The death of a patriot

A lawyer and scholar who was twice jailed by the Communist regime for his writings, Izetbegovic had a chequered past. A teenage recruit in a Nazi sponsored militia during WW II and a radical Islamist pamphleteer in his early professional life, he was hardly destined for the role that history had in store for him. Yet, great men can come to grips with their past and defeat the vanity of remaining steadfast to questionable beliefs. Alija Izetbegovic who took the helm of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious Bosnia in 1991 was such a man. Abjuring religious intolerance and fanaticism, Bosnia's president pledged to uphold the centuries old heritage of the country's Muslims, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox Christians living side by side in amity. Holding fort in the ancient citadel of Sarajevo where Bosnians of all three faiths had inter-acted and inter-married for generations, Izetbegovic declared independence from the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation. Unlike Izetbegovic, however, the Serbs were in no mood to be tolerant. The rest, as they say, is history.

Controlling the vast military hardware of the rump Yugoslavia, aided by a United Nations arms embargo, and supported actively by Russia and passively by the Anglo-French combine, Serbia and its proxies went on to orchestrate the ugliest European genocide since 1945. Though Muslims were the primary victims of the murder-pillage-rape orgy, Serbia had the financial support of Libya, Syria, and Iraq in its effort to subjugate Bosnia. Throughout the five years of the brutal war, the man affectionately known as "Deedo" (grandfather) stayed on at his sand-bagged office which often came under artillery attack from Serbs in the hills overlooking his beloved Sarajevo. The image of their president sharing their daily miseries must have inspired the beleaguered defenders of Bosnia as they battled to survive the direct onslaught of the Serbs and the indirect machinations of appeasers like Lord Owen and Cyrus Vance. Even President Clinton, who as candidate had promised to allow the elected, legitimate, multi-ethnic government of Bosnia to defend its people, hesitated to follow through on his pledge until his hand was forced by Senator Bob Dole who found the embargo to be criminal. When a tentative peace came in 1996, Bosnia-Herzegovina was a devastated land in every sense of the word. But thanks largely to Deedo's tenacity, it was still on the map, even if barely so.

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At the Dayton peace talks, Izetbegovic's war-time tenacity found its match in his statesmanship. To salvage what was left of his country and its vision, he swallowed a bitter pill and negotiated with men who had orchestrated the attempted annihilation of his people. With a heavy heart he signed an agreement that internally broke up his country into several autonomous units and, critics complained, rewarded ethnic cleansing. The same agreement, however, put Washington as a guarantor of the always shaky Croat-Bosnian alliance, recognised Bosnia-Herzegovina as a sovereign entity with a right to self-defence, and helped secure a meaningful post-war reconstruction plan financed by the rich countries. In time, the Dayton Peace Accords triggered a set of events that resulted in Serbian expansionism being checked in Kosovo and Slobodan Milosevic being captured for war-crimes. Bitter that Bosnia was still getting short-changed in the implementation of the Dayton Accords, the 76 year old Deedo left politics in 2001 to go into much needed rest and retirement. The future of a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious Bosnia was left to a new generation of politicians who could, perhaps, better negotiate the tricky currents of EU -- and Balkan politics.

Whether those new leaders of Bosnia live up to the task of rebuilding the physical, social, economic, and moral infrastructure of their country is anybody's guess. Every step of the way, however, a giant will be looking on them from the great beyond hoping that they too master their own inherent prejudices and tame their egos in order to heal the wounds of Bosnia.

Bosnia-Herzegovina will have to chart the rocky path to its destiny without the calming hand of its greatest patriot at the helm: Alija Izetbegovic belongs to the ages now.

Esam Sohail, a former college lecturer of international affairs, is a banker by profession.