Izetbegovic's Departure

AIM Sarajevo, October 19, 2000

After ten years, Alija Izetbegovic is not a member of the Presidency of Bosnia & Herzegovina any more. Allegedly of his own free will and due to age, he has decided to withdraw from this institution in which he had been the domineering figure for a whole decade unlike a longish list of various other members, mere passers-by, of the collective head of the state. But his very first explanation that he was withdrawing from the Presidency but not from politics indicates that assertions are true that he is not leaving the high state post by his own free will but by the will (read: under pressure) of high officials of international community. Because a man who is due to old age and fatigue leaving power certainly does not plan to spend his pensioner's days controlling the still ruling Party of Democratic Action (SDA) nor does he decide to chair its election headquarters for the forthcoming (decisive?) elections, which is exactly what Izetbegovic is doing.

The departing member of Presidency is certainly a person which has marked the last decade of Bosnia & Herzegovina. He will be remembered as a politician who has refused to be the president of the citizens of B&H for the sake of the post of the leader of the Bosniacs, who during the war had the support of the West and then, at the time after the war, transformed it into continued pressure, who regularly reached his political decisions with a delay, only after a political situation or developments forced him to do it. The citizens of B&H, regardless of their inclination towards or opportunism in relation to Izetbegovic, will remember him for the already notorious declarations such as “I think one thing in the morning, and another in the afternoon”, or “Peaceful dreams, there will be no war”. These declarations reflect the essence of Izetbegovic's rule: refusal of timely decision-making and acceptance of the position – I will think about it when it happens. If dominant leaders are recognised by their skill of decision-making and anticipation of moves, Izetbegovic is characterised by indecision, taking forever and decision-making one step backward only after something happens. With such a stand summarised in the slogan: I am not in favour, but I am forced to make such a decision”, Izetbegovic avoided (it later turned out, just temporarily) personal responsibility for the reached decisions and earned the epithet of a cooperative and non-militant politician, especially in the beginning of the war and even among the non-Bosniacs for whom ethnic origin was not alpha & omega of their existence and in international community which saw a tolerant politician in him.

Izetbegovic was born in 1925 in Bosanski Samac. He was first tried by the communist regime in 1946 as a member of anathematised Young Muslims organisation, and for the second time in 1983 as a Muslim fundamentalist. The period between two arrests he mostly spent writing. The most significant works which were by his numerous opponents claimed to be just the platform of his political activities and conception of Bosnia, are “Islamic Declaration”, “Problems of Islamic Revival”, and after this war he published “ The Islam between the East and the West” and two collections of his speeches and interviews. It seems its is forgotten that Izetbegovic was the one who established the first single-ethnic party in B&H – the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) – strongly persuaded by Tudjman's organisation in B&H at the time. After Izetbegovic's SDA, Croat Democratic Community (HDZ) was founded in B&H with the utmost possible support of Zagreb, and then finally Serb Democratic Party (SDS) at the founding convention of which Izetbegovic, who was invited as a guest, declared: “Where have you been, brethren, we have waited for you so long”. At that gathering (held in Foca) party banners of SDS and SDA were symbolically tied together, white doves were flying as symbols of lasting peace between the Serbs and the Bosniacs, and Izetbegovic established that he finally had partners with whom the Golgotha of Bosnian Muslims would not be repeated again!

After the first elections that took place exactly ten years ago, he became the head of the Presidency of B&H as a candidate of SDA from the list of Muslim candidates. Apart from Izetbegovic, members of the then seven-member Presidency of B&H (two Muslims, two Croats, two Serbs and one representative of other ethnic groups) were Fikret Abdic, his party vice-president, two candidates of SDS (Biljana Plavsic and Nikola Koljevic), two members of HDZ (Stjepan Kljujic and Miro Lasic) and another member of SDA, Ejup Ganic, but as a representative of Yugoslavs? Although Izetbegovic had not won the largest number of votes necessary to take over the post of the president of Presidency, with support of SDS (“We voted for Izetbegovic, because he was sent to us by God himself”, Biljana Plavsic, 1991), he took over the post. Since the largest number of votes among the presidential seven had been won by undestined president Fikret Abdic, this was the beginning of political disagreement between Izetbegovic and Abdic which in the following years developed into an open, both political and military conflict.

ATTITUDE TO THE STATE: Although verbally committed to Bosnia & Herzegovina, Izetbegovic has never had a vision of the state of B&H. Torn between the desired and the obtained international recognition of independence of B&H on the one, and his personal ideal of a Muslim state on this territory on the other hand (“I wish we had a Muslim state, but it is impossible over here”), Izetbegovic gave up on planning his moves and agreed to the position of a statesman without a vision of his own state. In such utterly unrewarding or rather even hopeless situation, he first agreed and just two days later rejected Cutillero's agreement for B&H (Lisbon, 1991) which organised B&H as a unitary state with six to eight territorial and not ethnic provinces, and then in 1995 signed the Dayton accords with by far more rigid ethnic and entity demarcation lines and unfavourable status of B&H as a state. Although after continuous pressure, even the then leader of Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadzic agreed to Cutillero's plan, having returned to Sarajevo Izetbegovic declared that he withdrew his consent and strongly influenced obstruction of the work of the state Council for Protection of National Interests (taken over from the law of Socialist Republic of B&H) which could have given its judgement on the future of B&H. That is how the discussion on the destiny of the country was reduced to three-party negotiations between SDA, SDS and HDZ. How big a favour he had done his coalition partners from SDS and HDZ in this way, or rather to the regimes in Belgrade and Zagreb, was shown by the war that followed.

That Izetbegovic did not consider the state as an organised system with clear rules of operation is also clear from his attitude to personnel policy. Nepotism became the foundation of his political system. He surrounded himself with his closest relatives and friends from prison and their children – and he institutionalised mistrust of experts who did not belong to these family clans with his message to the leadership of SDA: “Select the loyal, not the capable!” Corruption which during the war and the postwar years became in fact the only way in which the state was ruled, is the logical consequence of Izetbegovic's lack of understanding for or refusal to accept the state ruled by law. Although a lawyer by trade, Izetbegovic's conception of B&H as almost a medieval state ruled by a bey and of justice which necessarily has an ethnic prefix was crowned by his protest against eviction of the Bosniacs from illegally occupied homes of the Serbs and the Croats from Tuzla: “I am not in favour of their eviction. I know that it is required by law, but law is one thing, and justice something completely different”.

Finally, one of the strongest characteristics of Alija Izetbegovic as a statesman is that during the decade of his political activity he has never exceeded the single-ethnic limits even when he had the chance to be promoted to the president of the citizens of B&H. On the contrary, in line with the position he established for himself, the political and military interest he showed referred solely to the territory which could be the “Bosniac land” and this made him the statesman who in ten years of his rule has not visited a single place outside these limits, not even his native Samac (nowadays in Republika Srpska).

ATTITUDE TO THE WEST AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD: Izetbegovic's foreign policy could be characterised as a decade of constant calling the West for help and unconcealed confidence solely in the Islamic world. Sincere friendship, according to him, is possible only with Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia or Iran, which is the reason for his benevolent stand towards the imported jihad warriors in B&H, but not those which have incorporated secular values in their state system. The scandal will be remembered when Izetbegovic visited Turkey and refused to visit Ataturk's grave as required by state protocol of this country, because of his private disagreement with secular reforms this Turkish statesman introduced in his country. Izetbegovic verbally accepted the European and the American role in B&H, primarily because of military weakening of his enemies, but the continuous campaign against the Western system of values and norms of living remained to this day the backbone of his policy.

Essentially, Izetbegovic has never accepted either the Western model of free market or showed any major interest for transition in B&H, so the process of privatisation in B&H was marked by corruptedness and nepotism, and the economy by state crime. Nevertheless, Izetbegovic respects the West as a force, especially the United States of America which resulted in his signature on the Dayton peace agreement which cannot be said to have been an expression of his will. However, unlike his party comrades and family clan he is surrounded with, one can say that Izetbegovic had a more affirmative and a more realistic attitude towards the Dayton agreement (“It was not Dayton that defined Bosnia, but it was Bosnia such as it was that defined Dayton, and it will not change because of a wish or idea of a single politician, but based on real and psychological changes in Bosnia and its surroundings”) which put him above the loyal bureaucrats and explains his sovereign rule of the party during all these ten years.

ATTITUDE TOWARDS SERBIA AND CROATIA: In answer to the question, if he were forced to choose, who would he prefer to unite with – Belgrade or Zagreb, Izetbegovic replied something like this – it would be the same as if you asked a sick man how he would prefer to die: by force or of cancer?

It is a fact, however, that between these two Bosnia's neighbours with similar aspirations towards division of B&H, he was more inclined towards Croatia. After all, it was due to pressure from HDZ that he opened the Pandora's box and founded the first single-ethnic party in B&H and expressed mistrust towards the experts among army cadre who were leaving the JNA and joining the newly established Army of B&H. This meant that numerous trained soldiers, Bosniacs educated in military academies inclusive, were sacked from Izetbegovic's army. In any case, the key difference in views of his neighbours was stressed by Izetbegovic himself who declared that stable B&H needed “democratic Croatia in the west and weak Serbia on the east”. Why would not it be in the interest of Bosnia to have a democratic Serbia and not a weak state, it is pointless to ask.

ATTITUDE TOWARDS RELIGION: Izetbegovic is a believer who, according to his own confession, prefers a religious than a secular state. Being a statesman in a secular state it caused him additional confusion in ruling the country. At the post of the president of B&H Presidency, recognised as a multi-ethnic community, he was forced to publicly advocate its secularity, while in practice he used Islam as the foundation of his political activities and preservation of power, too. Establishment of strong links between his party and the Islamic community in B&H resulted in almost completely single-ethnic administration and Army of B&H in which religious greetings and values have replaced the secular ones, and the fighters for free B&H were promoted into fighters for Islam. Remaining in power of SDA and the promoted new way of life in this part of the country was directly linked to the religious foundation, which in the current campaign is manifested through the messages of SDA to the voters such as: “You certainly would not ask Serb Ljubisa Markovic (Social Democratic Party, chairman of Sarajevan Centre municipality after local elections in April 2000) for your rights”, or “Do not vote for them (meaning SDP), they eat pork!”

What nowadays seems to hurt Izetbegovic the most is the fact that his departure from B&H Presidency was experienced as changes in neighbouring Croatia or Serbia, even before the fiasco of his party in the elections. Indeed, newspapers are full of conclusions that after the fall of Tudjman's HDZ in Croatia and Milosevic's in Serbia, “post-Izetbegovic's era” is beginning in Bosnia. Revealing once again that he had not voluntarily stepped down from B&H Presidency, leader of SDA said that by departing from the Presidency he had “just changed the office in which he worked and that all the jobs remain the same because the problems of the state are the problems of my party”. In other words, Izetbegovic is still the key figure on B&H political scene until election results confirm otherwise. Indeed, his deputy in the Presidency – not high ranking in SDA – Halid Genjac, is a clear proof that decisions in the Presidency will in fact be made in Izetbegovic's new office. Not a soul expects Genjac to make decisions or work independently just as, for example, nobody ever expected certain Mirsad Ceman (does anyone remember him at all?) to do it, although he was the president of SDA during the war because Izetbegovic was reproached for carrying out the legally incompatible duties of the president of the party and president of state Presidency.

Therefore, post-Izetbegovic's era does not begin with his departure from the Presidency but only with defeat of his conception of the rule which is anticipated by numerous analyses for the forthcoming November elections in B&H. Therefore no wonder he has aimed the election campaign of his party solely against the Social Democratic Party which is growing stronger, threatening the Bosniacs with alleged return of atheist and rigid communism. The more and more certain victory of SDP after Izetbegovic's “ten most difficult years” will open a new question in B&H which probably disturbs the leader of SDA – will there be revenge? Indeed, when he came to power in 1990, Izetbegovic was not vengeful towards those who had tried and convicted him during the rule of communism, and some of them even found refuge in SDA – thanks to family relations, after having proved their loyalty, of course. That is why a possible new conception of power in B&H will be assessed according to the attitude towards Izetbegovic (and his subordinates), that is, institutional and realistic evaluation of his role in the war, but peace as well, in B&H. That is how the man who has marked the end of the 20th century in B&H and about whom many claim they would like to have him as their firstdoor neighbour but not as president of the state, will still continue to be around.

Ivana DRAZIC

(AIM)