Alija Izetbegovic

Alija Izetbegovic, the first president of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has died aged 78 in Sarajevo's Kosevo hospital, which overlooks the graves of so many of that city's siege victims. His was a short - and a late - political career, and one to which he always seemed ill-suited, as if history had played a cruel joke in casting him in a key role in the sad and brutal war disfiguring the Balkans.

Izetbegovic, a Slav Muslim, survived first Serbian and then Croatian assaults on his people and their ancestral lands, Yugoslav army arrest, Serbian rocketing and sniper fire of his offices, the backstabbing of rival Muslim leaders, and the contempt of western mediators before dying of a heart attack in the city he had inhabited since his youth.

Always an improbable national leader, devout and mild-mannered, he chalked up just over five years as president of Bosnia (1990-96) and after that, four years as co-president (1996-2000) in the wake of the Dayton peace treaty of December 1995.As president, he spent most of that time leading the fight for his country's very survival.

In a former Yugoslavia destroyed by misrule and betrayed by a host of treacherous, power-hungry leaders, Izetbegovic stood out as a decent sort. Even so, he blundered and schemed to the detriment of the cause he professed to be serving - that of an integrated Bosnia. He was more sinned against than sinning, but in the political, military, and diplomatic games of the Balkans, he was no angel either.

Izetbegovic emerged from obscurity at the end of the 1980s, just as the political battles that accompanied the collapse of communism and the nationalist ascendancy were being played out. In the spring of 1990, he helped form and was chosen leader of the Democratic Action Party.

In the first modern multi-party elections in November of that year, the Muslim party was strongest, by virtue of representing the biggest single national group, 44% of the pre-war population. By this time, the Bosnian political spectrum had already split along ethnic lines. President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia sponsored the creation of the Bosnian wing of his Croatian Democratic Union, while Radovan Karadzic's Serbian Democratic Party, controlled by Belgrade, became the other main force. Such a politics of ethnic exclusiveness made the war predictable. In opting for ethnic politics, Izetbegovic was as guilty as the Serbian and Croatian fanatics who hated him so viscerally.

As head of the strongest party, Izetbegovic became president, or rather first among equals in the collective presidency. Of all the heads of state in the six republics of former Yugoslavia, Izetbegovic uniquely had been a lifelong anti-communist. All the other leaders had been senior apparatchiks in the communist regime, although Tudjman swapped his communism for nationalism at the end of the 1960s.

By the summer of 1991, war was raging first in Slovenia, then much more seriously in Croatia. In a vain attempt to avert the looming bloodbath, Izetbegovic backed a new, looser structure for Yugoslavia, and sought to sweet-talk the (Serb) Yugoslav army, with its considerable stockpiles of arms and garrisons in Bosnia, into reason. However, he did little to prepare his people for what was about to befall them.

When western Europe bowed to German pressure and recognised Croatia's independence at the beginning of 1992, the Bosnian die was cast. Izetbegovic was forced to decide whether to request international recognition, too, or opt to remain as what would be an appendage of a Greater Serbia run by the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. The choice between following Tudjman or running with Milosevic, both of whom were scheming in secret to carve up Bosnia between them, was like having to choose between leukaemia and a brain tumour, he once memorably remarked.

Following an independence plebiscite, European recognition of a state called Bosnia-Herzegovina came on April 5 1992, and the Serbs launched their partitionist war the next day. The Serbs instituted the Sarajevo siege, and Izetbegovic looked to the wider Muslim world for financial support and hundreds of troops. There followed long weeks bunkered in the Sarajevo presidency where Izetbegovic veered between panic and other-worldly serenity, punctuated by endless negotiating sessions in Geneva, Vienna, London, and Ohio, culminating in the Dayton deal in 1995.

Izetbegovic often seemed a lonely old man. Throughout the terrible waves of ethnic cleansing in what was primarily a war against civilians, Izetbegovic alone among the rival leaders retained a moral stature. "Those who have bloodied their hands cannot be forgiven," he said. "But the only ones who are to be forgiven regardless of everything are the women and children. Let us not be an army that does what they are doing to us. Let us never fight against women and children. We will never win if we do."

The Serb and Croat leaders hated him for that kind of talk. In the propaganda of both regimes, Izetbegovic was a closet ayatollah, scheming to establish an Islamic theocracy.

He was a devout Muslim, who once affirmed that he had "no national feelings at all". The religious activism that earned him two jail terms under the communists was distorted by the Serb and Croat regimes to paint him as an Islamic supremacist.

Izetbegovic was born in the north Bosnian town of Bosanski Samac, and moved as a child to Sarajevo, where he spent the second world war. Just after the war, as Tito's communists tightened their grip on Yugoslavia, he was jailed for three years for religious agitation. He later studied law at Sarajevo university and worked as a legal consultant to Bosnian firms.

In 1970, he published his Islamic Declaration, a tract that says Islam is incompatible with non-Islamic systems and calls for Islamic religious and political revolution. The book made no reference to Bosnia, but it remained the basis for the well-funded and well-organised Serb and Croat campaigns to label Izetbegovic a fundamentalist.

In 1982, with Bosnia under hardline communist rule, Izetbegovic got a 14-year term for his publication Islam Between East And West, an attempt to define the curious status of Bosnia's Muslims, a population of semi-westernised Balkan Slavs. He served five years in Foca, south-east of Sarajevo, where Serbs massacred Muslims during the second world war and again in 1992.

He emerged from jail in 1988 to a Yugoslavia in its death throes, a process seriously set in train the previous year by the arrival in power of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade.

With the bigger and more powerful Serbian and Croatian nationalist rulers bent on helping themselves to Bosnia and confining the Muslims to the status of second-class citizens, the odds were stacked against Izetbegovic.

In the end, he, too, ended up a nationalist leader, agreeing in mid-1993 to the division of Bosnia along ethnic lines. And embittered by the ferocity of the assault on Bosnia's Muslims and what he perceived as their betrayal by the west, he eschewed all claim to multi-ethnic leadership.

However, above all, Izetbegovic, branded a fundamentalist by his enemies but who embodied the wish to live-and-let-live more than those enemies ever did, leaves behind a country partitioned and destroyed by the real fundamentalists, the Serb and Croat leaderships, in the worst barbarity seen in Europe since the Nazis.

He is survived by his wife, Halida, and three children, Sabina, Lejla and Bakir.

Paddy Ashdown writes:

I first met Alija Izetbegovic in July 1992. I met him regularly during the war years, frequently in the shell-battered presidency building in Sarajevo. Since May 2002, when I began my work as the International Community's High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, I have asked him for help as one of the key figures in this country's fitful reconstruction. That request was never denied. We did not always agree, but I know that he was committed to the peaceful reconstruction of a Bosnia- Herzegovina which could be part of Europe and in which all its citizens could feel at home.

He was tough, scholarly and serious. He lived a simple life and he had little of the opportunistic charm or coarse joviality that are hallmarks of political operators in the Balkans and elsewhere.

Izetbegovic, of all the leaders I dealt with during the war, was a man who conveyed only angst when confronted by the tragedy of conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina - he was devoid of the cynicism or vanity that marked other war leaders. History will no doubt say that not all his decisions were right, but more than anybody else he was responsible for the fact that Bosnia- Herzegovina survived.

· Alija Izetbegovic, politician, born August 8 1925; died October 19 2003

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