Irfan Ajanović, patriot, poet, and politician – participant and witness to key events during the breakup of Yugoslavia, has passed away

(Patria) - Former Vice-President of the SFRY Federal Assembly, long-time parliamentarian, and one of the founders of SDA, Irfan Ajanović, passed away in Sarajevo at the age of 82.

Ajanović was born in Žepče in 1942. He was a lawyer by profession, and was noted as a poet even in his youth. He composed folk melodies to his own lyrics, which he sang himself or were sung by famous folk interpreters.

After graduating from the Faculty of Law in Sarajevo, he worked in this city as a lawyer, and also in his hometown as an entrepreneur.

When, at the very beginning of the ninth decade of this century, national awakenings of the peoples began on the ruins of communism, he – as one of the participants in the Founding Assembly of the Party of Democratic Action – toured Bosnian-Herzegovinian cities and gave speeches on the necessity of the Bosniak people's struggle for their affirmation.

For a time, he served as the Party's Secretary-General, reaching the very top of politics – he was elected as a deputy in the Chamber of Citizens of the BiH Assembly, and in February 1991, as a deputy of the Federal Assembly of the then Yugoslavia, he was elected Vice-President of the Federal Parliament. The outbreak of war in the then country prevented him from becoming the President of the Federal Assembly of the former state after the rotation.

Friends consider him a national hero, acquaintances a patriot, and others (those who captured him during the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina and handed him over to another enemy) an ultranationalist.

Upon the outbreak of the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, he went to his hometown – Žepče – to defend his attacked homeland through political struggle, but also with a rifle in hand, until HVO fighters captured him and handed him over to Serbian military forces. After more than a thousand days spent in camps and prisons, he was saved from execution in 1995 through an exchange with the aggressor, when he returned to Sarajevo, taking his place again in the benches of the Parliament of the Federation of BiH.

Two details occupy a special place in Irfan Ajanović's biography. Namely, as Vice-President of the SFRY Assembly and a member of the State Commission for Ceasefire Control in Croatia in 1991, he was the first politician in the former Yugoslavia, who, as a high state official, spoke the irrefutable truth about the aggression of Serbia and Montenegro (together with the JNA) against the then recognized state of the Republic of Croatia, but also about the preparations of these aggressors for the attack on Bosnia and Herzegovina.

These views of his were fully accepted by the European Community on August 27, 1991, and incorporated into the Resolution on Yugoslavia, and the author himself presented them in his Statement on the termination of membership in the aforementioned commission.

The second significant detail from his biography is his participation (together with Haris Silajdžić) in the Lisbon negotiations. In addition, on May 22, 1992, Irfan Ajanović was a member of the BiH delegation for the admission of our country to membership in the United Nations Organization.