Bosniaks in Palestine: The late Nijaz Duraković also fought on the side of the oppressed!

Bosnians and Herzegovinians have been protesting the latest wave of violence in Gaza for days, but it is little known that the Bosniak intellectual elite and Bosniaks as a people have maintained ties with Palestine before, and some Bosniaks have even given their lives defending holy sites of Islam in Palestine, reports the BH News Agency Patria (NAP).

Throughout their decades-long struggle, Palestinians have always had the support of Bosniaks, and it is little known that some BiH politicians went to this part of the world in their youth with the intention of supporting the resistance of the oppressed people. Among them, the most famous is the late Nijaz Duraković, former leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and university professor.

In the 1970s, he was in Palestine and joined the Palestinian Resistance Movement led by the late Yasser Arafat. Arafat himself later maintained close ties with BiH and Bosniaks. For his involvement in Palestine, Professor Duraković would be criminally prosecuted in Bosnia and Herzegovina today, given that Bosnia and Herzegovina has a law in force that prohibits citizens of our country from going to foreign battlefields.

Few people talk about Professor Duraković's trip to Palestine today, and even less is known about it. Even his former closest associates, such as Esref Kenan Rašidagić, who was Professor Duraković's assistant at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Sarajevo for years, have scarce information about it.

- The professor stayed in Palestine, I can confirm that, but he never spoke to me about his involvement - Rašidagić told Patria. Also, the story reported by "Dnevni avaz" a few years ago about Bosniaks going to Palestine in 1948 is well-known.

The American newspaper "San Francisco Sentinel" reported the story of Israeli author Seth J. Frantzman, an expert on Arab-Israeli issues, who discovered that in 1948, a group of Bosnian Muslims fought alongside Palestinians in the defense of Jerusalem.

Records of Bosniaks who defended Jerusalem in the war after which the state of Israel, after international recognition, gained territory, exist in newspapers published at the time in Israel, as well as in Arab countries. Thus, the "Palestinian Post" wrote about how the journalist and correspondent of that newspaper, Emilo Traubner, a few months after the conflict on the battlefield near Jaffa, found the diary of a certain Jusuf Begović from Pale near Sarajevo. He described in detail in his diary the activities and struggle against the Israeli occupier.

- We 35 Bosnian Muslims will be the first to defend Jerusalem with jihad and liberate Tel Aviv - Begović wrote in his diary at the time.

One Israeli newspaper article states that in April of that year, 1948, almost 200 Bosnians arrived in Beirut and enlisted in the Palestinian ranks. However, a smaller number of them ended up on the battlefield due to the difficult political situation and the disunity of the Arab forces, so many were returned to Syria.

The newspapers mention several battles, one of the key ones being the attempt to break the siege of Jerusalem, in which volunteers from BiH participated during the war. It is not entirely clear what happened to the people who survived the war. One of them, Kemal Rustemović, according to his statement to one newspaper, settled in Lebanon, where he became an officer in the local army and their citizen.

Frantzman assumes that some of the volunteers went to the United States and Australia, but given that most of these individuals are "already likely in their nineties, it is difficult to verify."

There is also a story, the truth of which is difficult to verify, and which is mentioned among the few who knew anything about these events, that a group of Bosniaks who defended Jerusalem settled in Egypt after the war.

The intelligence services of Yugoslavia found out about this, so, allegedly, one of the first requests of Josip Broz Tito to the then President of Egypt, Nasser - at the time when they were negotiating the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement - was for these Bosniaks to return to Yugoslavia. Allegedly, Nasser obeyed Tito and handed over all those he managed to find to Yugoslavia, after which all traces of them were lost, according to an article published by "Avaz" a few years ago, reports NAP.