[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...