Inescapable Questions
Alija Izetbegovic may best be known as the President who single-mindedly struggled for a just end to the conflict which ravaged his country in the 1990s. In the face of the indifference of Europe, which had lapsed on its fifty year old promise of ‘never again’ as concentration camps once more sprang up in the midst, he tirelessly campaigned for justice at home and abroad. To some he is difficult and uncompromising: to others he is a man who sought to live by the highest of principles. As a prisoner of conscience in the 1980s he once wrote, ‘When I lose the reason to live. I shall die.’
This major autobiography is the account of one man and his remarkable life. Born in 1925, he was educated in Sarajevo before qualifying as a Lawyer. He was imprisoned twice by the communist government of Yugoslavia (1946-48 and 1983-88). On the second occasion, as a Muslim intellectual, he served five years of a fourteen year sentence merely for his written word. In 1990, as his political party came to power with the fall of communism, Alija Izetbegovic was elected as President of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He stood by his people throughout the war of aggression against his country in the 1990s, leading his people with nerves of steel, living by his principles both as a European and a Muslim. He signed the Dayton Peace Accord in November 1995 and was re-elected to a three-member collective Presidency in 1996. It was his principles, however, for which he eventually resigned his position in 2000, announcing that the international community was pushing things forward in a manner with which he could not live.
Alija Izetbegovic is one of those rare individuals who have managed to both inspire and lead a whole nation in its pursuit of freedom, winning the admiration of people the world over. His esteemed career as a lawyer, activist, politician, freedom fighter and scholar is detailed in this memoir. His life, spanning two centuries, as a model European Muslim will interest scholars, politicians and the general reader, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
