12 years have passed since the death of Alija Izetbegović

On this day 12 years ago, Alija Izetbegović, the first president of the Presidency of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, passed away, writes the BH News Agency Patria.

That day and the day of his funeral, it was as if the sky poured down on the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Endless columns of people, Bosnians and Herzegovinians, as well as numerous delegations from all over the world, wanted to pay their last respects. Alija Izetbegović was buried in the Šehidsko mezarje Kovači in Sarajevo.

He was born on August 8, 1925, in Bosanski Šamac, into a family of farmers who had moved from Belgrade to Bosanski Šamac in 1868. The Izetbegović family moved to Sarajevo in 1928, where Izetbegović finished high school. During his schooling, he joined the anti-communist organization "Mladi Muslimani" (Young Muslims), and during World War II, he was involved in humanitarian work (helping refugees and displaced civilians, protecting and hiding persecuted Bosniaks, and repairing mosque ruins).

Suspected of involvement in the founding of the Islamic magazine Mudžahid, and for being a member of the Mladi Muslimani organization, he was arrested in 1946 and sentenced to three years in prison. After his release from prison, he began studying agriculture, and from 1954, he continued his studies at the Faculty of Law in Sarajevo, which he completed within two years.

After completing his studies, he worked as a legal advisor for several Yugoslav companies. In 1970, he wrote the Islamic Declaration - a general discussion of politics and Islam. It was this study, written in the sixties of the last century, that would often be used as evidence of Izetbegović's political inclination towards Islamic fundamentalism.

The Islamic Declaration was banned in Yugoslavia. Until 1980. the year his second book, Islam between East and West, was published, the Islamic Declaration was almost unknown in Yugoslavia. In his second book, he attempts to define the position of Bosnian Muslims, Islam, among other ideas, and the differences between European and Islamic cultures. Due to the Islamic Declaration, in a political trial in 1983, he was accused, along with twelve Muslim intellectuals, of planning to create an Islamic state and sentenced to 14 years in prison. Although the book does not mention Bosnia and Herzegovina or Yugoslavia, the Declaration was one of the significant pieces of evidence in court. After the political changes in Yugoslavia, he was released after five years in 1988.

In 1990, Izetbegović, along with Fikret Abdić, Adil Zulfikarpašić, and several other politicians, founded the Party of Democratic Action (SDA). Due to the then-proposed law banning political parties with national affiliation, the SDA did not have a nationally defined name, unlike the other two newly formed parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS). In the 1990 elections for the Assembly of the SR BiH and for the member of the seven-member Presidency of the SR BiH, the Party of Democratic Action won 35.85% of the vote, thus the largest number of votes. Fikret Abdić won first place in the presidential elections, but after internal discussions within the party, Abdić ceded the position of president of the Presidency of the SR BiH to Izetbegović. After the secession and declaration of independence of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1991, Izetbegović saw Bosnia and Herzegovina's place in the rest of Yugoslavia, in a so-called healthy federation, which would inherit the former state through political reorganization. Until the decisions of several European Union member states on January 15, 1992, on the political recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, Izetbegović tried to avoid criticism of Greater Serbian politics towards Bosnia and Herzegovina. The politically clumsy ignoring of the conflict and destruction in the village of Ravna near Trebinje, with the statement "...that this is not our war...", the Presidency of BiH tried to avoid open conflicts with the JNA and Serbian politicians from the then Presidency of Yugoslavia. With the wars in Slovenia and Croatia, and the strengthening of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) military activities on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the decision was made for a referendum on the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In the referendum held on February 29 and March 1, 1992, about 90% of Croats and Bosniaks in municipalities where the SDA or HDZ won the elections voted for independence, while in municipalities where the Serbian Democratic Party or the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) won after the 1990 elections, the referendum was boycotted.

He found his work in the Presidency of BiH increasingly difficult, lacking freshness and concentration. Before the September 1998 elections, he seriously considered not running. In May of that year, he wrote a letter addressed to "my friends" and sent it to about thirty addresses. He expressed his desire to withdraw. However, party colleagues felt that the pre-election period was not a suitable time for such an action. Thus, the resignation was postponed to the next millennium, i.e., until June 2, 2000. It was a Friday, returning from Friday prayers, Izetbegović made an irrevocable decision: he decided to withdraw! He called his good acquaintance Senad Hadžifejzović, editor of RTVBiH, and asked for time to announce important news. It was Tuesday, June 6, 2000. Izetbegović appeared on the Dnevnik TVBiH at 7:30 PM and read the following statement:

- Dear citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, I wish to inform you of my decision to withdraw from the Presidency upon the expiration of my current term as Chairman of the Presidency of BiH, which means October 12 this year.(...) There are several reasons for my withdrawal, the main ones being my age (I will turn 75 in August) and my health. The job of a member of the presidency under these conditions requires physical and nervous stamina that I do not have. I thank all those who have supported me in the past ten difficult years of our history. I wish for the dream of Bosnian patriots for a whole, democratic, and prosperous Bosnia and Herzegovina to be realized - said Izetbegović.

(historija.ba)