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A Leader Despite Himself? an Analysis of the Statesmanship of Alija Izetbegovic, 1990-2000

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A Leader Despite Himself? an Analysis of the Statesmanship of Alija Izetbegovic, 1990-2000 University of Missouri, St. Louis IRL @ UMSL Theses UMSL Graduate Works 4-24-2009 A Leader Despite Himself? An Analysis of the Statesmanship of Alija Izetbegovic, 1990-2000 Jason Edward Carson University of Missouri-St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://irl.umsl.edu/thesis Recommended Citation Carson, Jason Edward, "A Leader Despite Himself? An Analysis of the Statesmanship of Alija Izetbegovic, 1990-2000" (2009). Theses. 164. https://irl.umsl.edu/thesis/164 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the UMSL Graduate Works at IRL @ UMSL. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses by an authorized administrator of IRL @ UMSL. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Jason Carson M.A., History, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2009 B.S., Secondary Education, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2002 “A Leader Despite Himself?” “An Analysis of the Statesmanship of Alija Izetbegovi ć, 1990-2000” A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Missouri-St. Louis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in History with an emphasis in European History An Institutional Review Board Approved Project (#071211C) May 2009 Advisory Committee Peter Acsay Ph.D Chairperson John Gillingham III Ph.D Ellen Carnaghan Ph.D 1 Abstract Although much attention and scholarship have been devoted to the 1992-1995 Bosnian War, very little work has been done on one of the key figures of that conflict, Alija Izetbegovi ć. No biography exists of Izetbegovi ć in English, nor is there even a serious journal article which thoughtfully analyzes Izetbegovi ć’s statesmanship during the war. There is a great need then for a work which intelligently analyzes Izetbegovi ć’s actions during that turbulent time, something I have attempted to do in this thesis. I argue that Alija Izetbegovi ć was a flawed political leader, who because of reasons of temperament and religious belief was unable to successfully confront the many challenges that were presented to him. Yet I also argue that Izetbegovi ć must be judged in light of the remarkably difficult situation he was in, when his choices were often limited and when he faced circumstances which were often beyond his control. 2 Table of Contents Introduction An Elusive Figure 4 Chapter Two The Choice Between Conflict and Accommodation 26 Chapter Three Izetbegovi ć’s Dangerous Gamble 54 Chapter Four War Bringing out the Worst 77 Conclusion A Leader Despite Himself? 99 3 Introduction An Elusive Figure Of all the major actors of the Bosnian conflict, Alija Izetbegovi ć was perhaps the one who was – and remains today - the most enigmatic and confusing. We basically know who individuals like Franjo Tu ñman, Radovan Karadžić, or Slobodan Miloševi ć were – unscrupulous nationalists whose unpleasant mugs appeared on countless television screens and newspaper front pages, visual incarnations of those Balkan demons who were responsible for the particular hell that Bosnia was during the early 1990s. Izetbegović however, in spite of his being one of the key players in the Bosnian drama because of his role as president of Bosnia, is to most people a totally unknown figure, a mystery.1 Show a photograph of Miloševi ć to someone, with his sharp crew cut and squat, rather ugly face, or of Karadžić with that wild, crazy mane of hair, and it is likely that instant recognition will occur, but show one of Izetbegovi ć with his sad-faced visage and that quintessential beret on his head, and all you are likely to get is a blank expression. Yet even for those who know of him, it is quite possible that their opinions will be unformed or tentative, if for no other reason than because so much is not known about him.2 Not that there are not quite a few people who do believe we have a proper understanding of Izetbegovi ć, and they have not hesitated over the years in making their views known. One such category of individuals is Izetbegovi ć’s defenders, those who see him as having been a great Bosnian democrat who valiantly defended his people. Unsurprisingly, many Bosnian Muslims fall into this category, those who consider their fellow Muslim Izetbegovi ć the “father of the 1 As the Bosnian Serb columnist Gojko Beri ć notes, some see Izetbegovi ć as a “Bosnian Ghandi,” others as “an Islamic fundamentalist;” some say that he is “a living legend,” others “a mild form of dictator.” He also writes, “…it seems to me that it is easier to catch an eel with your bare hands at the mouth of the Neretva…than to deal with the political and intellectual profile of Alija Izetbegovi ć.” Gojko Beri ć, Letters to the Celestial Serbs , trans. Saba Risaluddin (London: Saqi Books, 2002), 258, 266. 2 Consider that although there are at least nine biographies on Miloševi ć, not one exists on Izetbegovi ć in English, and perhaps not even in Bosnian. Jasna Dragovic-Soso, “Why Did Yugoslavia Disintegrate?” in State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration , ed. Leonard J. Cohen and Jasna Dragovic-Soso (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008), note 79, 35 and Gale Stokes, “From Nation to Minority: Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia at the Outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars,” Problems of Post-Communism 52, no. 6 (November/December 2005): note 13, 18. 4 nation” i.e. an independent Bosnia - an entity which before 1995 had never even existed.3 Such Muslims, a few of whom this historian has met here in St. Louis, tend to be quite sensitive about his legacy, as though it has been sullied enough by others over the years and they wish for it not to be sullied further.4 There are also a few Westerners who are admirers of his, perhaps the most prominent of whom is the French philosophe Bernard-Henry Levy, who as recently as at a 2006 conference declared that Izetbegovi ć was “a friend” who “embodied… the definition of a warrior… a man who made war because he was obliged to, but without liking it, finding it at the same time disgusting and necessary.” 5 On the other extreme there are Izetbegovi ć’s critics, who make a number of claims against the man which run from the sensible to the rather extreme. Unlike fanatics who seek to do things like rehabilitate figures like Slobodan Miloševi ć or deny the crimes of individuals like General Ratko Mladi ć, they are composed of a vocal minority of scholars as well as much of the Serbian (although also to an extent the Bosnian and Croatian) peoples who seek not so much as to totally ignore the responsibility of Serbs (and to a lesser extent the Croats) for all the bad things which happened during the Bosnian conflict as to put more of the onus on Izetbegovi ć for what happened – a pox on all of their houses sort of approach which seeks to revise the oft-accepted narrative of the Bosnians simply being victims of Serbian and Croatian aggression. This sort of revisionism has taken different forms by different individuals – I will mention only three here, scholars whose works have a good deal of substance and whose views are fairly representative of 3 There were various independent Bosnian kingdoms during the Middle Ages, but none of these states were nations in the contemporary sense. And during the last five hundred years, Bosnia has always been simply one component part of greater states or kingdoms, namely the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Yugoslavia. 4 “For most of the Bosniacs, Izetbegovi ć is the father of the Bosniac nation. They refer to him in an affectionate way as dedo /grandpa, and for many he remains above criticism.” Ante Cuvalo, Historical Dictionary of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Lanham, Maryland, Toronto, and Plymouth, UK: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., Second Edition, 2007), 119. 5 “Salmagundi Conference: War, Evil, the End of History, and America Now,” Salmagundi , nos. 158-159 (Spring-Summer 2008), 143. Levy also at some point described Izetbegovi ć as a Bosnian Charles de Gaulle (i.e. the de Gaulle who led the French Resistance during World War II), something Beri ć says is “panegyric nonsense from a philosopher who had simply ‘fallen in love with Bosnia’ and made friends with Izetbegovi ć.” Gojko Beri ć, Letters to the Celestial Serbs , 261. 5 some of the common indictments made of Izetbegovi ć and his statesmanship. There is Bat Ye’or, a Jewish/Egyptian expert in the phenomenon of dhimmitude - the name for the inferior status which non-Muslims have had under Islamic rule over the centuries up to the present day - and who is much sought after in conservative and neoconservative political circles for her crusading efforts against modern jihadism around the world. She sees Izetbegovi ć as a disingenuous Muslim who downplayed the history of ethnic hatreds within Bosnia and who nonchalantly dismissed what she sees as the very legitimate fears that Bosnian Christians had of some kind of reversion to Ottoman rule when he and his Muslim-majority SDA party came to power in 1990, thus setting the stage for violence within the nation. Or there is the political scientist Alan J. Kuperman at the University of Texas-Austin, who sees Izetbegovi ć as an indecisive and weak-willed ruler who was beholden to the hard line Islamic interests within his political party, something that had terrible consequences - not the least of which in Kuperman’s mind was Izetbegovi ć’s dragging Bosnia into a brutal war which his nation was totally unprepared for and which, even worse, was eminently avoidable.
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