović became president of Bosnia at the end of 1990, while Bosnia was still a republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This was an office that he should have shared in rotation with other members of the Bosnian presidency, but because war erupted in Bosnia in April 1992, he became the first sole president of an independent Bosnia and is remembered as the country's beleaguered wartime leader. He was elected chairman of Bosnia's presidency in the first postwar elections in 1996, stepping down before the second postwar elections two years later. He retired from politics in 2001.

In the immediate aftermath of his death, Izetbegović was hailed internationally as a statesman for his efforts to keep Bosnia and Herzegovina together. He was also deeply loved and respected by Bosnian Muslims, who called him "dedo" ("grandpa"). By contrast, the Croats and Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina generally despised him. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague revealed that it had been investigating him for war crimes. The investigation was aborted with his premature death.

Izetbegović's detractors accused him of bearing responsibility for the deaths of Serbs in Sarajevo at the hands of criminal gangs; of bearing responsibility for atrocities committed by Bosnian Muslims against Croats and Serbs in detention camps such as that at Čelebići; and of bearing responsibility for atrocities committed by the Bosnian Army against Croats and Serbs, especially during its advance in summer and autumn 1995. He was even accused of shelling his own people to generate maximum media sympathy for their plight in order to encourage international intervention. In the absence of a thorough ICTY investigation, no definitive judgment can be made about the allegations against Izetbegović, although his relationship with Mušan Topalović-Caco is a matter of record. Given the logistical difficulties that Izetbegović faced simply in communicating with his lieutenants around Bosnia during the war, it would be almost impossible to link him personally to any individual atrocity committed against Croats and Serbs. Nonetheless, he failed to make any public effort to curb the actions of over-zealous Bosnian Muslims. He also failed to take international concerns about Muslim excesses seriously, justifying them by the scale of the atrocities that were committed against Bosnian Muslims by Serbs and to a lesser extent by Croats.

The charge that Izetbegović shelled his own people, came from both his enemies and various UN officials. Lewis MacKenzie, the first UN general from Canada to arrive in Sarajevo in 1992, and Michael Rose, the British general who commanded UN operations in Bosnia in 1994, went on record with the accusation both at the time and later. At the time, the international presence in Sarajevo was unable to determine what happened during the so-called "bread queue massacre" in 1992 (one instance where Izetbegović was alleged to have shelled his own people). Moreover, UN investigations of the "marketplace massacres" of 1994 and 1995 were inconclusive. Most analysts, however, give Izetbegović the benefit of the doubt and assume that, given the great number of shells being fired into Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs, some were bound to have killed large numbers of civilians.

The Western countries that belatedly intervened militarily in Bosnia in August 1995 wished to see Izetbegović as a moderate who stood for the preservation of a multi-ethnic state, being that they effectively intervened on his side. However, all that can be said for sure is that Izetbegović was a complex individual and a devout Muslim whose primary concern in the run-up to and during the war was the preservation of his own people.

SEE ALSO Bosnia and Herzegovina; Croatia, Independent State of; Ethnic Cleansing; Rape

Chris Bennett