Alija Izetbegović: The Prisoner Who Became a President
In April 1983 a Sarajevo court sentenced a fifty-seven-year-old lawyer to fourteen years for "hostile activity inspired by Islamic ideologies." Amnesty International and Helsinki Watch protested that the verdict rested on communist propaganda and that none of the thirteen defendants had been charged with advocating violence. Seven years after the sentence, and two years after his pardon, the man was head of state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Two years after that, his country was at war.
Bosanski Šamac to Sarajevo
Izetbegović was born on 8 August 1925 in Bosanski Šamac. His paternal grandfather, also Alija, had married a Turkish woman, Sıdıka Hanım, while serving as a soldier in Üsküdar, and later became mayor of Bosanski Šamac. His father was an accountant who had fought for the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and came home semi-paralysed by his injuries. The family moved to Sarajevo in 1928. He took a law degree from the University of Sarajevo's Faculty of Law.
The Young Muslims, and Eight Years Inside
In 1941 he helped found Mladi Muslimani — the Young Muslims — modelled on the Muslim Brotherhood. His wartime record is contested: the New York Times reported that he had joined the SS Handschar Division, while his family insisted he joined the Yugoslav Partisans; he was detained by royalist Chetniks in mid-1944 and released. In 1946 the new communist authorities arrested him and sentenced him to three years for collaboration with the Nazis. He was twenty-one at his first arrest. Across two separate prosecutions he served eight years in total for belonging to organisations that argued for human rights and religious freedom. The second stretch, after the 1983 trial, ran nearly five years — the Bosnian Supreme Court cut the sentence to twelve years in May 1984 and he was pardoned in 1988, his health permanently damaged. He married Halida Repovac in 1949; their son Bakir would later sit on the Bosnian presidency himself.
The Islamic Declaration
The 1970 manifesto that eventually put him in the dock was an attempt, as he framed it, to reconcile Western-style progress with Islamic tradition. It also contained the sentence that followed him to his grave: "There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions." It named Pakistan as a model for Muslim revolutionaries. The government banned it. His other major work, *Islam Between East and West*, pursued the same synthesis in more philosophical terms. Izetbegović maintained afterwards that the passages about establishing an Islamic state were hypothetical and had no application to Bosnia — a defence that convinced his supporters and nobody else. In the 1990s his opponents quoted the Declaration as proof that he intended an Iranian-style republic in the Balkans; some Western commentators agreed. He denied it to the end. The 1983 indictment also accused him of organising attendance at a Muslim congress in Iran.
1990: A Party, and a Presidency Handed Over
In 1990 he founded the Party of Democratic Action, the SDA, and became its first president. It took 33 per cent of the parliamentary seats. In the presidential vote Fikret Abdić outpolled him — 44 per cent to Izetbegović's 37 — and then stepped aside, allowing Izetbegović to become Chairman of the Presidency. It is a founding fact of his rule that is rarely mentioned: the most consequential Bosniak leader of the century did not win the election that gave him the office.
The Referendum and the War
In October 1991 he went on television to proclaim neutrality in the disintegrating Yugoslavia: "it is not our war." Within months it was. He called an independence referendum over Serb warnings that it was unconstitutional; on a 63 per cent turnout, boycotted largely by Serbs, it returned 99.4 per cent in favour. Parliament declared independence on 29 February 1992, Izetbegović announced it on 3 March, and the European Community and United States recognised the state on 7 April. He then led the Bosnian government through three and a half years of war, holding Sarajevo through the siege. His initial alliance with Bosnian Croat forces collapsed into a separate Croat-Bosniak war, which he ended by signing the Washington Agreement with Franjo Tuđman in March 1994, creating the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Dayton, and What It Settled
In November 1995, after NATO's bombing campaign, he signed the Dayton Agreement. It ended the war in a stalemate and recognised Republika Srpska as an autonomous entity inside Bosnia and Herzegovina — a settlement that preserved the state's existence at the cost of institutionalising the division the war had produced. He served as first chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1996 to 1998 and remained a member until 2000, resigning that October at seventy-four, citing his health. He died on 19 October 2003 of heart disease complicated by injuries from a fall at home.
Why Alija Is Called a Genius
Almost nobody uses the word about him, and the record does not support it in the ordinary sense. He was a serious writer: *Islam Between East and West* and the Islamic Declaration were genuine attempts at a difficult synthesis — reconciling Islamic tradition with modern European political life — undertaken by a provincial lawyer under a police state that eventually jailed him for it. There is real intellectual courage there. Whether there is originality is harder to establish; the Declaration's Brotherhood inheritance is explicit, and its most quoted line is rhetoric he spent his career explaining away.
The faculty he possessed exceptionally was endurance under conditions designed to break people, coupled with the ability to hold a coalition together while it was shelled. He kept a government functioning inside a besieged capital for three and a half years, turned an unrecognised territory into a state recognised by Washington and Brussels within five weeks, and negotiated a settlement preserving it when the military position did not entitle him to one.
The counter-case is substantial. The ICTY had an investigation of him underway when he died, probably for command responsibility, and its spokesperson said the accusations would not be disclosed because he could no longer answer them. Foreign mujahideen fought in his army; bin Laden held a Bosnian passport under his presidency. His case rests on will, not mind, and it comes with an unclosed file.
Dedo
Bosniaks called him *Dedo* — grandfather. His funeral on 22 October 2003 drew between 100,000 and 150,000 mourners, dignitaries from forty-four countries, 105 members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, more than four hundred journalists and over four thousand telegrams; his endorsement had helped the SDA recover in the 2002 election. Attempts to name Sarajevo's main street and its international airport after him failed against objections from Republika Srpska politicians and the international community, and in August 2006 a bomb damaged his grave at Kovači cemetery; the bomber was never identified. He held the Grand Order of Queen Jelena, the Order of the State of the Republic of Turkey and the Order of Independence. Twenty years on, he remains the figure through which Bosnia argues with itself about what it is.
