IZETBEGOVIC'S VIEW OF WAR AND PEACE

How to face the Truth

AIM Sarajevo, 4 December, 1997

For days, the domestic and the international public called to account the leading personages from the authorities which until just recently liked to call themselves "legal", and which were formed of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the Army of B&H, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MUP), all supported by TV B&H. And for days they were silent, and even if anyone cared to answer, it was mostly on the lower level and mostly attacking the Office of the High Representative (OHR) of the international community, along with the major culprits - the members of the Croat Democratic Community (HDZ) and the Serb Democratic Party (SDS).

And then, instead of instigating proceedings against Caco, exhuming his victims and identifying them, instead of having MUP investigate the latest terrorist acts, implementing court decisions in the case of evictions, instead of having courts deal with smuggling, Alije Izetbegovic appears at the session of the Council of the Convention of Bosniac Intellectuals, as the still unidentified group of people call themselves, who gather every Saturday (about fifty of them, all at the age of over seventy) to deal with "topical issues", and says everything that he has to say to the public.

The president of the Presidency and the President of the SDA does not say it in public to all his citizens, nor at a press conference, but only to his "own", and by doing that shows where and among whom he truly and utterly belongs! In this way he avoids domestic and foreign journalists, and he both puts the questions and gives answers, allegedly drawing them from letters sent lately to him by his "people", mostly women! And this - by complaining against the media which allegedly write all sorts of things and "do not deal with Karadzic's and Mladic's crimes any more", but what "we", the "legal" ones have done.

If Izetbegovic's speech would be summarized it could be brought down to "my or our showdown with them". "We" are the good guys, "they" are no good. And "they" are those who we would allegedly like to have in our joint state. Said like this, it becomes clear in what kind of a state! But, first things first.

Izetbegovic is a reader of "magazines", as he calls reviews and weeklies (Dani, Slobodna Bosna, Svijet) and everything he said that day was a polemic with the "magazines". That is how he started a polemic with Halid Causevic, the greatest challenger of the Bosniac nation, the current head of the muslim community and Izetbegovic's policy. Of course, he does not name him, but everything he says is a polemic with the "wise guy" who has "the devil on his shoulder who whispers what he should say". And he, Izetbegovic, even when he promised to his people that there would be no war, he "anticipated the war". The only thing that surprised him was the way the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) became a purely Serb army. Not a word about the Army of B&H becoming a purely "Muslim army", as its enemies had wished it! It was impossible to achieve a better peace, he says, so that what we have now is the best we could have. He does not say, however, why the program of the Presidency was abandoned, why the Army of B&H was cleansed of the Croats and the Serbs, why he was making his own "entity", why the "Seventh Muslim Brigade", and by doing this, while in fact approving what Karadzic and Boban were doing, he narrowed down the territory he controlled no matter how much he was reinforcing this same Army which has become his guarantor of the less than 25 per cent of the territory he has "legal" control of, and from this position, he invokes "reintegration" and "united, undivided and similar B&H".

And then he opened the Pandora's box which the SDA has on its back or which are attributed to it: crimes, plunder, violation of human rights and freedoms. However, none of these things would have existed if it were not for the media, of course! He has no complaints against television stations, except those in Pale and western Mostar. Nor does he reproach the dailies in Sarajevo, at least not the "main ones" (what does this mean and which are the main one when there are "only" three), but against "certain magazines which have started to compete in presenting the dark side of this society" he certainly does bear a grudge. Therefore, it is not a problem that there are these dark sides, but that the media write about them. It is all very well to write about these dark sides of the other societies, but when it comes to ours - "it is not exactly patriotic", says Izetbegovic! Rhetoric deja vu both in Zagreb and in Belgrade, and nothing to say about Pale! It is not patriotic - this is the only argument Izetbegovic has. And it is patriotic to commit crimes, plunder, hold a few apartments, to plant mines in front of churches, schools... and be silent about it. There is more articles, he says, about Kazani, the place where Caco killed his victims, than about Karadzic and Mladic. It can be concluded that, according to Izetbegovic, in the next hundred years, only Srebrenica should be written about, and in the meantime, Hasan Cengic could keep his two airplanes, general Alagic his five houses and apartments, as Slobodna Bosna writes, leaders of the SDA could own their own enterprises, several apartments each, bank accounts on which there is more other people's money than the "mercenaries' newspapers" have ever received.

Crimes and plunder were committed only by the others, and the penetration into Energopetrol, as the source of "ready money" for financing of the SDA, the Army and AID, the SDA politicians and similar, is a normal thing to do and there is nothing to write about it. It is not patriotic. Izetbegovic does "not understand such writing", if it is not an attempt to overthrow "this government". There is, therefore, either overthrowing the government or slipping into general crime which the public and the international institutions are pointing out to. Is not there the third way as well - democratization, institutionalization of the state, the laws and jurisprudence, and not justice which Izetbegovic, being a lawyer, enjoys referring to. Because there is not even justice. At least not for combatants, the killed, the wounded, the refugees.

The greatest problem is, certainly, the problem of crimes committed by the members of the Army of B&H. Izetbegovic says that the Army was not directed by the concept of "ethnic cleansing", that is, genocide. But, no "magazine" ever wrote that. They just spoke of the crimes, or just a part of the crimes, because just a few bloody wounds have been opened. And he immediately falls in the political and rhetoric trap of the "deja vu", he defends his own crimes while those of the others are unquestioned. He refuses to sweep his own backyard, but looks over the fence at that of the other's. Indeed, he quotes the Koran which says that to kill a single man is the same as if you have killed the whole world and warns that it means "not to count" the killed. And then he, nevertheless, "revises" the Koran and counts, then says: "soldiers of our army could have the total of up to one hundred men on their conscience" claiming that this is hundred or even thousand times less than the number of murders committed by the others. One could accept the fact that he counts, but he counts wrongly, minimizes and fails to mention the places where the crimes were committed. As if he did not know about them. After all, he claims that he had known nothing about the revealed ones either until the "magazines" started writing about them. The real proportions will emerge when in other places they are "called to account". Izetbegovic says that the investigation in Grabovica has been interrupted until "we were called to account". But it has also been interrupted in Kazani, in Bugojno it has not even been initiated, nor in the villages around Vares or Zenica, in Konjic or Neretvica, and the Serbs from across the entity border would probably have something to add to this list. The question of the Serbs in Sarajevo or Celebic were opened by Mirko Pejanovic, member of the B&H Presidency during the war, general Divjak, or in an interview to Slobodna Bosna, by Mirko Mikerevic, judge of the district military court in Sarajevo, before he "deserted to the enemy". They testify about two-three thousand of the Serbs killed, and these testimonies make one's hair stand on end just as the ones from Srebrenica. The only difference, should one say it again, is in the figures. But, does not Izetbegovic himself say that one should not count?

Izetbegovic does not say how Caco was killed, how the SDA used its influence in the case of Caco, about Caco's funeral which the mentioned judge testifies about, and which the media wrote about. He does not say why ten odd inexperienced young men from the police were sent after Caco, who were then so easily killed and massacred. The only way to avoid equal treatment of all the three sides which the SDA is extremely keen on, is persistent revelation of all crimes, and then to have the figures show, although it is wrong to count, that the three sides are not the same.

Crime, plunder, what Biljana Plavsic, the English foreign minister Cook and findings of the OHR point their fingers at, are a special problem. "Most probably", says Izetbegovic, there is crime, as if he were an ignorant citizen, and not the man who receives detailed reports on all aspects of life every morning. After all, did not he himself appeal at the convention of the SDA not to elect persons involved? That is what they are like in the SDA! And after all, what is AID, the secret police of the party, doing, which "controls everybody's movements and actions". After all, AID is party police which reports every small detail to him as the president of the party. But what is the sense of it when it is followed by the directive - do not touch, do not rock the boat, the others are also doing it, and similar. Izetbegovic is boasting that the executive board of the SDA was the first to react to Caco's "mischiefs", but he does not say what he did as the president of the party (which means that he knew about it), as the commander of the army, police, presidency, everything and everybody in Sarajevo and the part of B&H he controlled.

One could go on talking about Izetbegovic's certainly not at all political appearance, but it would maybe be better to let his critics have their say about it, too. Indeed, never has Izetbegovic said anything without having to justify it later on either by himself or by his supporters, or without an avalanche of criticism falling on his head the very next day. This time, the same thing happened. Even if one laid aside the fact that the Croatian media attacked Izetbegovic's allegation that Croatia would be democratized (will B&H?), even if one laid aside the already mentioned reactions of the Serbs, at least those over here who still have the courage to say anything, an avalanche started from among the politicians. Muhamed Filipovic, president of the Muslim-Bosniac Party of B&H, qualified Izetbegovic's speech as a "complete lack of any concept how to make B&H a normal state". And for Pejanovic's figure of two to three thousand killed Serbs, Filipovic also reproaches Izetbegovic because his authorities during four years have not been able to establish the exact number of killed people, nor have they taken the criminals to court. If there have not been two thousand, says Filipovic, the authorities must know how many there were. "Why were not the bodies exhumed?" Filipovic wonders and accuses the authorities for obviously concealing something, and it is known who is hiding what. Journalists Boro Kontic, Zoran Udovicic, and editors of "magazines" Senad Avdic, Senad Pecanin and Zlatko Dizdarevic from Slobodna Bosna, Dan and Svijet, replied with vehemence as well. Izetbegovic reminds Pecanin of Tudjman, Avdic is shocked with the way Izetbegovic praises TV B&H, he wonders "as a foreign mercenary" where the money of the other mercenaries is, that is the money of those from the SDA who carried the money in sacks. Zlatko Dizdarevic speaks of "substitution of thesis" according to which media are condemned "which speak the truth, and not the truth itself".

The last but certainly not the least reaction is the one of Zlatko Lagumdzija, president of the Social Democratic Party of B&H, although this time in the capacity of a university professor. He asks Izetbegovic who gave him the right to say that he "sustains professors and physicians" and wonders who are the "we" who sustain them or whether professors and physicians should be sustained at all. Do not they live off their work? Sustenance is given to the weak and the young, the ailing and the poor. And these categories of people in B&H have aid of about a hundred German marks. And everybody knows who is in this state sustained by whom, says Lagumdzija, at least those who "control movements and actions of the people" know it. And at this point one could add something about schools. "We have reconstructed all the schools", says Izetbegovic and forgets that this was done neither by him nor by his "we", that is the SDA, but by foreigners with their donations and loans which this people will have to pay back!

Izetbegovic has opened a lot of problems, but he has resolved none. Indeed, he gave additional arguments to the "magazines" to be "not exactly patriotic".

Was it a pure coincidence that on that very day an attack against the Croats and everything that was Croat occurred at the basketball match between B&H and Croatia, in which one of the constituent nations of the Federation was insulted, and the vice-president of the Federation and representative of the Croats in it, Ganic, marked it all as "mischiefs". What would have happened to the Serbs from Republica Srpska? And how can on the foundations of such political stands of the two leading men from the ranks of the Bosniac people in B&H, an "integral, united and democratic B&H" be built, how can "B&H be reintegrated" whatever that word may mean.

It seems that Izetbegovic will soon have to explain it to himself all over again. And it will be neither for the first nor for the last time. At least not until he withdraws, and he has promised to do it after this mandate of his expires "if he will still be in his right mind". But, since he thinks one thing in the morning, and completely the opposite in the afternoon, one never knows. Not such a long time ago, he also promised that he would make the SDA a civic party, but then changed his mind at the last convention of the party. And then, it is never difficult to find reasons to change one's mind, is it now?

Zeljko IVANKOVIC

(AIM, Sarajevo)