Alija Izetbegovic
Alija Izetbegovic led Bosnia through a war he had tried to avoid and signed a peace that divided the country he had fought to keep whole. He was a lawyer who had been imprisoned twice by Yugoslavia, once as a young man for belonging to a Muslim youth organisation and again in 1983 for an essay arguing that Islam and modernity were compatible - a text the prosecution read as a programme for an Islamic state and which is still quoted as such by his opponents. He won the presidency in 1990 in a country with no majority: Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats in roughly forty, thirty and twenty per cent. When Slovenia and Croatia left Yugoslavia he was left choosing between a Serb-dominated rump and an independence the Serbs would fight. A referendum in 1992 was boycotted by the Serbs, independence was recognised, and the war began within weeks. It lasted three and a half years. Sarajevo was besieged for longer than Stalingrad, an arms embargo left his government far worse armed than its opponents, and in July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces killed some eight thousand men and boys at Srebrenica, a town the United Nations had declared a safe area. NATO air strikes and a Croat-Bosniak offensive brought a settlement. At Dayton he accepted a state divided into two entities, with the territorial results of the war largely confirmed - a peace he described as not just, but more just than a continuation of the war. He resigned in 2000 and died three years later.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 2003 CE
- Nationality: Bosnian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
