Alija Izetbegović

Biography

Alija Izetbegović was born in 1925 in Bosanski Šamac and grew up in Sarajevo. In 1941 he helped found the Young Muslims, an Islamist youth organisation, and in 1946 the communist authorities sentenced him to three years in prison for his activities. He later took a law degree at the University of Sarajevo in 1956.

He became known as a dissident writer. His Islamic Declaration, written in 1970, set out his views on Islam, society and the state; opponents later cited it as proof of fundamentalist aims, which he denied. In 1983 he and twelve other Bosniak activists were convicted of counter-revolutionary activity, and he was sentenced to fourteen years, later reduced. He was pardoned in 1988 after almost five years in prison.

In 1990 he founded the Party of Democratic Action and, after that year's first multiparty elections, became president of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Caught between Serb and Croat nationalist demands, he called the 1992 independence referendum. War followed recognition, and he spent most of it in besieged Sarajevo, leading a government that fought the Bosnian Serbs and, from 1993, the Croats of Herzeg-Bosnia.

He signed the 1994 Washington Agreement with Franjo Tuđman, which created the Bosniak-Croat Federation, and the Dayton Agreement in 1995. He then sat on the new three-member presidency, chairing it twice, until he stepped down for health reasons in October 2000. He led his party until 2001 and died in Sarajevo in 2003.