The Dilemma of One

Nation with Two Names

Alija Izetbegović and the Bosnian Muslim
(Bosniak) National Question

Mirela Kadrić

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History

University of Sydney

04 October 2016

Supervised by Dr Marco Duranti

 ii

CONTENTS
___________________________________________________________________________

Abstract ............................................................................................................. iii

Acknowledgments .............................................................................................. iv
Note on Names and Pronunciations ....................................................................v
Map of Bosnia (Post-WWII Yugoslavia) ............................................................ vi
Map of Bosnia (Post-Dayton) ........................................................................... vii
The Oppressing Throne ................................................................................... viii

Introduction ...................................................................................................... 9

Chapter One: The Unresolved National Question in Yugoslavia ................. 20

WWII and the Partisan Resistance Movement .................................................................. 20
The Muslim National Question .......................................................................................... 23
Muslims and the Census .................................................................................................... 30

Chapter Two: Alija Izetbegović and the 1983 Sarajevo Trials ...................... 38
Alija Izetbegović: A Political Dissident ............................................................................ 39
Islamska Deklaracija .......................................................................................................... 42
1983 Sarajevo Trials .......................................................................................................... 48

Chapter Three: A New Nation, A New Beginning? ............................................ 54

The SDA and National Self-Determination ....................................................................... 54
Serbian and Croatian Reactions ......................................................................................... 58
Izetbegović Strikes Back: Building the New Bosniak Nation ........................................... 65

Conclusion: Post-Dayton Bosnia-Hercegovina .................................................... 72

Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 78
 iii

ABSTRACT
___________________________________________________________________________

This thesis examines how the Muslim population of Bosnia-Hercegovina developed a distinct

Bosniak identity under the leadership of Alija Izetbegović, from the aftermath of WWII until

the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. As a young Muslim intellectual, Izetbegović revealed how

Islamic expression, whether it be national or religious, challenged the socialist Yugoslav state’s

political organisation by highlighting the contradictions in its nationalities policy. More

broadly, his writings raised the question of what it meant to be a nation with two names, thereby

pointing to the entanglement of national and religious identities in the formation of nationhood.

This thesis explores how Izetbegović’s opposition to the Communist regime contributed to the

rise in Bosniak national consciousness as a result of the dissemination of his manifesto

Islamska Deklaracija (1970). Although the Bosniak nation existed prior to his political

activism, it was the combination of Izetbegović’s Islamic ideology and Communist ideals that

indirectly led to the affirmation of Bosniak identity. From the 1950s to 1980s, as Bosnian

Muslim intellectuals pressed for their recognition as a constituent nation equal to Serbs and

Croats, Bosniak identity gained a sharper outline – and when it did re-emerge, it did so as a

form of disengagement from Serbian and Croatian nationalisms.

Keywords: Muslim, Bosniak, Yugoslavia, Nationalism, Identity, Alija Izetbegović

 iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
___________________________________________________________________________

I would like to thank, first and foremost, my supervisor Marco Duranti for taking his time to

supervise me and assist me with this thesis. His encouragement and advice were invaluable

and without his support, I would not have completed this thesis. I would also like to thank my

parents for always being there for me, for giving me the time and space I needed to write and

think, and for never losing faith in me even when I wanted to give up at times. Special thanks

also to my personal ‘historical consultant’ Dian Novita for always being there for me even

though she had her own University load to deal with, Nathan Compton for the encouragement

and willingness to always offer advice, and to all my other lovely friends, family, and

Twitterstorians who have supported me throughout this challenging yet rewarding journey. I’d

like to extend a further thanks to my Godmother, Asmira Hrvat, for taking time out to help me

search for sources in Bosnia and elsewhere. It’s been a gruelling process and I know that

without you and your help, this thesis would not be here, in its finished form.
 v

NOTE ON NAMES AND PRONUNCIATIONS

___________________________________________________________________________

I have Anglicised standard words like Yugoslavia (instead of Jugoslavija), Bosniak (instead of

Bošnjak), and Bosnia (instead of Bosna) to make it easier for the non-Bosnian speaking reader

to understand. However, often, I have used the original spelling of the name of a person, place

or thing, if in Bosnian, Serbo-Croatian, or another language. For example, instead of writing

Izetbegovich, I have stuck with Izetbegović. In the case of the name of groups or certain works,

I have referred to them in their original form, even after providing the English equivalent. For

example, instead of writing Young Muslims, I write Mladi Muslimani; instead of writing

Islamic Declaration, I write Islamska Deklaracija. This is because there are instances where

the English translation can refer to other phenomena, and thus a distinction is necessary.

Despite this, the pronunciation of Serbo-Croatian (and Bosnian) is simple and regular; only the

following differences need to be observed:

c is pronounced ts (as in ‘bats’)

č ch (as in ‘archer’)
ć tj (as in ‘tune’)
dj dg (as in ‘bridge’)
dž/đ g (as in ‘gentle’)
j y (as in ‘you)
lj lli (as in ‘million’)
nj n (as in ‘new’)
š sh (as in ‘sharp’)
ž zh (as in ‘treasure’)

I have abbreviated names of certain organisations, movements, or political parties after

providing the full name of each. Most abbreviations are in the Bosnian form. For example,

when writing Communist Party of Yugoslavia, instead of providing the English abbreviation

CPY, I have put KPJ.

 vi

MAP OF BOSNIA
(POST-WWII YUGOSLAVIA)
___________________________________________________________________________

Map of post-WWII Yugoslavia from Marko Attila Hoare, The History of Bosnia: From the
Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: SAQI, 2007), p. 312.
 vii

MAP OF BOSNIA
(POST-DAYTON)
___________________________________________________________________________

Map of post-Dayton Bosnia-Hercegovina from UNHCR, ‘The 1995 Dayton Agreement for
Bosnia and Hercegovina’. Available at:
http://www.unhcr.org/publications/maps/3ae6baea8/map-1995-dayton-agreement-bosnia-
herzegovina.html, accessed on 14/09/2016.
 viii

THE OPPRESSING THRONE

___________________________________________________________________________

Will they fear and hide

Or maintain their pride?
To hide is to fear
But courage is not mere.

Courage itself defeats ill fate

But why do all hesitate?
In hesitation the devil is to choose
And all then are bound to lose.

To lose identity
Has become their expectancy.
All destined to drown in a sea
So hopelessly unfree!

Unfree to practice as they please

With all but pure ease.
With ease they shall vanish into thin air
Or move away elsewhere!

Elsewhere the world thought

But the Bosniaks surely fought.
Fought for their fate
Before it became too late.

As late as early
Yet so firmly
Courage seemed to appear
In a new confident atmosphere.

One man voiced his frustration

On behalf of his nation.
One he was, but he attained
Exactly what he claimed.

Claiming his life as his own

And defeating the oppressing throne.1

1
Poem by Hena Huseinspahić (unpublished, 2016).
 9

INTRODUCTION

Since the nineteenth century, the nation has been the determining place of collective identity,

though the ethnic make-up, social structures and borders of a nation-state are constantly being

shaped and reshaped. While in perpetual flux, national identity as established through

collective memory, feelings, and ties, is premised on a process of inclusion and exclusion

whereby ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ are constructed in opposition to one another.2 Bosnia-

Hercegovina, in its contemporary form, is an example of the fickle nature of nationalism and

national identity.3 Bosnia-Hercegovina is inhabited by three principal nationalities – Serbs,

Bosnians and Croats – and has been subject to Byzantine, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and

Communist rule. While Serbs can be identified as the people of Serbia and Croats as the people

of Croatia, the Bosnian case differs. This is because within Bosnia-Hercegovina there are a

number of hybrid identities, with the primary distinguishing feature being religion: Muslims

(Yugoslavia) / Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks (post-Yugoslavia) traditionally follow the Islamic

faith; Bosnian Serbs / Serbs are traditionally Eastern Orthodox; and Bosnian Croats / Croats

are traditionally Catholic.

Of these three identities, that of Bosnian Muslims has been constantly suppressed as a

result of their affiliation with Islam and the wider Islamic community. It is from this

2
Philip Schlesinger, ‘Collective Identities, Friends, Enemies’, Innovation 12, no. 4 (1999), p. 462.
3
Scholars have differing views on nationalism and national identity. While literature on nationalism and identity
is constantly evolving, earlier works tend to trace the long-term political, cultural, and economic changes that
led to the gradual emergence of nations and nationhood; more recent works, on the other hand, attempt to
deconstruct nationalism and identity in order to breakdown how and why both occur. See, for example, Ernest
Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une Nation, trans. Ida Mae Snyder (Paris: Calman-Levy, 1882); Ernest Gellner, Nations
and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989); John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). For an overall assessment of nationalism and ethnicity, see John
Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); John
Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
 10

suppression that the Bosnian Muslim national question emerged, predominately from the

Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918-41), and remained unresolved until 1993, despite earlier

attempts by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) to grant Bosnian Muslims national

recognition. However, scholarship on the development and affirmation of Bosnian Muslim

identity has been limited to the Bosnian War (1992-1995) and Bosnian Muslim memory of the

war.4 While this scholarly literature on the Bosnian War as revealed new ways of

conceptualising national and ethnic identity, by drawing on the analytical frameworks of

memory and trauma, it obscures how Bosnian Muslim identity emerged, as well as how the

rise in Bosnian Muslim national consciousness bolstered the integrity of Bosnia-Hercegovina

during the Bosnian War.5

Throughout history, the usage of the term ‘Bosniak’ has changed.6 Initially, ‘Bosniak’

referred to the general Bosnian population, which included Serbs and Croats. By the 1990s, it

referred specifically to Bosnian Muslims within Bosnia-Hercegovina. In this thesis, Bosniak

will refer strictly to Bosnian Muslims within Bosnia-Hercegovina. While the term literally

translates to ‘Bosnian Muslim’, this thesis makes a distinction between the two. The term

‘Bosniak’ will largely be used when analysing post-Yugoslavia, while ‘Bosnian Muslim’ will

be placed out of context to refer to the Muslim population generally. In the context of

Yugoslavia, the term ‘Muslim’ will be used as both a religious and national category.

4
Prominent works on the Bosnian War include, though are not limited to: Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia:
The Policy of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ (Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1995); Rabia Ali and Lawrence
Lifschultz, eds., Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War (Stony Creek: The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1993); John
Mueller, ‘The Banality of “Ethnic War”’, International Security 25, no. 1 (Summer 2000), pp. 42-70; Charles
Ingrao and Thomas A. Emmert, eds., Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholar’s Initiative (West
Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2nd ed., 2012).
5
Scholarship on memory and trauma, emerging from the case of the Bosnian War, include: Christoph Schiessl,
‘An Element of Genocide: Rape, Total War, and International Law in the Twentieth Century’, Journal of
Genocide Research 4, no. 2 (2002), pp. 197-210; Cindy S. Snyder, Wesley J. Gabbard, J. Dean May and Nihada
Zulcic, ‘On the Battleground of Women’s Bodies: Mass Rape in Bosnia-Hercegovina’, Affilia: Journal of
Women and Social Work 21, no. 2 (Summer 2006), pp. 184-95; Nicholas Moll, ‘Fragmented Memories in a
Fragmented Country: Memory Competition and Political Identity-Building in Today’s Bosnia and
Hercegovina’, Nationalities Papers 41, no. 6 (2013), pp. 910-35; Patrick Finney, ‘On Memory, Identity and
War’, Rethinking History 6, no. 1 (2002), pp. 1-13.
6
In Serbo-Croat, Bošnjak / Бошњаци; in Turkish, Boşnak.
 11

Additionally, the term ‘Bosnians’ is geographic and will be used to refer to any inhabitant of

Bosnia-Hercegovina, regardless of ethnicity.

This thesis examines how the Muslim population of Bosnia-Hercegovina developed a

distinct Bosniak identity with the help of its leader, Alija Izetbegović, from the aftermath of

WWII until the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. It traces how Izetbegović’s opposition to the

Communist regime contributed to the rise in Bosniak national consciousness as a result of the

dissemination of his manifesto Islamska Deklaracija (1970). Among the principal subjects

under discussion here are Tito’s role in the recognition and flourishing of the Muslim nation,

the ways in which neglect of Tito’s vision led to the further suppression of Muslim identity

which highlighted the contradictory nature of KPJ national policies, and the resurgence of the

Mladi Muslimani (Young Muslims) movement who, through their political activity, gave

Bosnia-Hercegovina a distinct national identity.

Communist attitudes toward national identity, especially toward the development of

Bosnian Muslim identity, were crucial to these developments. Communism, as an ideology,

was claimed by the KPJ to be a method of ‘discipline’ whereby nationalism and the affirmation

of national identity was tamed to ensure social order. As the case of Bosnian Muslims will

illustrate, the opposite occurred. Most often than not, the KPJ either stirred up and manipulated

nationalism for their own purposes, made nationalism fester and become more potent by

creating a politically upset and estranged population (i.e. Bosnian Muslims), or they did both.7

As Xavier Bougarel, wrote, the distinctive feature of communist Yugoslavia lay in ‘an attempt

at modernisation aimed at the eventual disappearance of national peculiarities’, which,

paradoxically, led to the ‘reinforcement of national identities… and to a resurgence of…

nationalist ideologies’.8

7
Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 2nd ed., 1996), p. xx.
8
Emphasis added. Xavier Bougarel, ‘Bosnia and Hercegovina: State and Communitarianism’, in David A.
Dyker and Ivan Vejvoda, eds., Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth (London:
Longman, 1996), pp. 92-3.
 12

In Yugoslavia, the national question of Bosnia-Hercegovina was set in terms of

‘choosing’ between being a Muslim Serb, a Muslim Croat, or as nationally undeclared

Muslims. It was this practice that contributed to the reinforcement of Bosnian Muslim national

identity, contrary to the wishes of the KPJ. This is because the Yugoslav practice denied

Bosnian Muslims national self-determination, which left them as the only nation within

Yugoslavia without a nationality. For the Communists, the concept of a people, a nation, and

a nationality differed from western European discourse. Tone Bringa writes:

While in western Europe citizenship and nationality are synonymous and

nationality refers to the relation of a person to a particular state, in the
multiethnic socialist state national identity was different from and additional
to citizenship… According to the Marxist definition, narodnosti (nationality)
are smaller than narodi (people), they do not have an industry or working class
of their own, and exist only in relation to a larger nation (that is, a narod).
However, a narodnost may gain political recognition, as did the Muslims of
Bosnia-Hercegovina.9

Bringa observes that Bosnian Muslims could not be classified as a narod because their status

as a narodnost was not synonymous with the territory of Bosnia-Hercegovina. As will be

discussed, Bosnian Muslims in Yugoslavia did not gain official national recognition until 1971

when their status in the Yugoslav census changed from being ‘Muslims, nationally undeclared’

to the specific category of narod under the label ‘Muslim’. Part of this reluctance to recognise

Bosniaks was a reaction to the development of extreme Serbian and Croatian nationalism,

which maintained that Bosnia-Hercegovina and its people belonged to each, respectively.

Regardless of the denationalising policy toward Bosniaks as Muslims, in the affirmation of

their national identity, Bosniaks were never mass identified as being either Serbs or Croats.

This can be partly attributed to the pre-existing national consciousness of Bosnian Muslim

communities within Yugoslavia, and partly to the political activities of the Muslim

intelligentsia during this time who fought for the national revival of Bosniak identity.

9
Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 25.
 13

Why is the study of the development of Bosnian Muslim identity important? What does

it reveal, more broadly, about the study of nationalism and national identity? For one, on a

global scale, the word ‘Muslim’ typically refers to an estimated one-billion plus adherents of

the religion of Islam. In Yugoslavia, this term acquired a national connotation, so that one could

identify as being nationally Muslim yet religiously a Jehovah’s Witness – i.e. practicing

adherent. This ‘hyphenated identity’ of the Bosnian Muslim population reveals how their

national affirmation challenged the political organisation of communist Yugoslavia, by raising

questions about the accommodation of Islamic values with socialist practices, the relation of

national (ethnic) and religious identity, and the limitations of acceptable Islamic expression in

a socialist multinational state. It was the unresolved national question of the Bosnian Muslims

that formed, according to Sabrina P. Ramet, one of ‘the chief axes of nationalist disequilibrium

in the country’.10

The unresolved national question of Bosnian Muslim identity also reveals how ethnicity

can be embodied and expressed through political projects and nationalist rhetoric. It was the

dilemma of Bosnian Muslim identity that led to the emergence of political activism by Muslim

intellectuals, of which Izetbegović was one, who sought to challenge both the Communist

insistence of a purely ‘Muslim’ label on their national identity, and claims by Serbian and

Croatian nationalists that the Muslims were their own. Their struggle against both Communist

ideology and the nationalisms of their neighbours was a struggle against the disintegration of

the distinct character of Bosnian Muslim identity, which developed from Ottoman influence.

Through the dissemination of the Islamic faith by the Ottomans over the period of their rule, a

majority of Bosnians began to emulate their religious and cultural practices.11 In this way, Islam

10
Sabrina P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918-2005 (Washington:
Woodrow Wilson Centre Press, 2006), p. 285.
11
Historians have extensively written on the Ottoman influence over the Balkan region, particularly over
Bosnia-Hercegovina. Of the vast scholarship that exists, a few include: Milica Bakić-Hayden and Robert M.
Hayden, ‘Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans”: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural
Politics’, Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 1-15; Antonina Zhelyazkova, ‘Islamisation in the Balkans
 14

is the key to understanding Muslim identity in Bosnia-Hercegovina, not only in terms of having

a distinct set of religious beliefs, but also in terms of providing a contrast to their Christian

counterparts – Serbs and Croats – in the national sense. It was the first aspect of its two Islamic

identities that Izetbegović stressed in his manifesto Islamska Deklaracija, which was to provide

the first stepping stone, paradoxically, to the suppression and affirmation of a distinct Bosniak

national identity; and it was as a result of the indirect consequences that occurred after the

publication of Islamska Deklaracija that the status of Bosnian Muslims changed from being

tied to just the Islamic faith to one tied to both Bosnia-Hercegovina and Islam.

Still, the development of Bosnian Muslim identity was not a straightforward process.

This is because the concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘nationalism’ remain contested in scholarly

discourse, which explains why the implementation of policies to solve the national question in

Yugoslavia were plagued by contradictions. As Rogers Brubaker has stated, ‘that they [nations]

exist is taken for granted, although how they exist – and how they come to exist – is much

disputed’.12 He argues, together with Frederick Cooper, that ‘identity’ is an ambiguous term as

it can be split into two meanings: ‘hard’ identity connotes unity, sameness, permanence – a

singular, abiding, foundational sameness; whereas ‘soft’ identity connotes multiplicity,

difference, change – a multiple, fluid, fragmented difference.13 In the case of Yugoslavia, ‘hard’

identity was prevalent among popular and intellectual conceptions of national affiliations.

However, analysing Yugoslavia through a scholarly lens reveals an altogether different

conception: that identity in Yugoslavia remained in constant flux, in which various ‘nations’

as an Historiographical Problem: The Southeast-European Perspective’, in Fikret Adanir and Suraiya Faroqhi,
eds., The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 224-266; Fikret
Karcic, ‘The Eastern Question – A Paradigm for Understanding the Balkan Muslims’ History in the 20th
Century’, Islamic Studies 41, no. 4 (Winter 2002), pp. 635-650.
12
Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 16.
13
Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond “Identity”’, in Rogers Brubaker, ed., Ethnicity without
Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 28-63.
 15

within Yugoslavia had the opportunity to claim to be one or the other.14 Tito himself once

described Yugoslavia as having two scripts, three languages, four religions, five nationalities,

six republics, and seven neighbours.15 This was in reference to Yugoslavia’s institutional

complexity and cultural diversity – a result of the myriad of empires that conquered and ruled

over the Balkan region.

It is for this reason that Marko Attila Hoare, a prominent British historian specialising

in the history of Bosnia-Hercegovina, wrote that placing a strict definition of nationalism,

national identity or even ethnicity on Yugoslavia is problematic because to emphasise one

national identity as being distinct from another imposes ‘the nationalists’ own sense of

homogeneity upon nations that are internally highly diverse’.16 This phenomenon was no more

apparent than in Bosnia-Hercegovina, a country that, under Yugoslavia, was declared as not

being nationally defined by the KPJ. As discussed earlier, Bosnia-Hercegovina did not share

the same privileges of being bound by a national majority, because for the Yugoslav

communists, Bosnia-Hercegovina was the official homeland of Serbs, Muslims, and Croats.

Hoare further notes that national identities have, in some respects, existed since the beginning

of time, but have also emerged as an entirely modern concept. This then complicates the

analysis of national identity formation in Bosnia-Hercegovina because ‘the relationship of

nationally conscious Muslims, Croats and Serbs to the common Bosnian homeland is one that

14
An interesting observation was made by Croatian writer, Slavenka Drakulić, on the interplay of both ‘hard’
and ‘soft’ identity. For her, nationality did not play a central role in her life prior to the Yugoslav war. It was
only when the war ended that she noticed nationality beginning to define who she was as a person. She writes:
‘Being a Croat has become my destiny… I am defined by my nationality, and by it alone… Along with millions
of other Croats, I was pinned to the wall of nationhood… This was what the war was doing to us, reducing us to
one dimension: the Nation… So right now, in the new state of Croatia, no one is allowed not to be a Croat’. She
describes this process as being ‘overcome by nationhood’. While this thesis will demonstrate that ideas of
nationhood in the sense of a ‘hard’ identity did exist – at least in intellectual circles – prior to the break-up of
Yugoslavia, Drakulić’s observation highlights the fickle nature of nationalism and national identity in post-
Yugoslav states, and how conceptions of identity can easily shift from being bound by ‘sameness’ to
‘fragmented difference’. Slavenka Drakulić, The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1993), pp. 50-3.
15
Quoted in Mihailo Crnobrnja, The Yugoslav Drama (Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2nd ed.,
1996), p. 15.
16
Marko Attila Hoare, The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: SAQI, 2007),
p. 25.
 16

has continuously changed, and any understanding of the relationship requires it to be viewed

as a work-in-progress rather than as a constant’.17

For the purposes of this thesis, I have chosen to group Serbians with Serbia, Croatians

with Croatia, and Bosnian Muslims – in all respects – with Bosnia. This thesis is interested in

the development of Bosnian Muslim identity against Serbian and Croatian suppression and

nationalistic ideologies, which was prevalent throughout post-WWII Yugoslavia up until the

present day. In the case of the Bosnian Muslims, there is often a focus on the lack of their

national identity. I emphasise that Bosnian Muslims are a named national identity with a self-

awareness as a distinct identity, being long established in a well-defined territory, i.e. Bosnia-

Hercegovina. In doing so, I trace the chronology of Bosnian Muslim identity and the Serbian

and Croatian nationalisms that intensified in response. Benedict Anderson’s notion of an

‘imagined community’ can be applied to this antagonistic relationship, whereupon Serbian and

Croatian attitudes toward Bosnian Muslims were formed through a spatial dimension: the

justification of the suppression of Bosnian Muslim identity was based on the idea that Bosnia-

Hercegovina belongs to them, and holds a special meaning particular to each national group.18

In this way, Bosnia-Hercegovina sits as an ‘in-between’ space that has been imagined and

claimed as being central to the Serbian and Croatian nations, an imagining that neglects

Bosnian Muslim national consciousness.

Here, a distinction needs to be made between ethnicity (or ethnic politics) and

nationalism. The latter places an emphasis on the nation-state, while the former does not

necessarily emphasise statehood. In the case of Bosnia-Hercegovina, there is an interplay

between the two. Stephen Ryan captures this dynamic when he writes that ‘when an ethnic

group organises itself politically and adopts a programme calling for a separate state to coincide

17
Ibid., p. 29.
18
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1996).
 17

with cultural boundaries it can then be termed a national group’.19 However, when this process

is initiated, it often always leads to destabilisation. For instance, when Muslim intellectuals

fought for the recognition of their nation in Bosnia-Hercegovina, it not only contributed to the

collapse of Yugoslavia, but also reignited and intensified Serbian and Croatian nationalism.

Eric Hobsbawm emphasised this aspect of nationalism when he argued in 1990 that nationalism

is no longer a ‘major vector of historical development’ that unified as well as emancipated

peoples. Instead, it was merely divisive.20

While most certainly true, in the case of Bosnian Muslims, it was nationalism’s

emancipatory and divisive features that shaped the history of the former Yugoslav states.

Milica Bakić-Hayden’s concept of ‘nesting orientalisms’ reveals how the study of ethnicity,

and especially ethnic conflict, leads directly to an analysis of ethnic groups and their

relationship with other ethnic identities. Bakić-Hayden argues that perceptions of the ‘other’,

through orientalist discourse, contributed to the rise of nationalistic attitudes. She argues that

Orientalism transforms into a ‘subjectivational practice by which all ethnic groups [within the

Balkans] define the “other” as the “East” of them’.21 That is to say, they are not only

‘orientalising the ‘other’ but also manage to position themselves in an occidental fashion to

that ‘other’, thus creating a hierarchy.22 For example, the Croats orientalised the Serbs due to

their historical trajectory with the Ottomans and their Orthodox religiosity, whilst the Serbs

orientalised the Bosniaks because they were Muslim; and in a broadened sense, Bosniaks

managed to distinguish themselves from the ‘ultimate Orientals, non-Europeans’, i.e. Middle

Eastern Muslims. 23

19
Stephen Ryan, Ethnic Conflict and International Relations (Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company,
1995), p. 5.
20
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 163.
21
Quoted in Dušan Bjelić, ‘Introduction: Blowing Up the Bridge’, in Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić, eds.,
Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalisation and Fragmentation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), p. 4.
22
Milica Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of the Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review 54, no. 4
(Winter 1995), p. 918.
23
Ibid., p. 922.
 18

In order to examine such complex discourse, a majority of this thesis is based on sources

written in Serbo-Croat, most of which have been translated by myself unless otherwise stated.

This has been the result of limited sources written in the English language that deal specifically

with the development of Bosnian Muslim identity. Most literature only touch on the role of

Izetbegović in the formation of Bosnian Muslim identity and most, too, only provide a

sweeping overview of the history of Bosnia-Hercegovina and its people. Thus, a majority of

sources cited come from overseas. As a result of this limitation, this thesis only provides a

window into the vast history of the development of Bosnian Muslim identity. Moreover, as my

thesis is making a contribution to the scholarly literature on Bosnia-Hercegovina by linking

Alija Izetbegović’s political activity directly to the development of Bosniak identity, access to

a range of sources has been limited, especially as archives – in Bosnia-Hercegovina and

elsewhere – do not provide easy access to source material. This thesis, therefore, is largely a

political and intellectual history, analysing the views of relevant organisations and intellectuals.

The first chapter of this thesis provides a brief overview on the history of Bosnian

Muslim identity before analysing the development of Bosnian Muslim national consciousness

throughout Communist Yugoslavia under the leadership of Tito. In particular, it tracks the

changes in the national recognition of Bosnian Muslims through census data and concludes by

tracing the emergence of Alija Izetbegović’s political activity with the Mladi Muslimani

movement. The second chapter examines the political activity of Izetbegović and his beliefs

while providing an overview of his Islamska Deklaracija. It then examines the political

consequences of his manifesto, namely the 1983 Sarajevo Trials which saw him and other

Muslim intellectuals imprisoned up to fourteen years for ‘revolutionary acts against the state’;

exploring what this meant for the Bosnian Muslims. The third chapter addresses this question

by tying together the Islamic ideology put forth in Izetbegović’s Islamska Deklaracija with the

programme of his political party, Stranka Demokratske Akcije (Party of Democratic Action –
 19

SDA). It was because of Izetbegović’s controversial political text, this chapter argues, that a

move toward the establishment of Bosniak identity became possible. It then traces the

consequences of this by looking at Serbian and Croatian attitudes and retaliation against any

idea of an Islamic state in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The thesis concludes with a brief overview of

the aftermath of the Bosnian War, examining Izetbegović’s decision-making during the peace

talks as the President of Bosnia-Hercegovina, which ultimately led to the establishment of a

Bosnian Muslim nation with its own independent territory, albeit with some concessions.
 20

CHAPTER ONE:
The Unresolved National Question in Yugoslavia

They do not allow Bosnianhood, but offer, instead, Muslimhood. We should

accept their offer, despite the wrong name, for with it we will begin the process
[of attaining Bosnianhood].
– Hamdija Pozderac, 197124

In the study of the unresolved Bosnian Muslim national question in Yugoslavia, historians tend

to view the issue as unique to the 1960s. While it was during this decade that the national

question preoccupied the political sphere, the problem emerged much earlier and persisted well

throughout the 1960s onto the 1980s, when Muslim intellectuals faced public persecution for

their political as well as religious beliefs. This chapter will examine how nationalism, in

relation to Muslims, emerged as one of the principle problems throughout post-WWII

Yugoslavia, leading to the rise in the affirmation of a Muslim national identity and, with it,

Muslim resistance movements. Specifically, the chapter will examine how the KPJ attempted

to disregard the Muslim national question by emphasising bratstvo i jedinstvo (‘brotherhood

and unity’) to keep Yugoslavia together, only to be forced to acknowledge Muslim national

self-determination by incorporating Muslims in the census. After analysing census data, the

chapter concludes by connecting KPJ reluctance to recognise Muslims as a national group to

the re-emergence of the Muslim resistance movement, Mladi Muslimani, and Alija Izetbegović.

World War II and the Partisan Resistance Movement

On the eve of the Axis occupation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Yugoslavia

was on the brink of civil war due to the unresolved national question, which left open the

opportunity for Croatian and Serbian nationalists to claim the Bosnian territory as their own.

This led to the division of Yugoslav territory and the establishment of a quisling state and

24
Quoted in Ana Horvat, ‘Autohtone Nacionalne Manjine i Ustavne Promjene 2009 – 2010’, Zbornik PFZ 60,
no. 2 (2010), p. 574.
 21

regime as a result of the development of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which the

Axis assigned to a group of Croat fascists called the Ustaša. This independent state included

the whole of Bosnia-Hercegovina, which, to them, was to become a Croatian nation-state.

However, such aspirations were challenged as at least a quarter of the inhabitants in Bosnia-

Hercegovina were Serbs, and the other consisted of Bosnian Muslims who had been vying for

national recognition. While the creation of the NDH by the Axis powers was a strategy of

‘divide and conquer’ to provide a solution to the national question, throughout the duration of

WWII, this problem only intensified.

The intensification of the problem occurred partly because Bosnia-Hercegovina was

the home of three ethnically similar albeit religiously different national groups, in which the

Bosnian identity bound all three groups together; and partly because of the nationalistic

ideologies that developed within Ustaša ranks and the Serbian equivalent, the Četnici (or

Četniks). According to Hoare, these two factors then gave all three groups the incentive to stake

a claim on Bosnia-Hercegovina, to the point of civil war and genocide.25 With the aim of

creating an independent fascist state, the Ustaša solution to the claim of Bosnia-Hercegovina

entailed two components: viewing Serbs as ‘ethnic undesirables’ to be expelled, killed, or

converted to Catholicism, and Bosnian Muslims as Islamised Croats. In the eyes of Ante

Pavelić, the leader of the Ustaša group, ‘there is no Muslim question, for that is a Croat

question’.26 For them, Bosnia-Hercegovina was the ‘most precious jewel of Croatian

statehood’, in which the Bosnian Muslims were ‘the heart of the Independent State of

Croatia’.27 That is, the Muslim national tradition, as presented by Ustaša propaganda, was seen

as an expression of Croat national identity. In fact, they claimed that ‘Bošnjaštvo

[Bosnianhood] is nothing other than safeguarded Croatism’ whereupon it found its defence

25
Hoare, The History of Bosnia, p. 197. See also Marko Attila Hoare, The Bosnian Muslims in the Second
World War: A History (London: Hurst Publishers, 2013).
26
Quoted in Šaćir Filandra, Bošnjačka politika u XX. stoljeću (Sarajevo: Sejtarija, 1998), p. 150.
27
Hoare, The History of Bosnia, pp. 200-1.
 22

‘under the wings of Islam’.28 However, the rise of the Četniks during this time challenged

Croatian aspirations to an independent state as the Četniks rose in direct opposition to the

fascist occupation of Yugoslavia, with the aim to instil their own nationalistic agenda.

The Četniks harboured the ideology of Serbian nationalism in an attempt to advocate

for the reconstruction of Yugoslavia under Serbian dominion; they wanted to emulate the

partition of both Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina that was espoused by the Karađorđević

monarchy during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.29 Under the wing of Dragoljub ‘Draža’

Mihailović, the Četniks made little room for Bosnian Muslims and called for ‘the cleansing of

the land [Bosnia-Hercegovina] of all non-Serb elements’.30 They, too, held the position that

Bosnian Muslims were of their ethnic (Serbian) origin. For them, Bosnia was a country where

the Serbian nation was simply divided into three faiths and, as a result, was the ‘largest,

purest… and most capable part of the Serbian people’.31 While Croatian independence centred

largely on the incorporation of Bosnia, for the Četniks, Serbian domination also meant control

over Montenegro, Dalmatia, Slavonia, parts of Croatia, and even northern Albania.32

Meanwhile, there also developed a Serbian pro-fascist movement called Zbor under the

leadership of Dimitri Ljotić, inspiring the further crusade of nationalist and pro-fascist

movements elsewhere in Yugoslavia, namely in Slovenia, Montenegro and Macedonia.33

28
Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i NDH 1941-1945 (Zagreb: Sveučilinšta Naklada Liber, 1978), p. 197.
29
Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1997), pp. 109-10, 118. Stjepan Radić, leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, raised concerns regarding Serbian
aspirations for domination. He told the Central Committee of Zagreb’s National Council in 1918: ‘Gentlemen
[Serbs], your mouths are full of words like “naradno jedinstvo, one unitary state, one kingdom under the
Karađorđević dynasty”. And you think it is enough to say we Croats, Serbs and Slovenes are one people because
we speak one language… If the Serbs really want to have such a centralist state and government, may God bless
them with it, but we Croats do not want any state organisation except a confederated federal republic.’ Quoted
in Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1984), p. 226.
30
Malcolm, Bosnia, pp. 178-9.
31
Kasim Suljević, Nacionalnost Muslimana (Rijeka: Otokar Keršovani, 1981), p. 129.
32
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 178.
33
Branko Petranović and Čedomir Štrbac, Istorija socialističke Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Radnička štampa, 1977),
pp. 25-52.
 23

Then there was the Partisan resistance movement (also, Communist Party of

Yugoslavia - KPJ). They entered the war in 1941 in response to the invasion of Yugoslavia,

but their ranks consisted largely of Serbs as a form of resistance against NDH atrocities and

the struggle against fascist occupiers. Initially, this proved to be a problem for the Partisans as,

unlike the Četniks who sought to restore Yugoslavia under the Serbian monarchy, their

objective was to build an inclusive and multinational liberation struggle. Under the slogan

bratstvo i jedinstvo, the Partisans insisted that there can be no national hostility between the

peoples of Yugoslavia as they fought for the liberation of Yugoslavia from foreign occupiers

(i.e. Axis powers) and domestic traitors (i.e. Ustaša, Četnik, and Ljotić supporters).34

In regards to the latter, the Partisans attempted to instil bratstvo i jedinstvo by recruiting

more non-Serbs into their ranks. Of their various forms of propaganda, the KPJ directly

targeted Bosnian Muslims by acknowledging Muslims as a separate community in their own

right, just like Serbs and Croats. On 16 December 1942, leader of the KPJ, Josip Broz Tito,

proclaimed that the phrase ‘national liberation struggle’ would be ‘a lie’ if it did not only

encompass, besides the wider Yugoslav meaning, ‘a national meaning for every nation

individually’.35 Here, Tito tied the liberation of Yugoslavia simultaneously with the liberation

of Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians, and Muslims. The tension between the

Partisans and domestic traitors crucially defined national relations in post-WWII Yugoslavia.

The Muslim National Question

The Partisan strategy not only involved driving out foreign occupiers from Yugoslavia, but

also sought to engage in a socialist revolution. Tito’s aim was to seize power for a post-war

34
Josip Broz Tito, ‘Federative Yugoslavia – State of Brotherhood’ [speech], in Josip Broz Tito, New
Yugoslavia: Speeches by Marshal Josip Broz Tito (Sydney: Yugoslav Immigrants’ Association of Australia,
1945), pp. 9-17.
35
Emphasis added. Josip Broz Tito, Nacionalno pitanje i revolucija (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1977), p. 70.
 24

Communist state under the leadership of the KPJ.36 But at this stage, Tito was a loyal supporter

of Stalin and would implement the policies and ideological positions set by the Soviets. This

included creating a centralised state, and later, a Yugoslav union of socialist federal republics.37

This was despite the initial Soviet scepticism toward Yugoslavia, which, in 1935, shifted to

acceptance upon the rise of international fascism. As such, both the Yugoslav and Soviet

nationalities policies appeared to be similar. Moreover, the nationalities policy of the KPJ also

centred around Soviet ideology, i.e. attitudes toward finding a solution to the Muslim national

question included considering their material position in accordance with Marxist principles.38

Initially, the KPJ considered Muslims to be a community only determined by religious

affiliation. This meant that Muslims were not considered an ethnic group, an attitude that

stemmed from Stalin’s definition of a nation, in which a nation is ‘a historically evolved stable

community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a

community of culture’.39 As Muslims refused to assimilate into either the Croat or Serbian

national identity and aligned themselves with the Islamic faith, such national recognition was

denied by the KPJ. The result was heated debates as to the status of Bosnian Muslims.40 In 1923

two camps formed in regards to the unresolved national question: on the one side were

supporters of the concept of a homogenous Yugoslav national identity, and on the other were

the supporters of the national struggle of the minority peoples of Yugoslavia, namely those

36
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 177; Srećko M. Džaja, Politička realnost Jugoslovenstva-sa posebnim osvrtom na BiH
(Sarajevo-Zagreb: Svijetlo Riječi, 2004), pp. 95-106.
37
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 180.
38
Marxist principles are based on the perspective of the working class, which it sees as fundamentally
revolutionary in relation to capitalist society. Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels wrote, ‘[i]n proportion as the
bourgeoisie, i.e. capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class,
developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as
their labour increases capital.’ As will be discussed, in the case of the Bosnian Muslims, their former status as
Muslim nobles and feudal lords before and during the Ottoman Empire deemed them ‘unfit’ to be classified as a
nation. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Books, 2002), pp. 226-7.
For further analysis, see Thomas Barnes and Damien Cahill, ‘Marxist Class Analysis: A Living Tradition in
Australian Scholarship’, Journal of Australian Political Economy, no. 70 (Summer 2012), pp. 47-69.
39
J. V. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question (New York: International Publishers, 1942), p. 16.
40
Robert J. Donia and John V. A. Fine Jnr., Bosna i Hercegovina: Iznevjerena tradicija (Sarajevo: Institut za
Istoriju, 2011), p. 128.
 25

who did not affiliate themselves with the Serbian majority. The latter current advocated for the

establishment of various Republics within a unified federal Yugoslavia, which included the

recognition of Bosnia-Hercegovina as a distinct land with the right to national self-

determination.41 The debate continued throughout post-WWII Yugoslavia.

A Serbian member of the Central Committee, Moše Pijade, denied the national standing

of Muslims in Yugoslavia. He claimed that Muslims were ‘confessionally rather than

nationally bound’, and maintained that the people of Macedonia and Montenegro were, as

nations, ‘not fully formed’.42 However, the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of

Yugoslavia (Antifašističko Vijeće Narodnog Oslobođenja Jugoslavije – AVNOJ) attempted to

address the national status of Muslims. It not only affirmed the idea of a ‘fraternal, democratic,

federal community of all peoples of Yugoslavia’, but in the case of Bosnia-Hercegovina, it

affirmed the equality of its three nationalities:

For the first time in history, Serbs, Muslims and Croats of Bosnia-
Hercegovina united in the movement for national liberation, stepped forward
on the same path… to build a community in which they could live in equality,
freedom, peace and prosperity.43

But Muslims did not see to fruition the solution to their national status because, according to

Atif Purivatra, the Partisans could not reach a unanimous decision concerning their national

status.44 This was despite the fact that during the AVNOJ session, Muslim delegates constituted

a majority – 42 of 250, followed by 37 delegates from Croatia, 24 from Serbia, 17 representing

Slovenia, 16 from Montenegro and the other 2 from Vojvodina, with Macedonia and Sanjak

41
Dušan Lukač, Radnički pokret u Jugoslaviji u nacionalno pitanje 1918-1941 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu
istoriju i NIP export-press, 1972), p. 98.
42
Quoted in Hoare, History of Bosnia, p. 187.
43
Emphasis added. Declaration of AVNOJ cited in Paul Shoup, Communism and the National Question (New
York: Colombia University Press, 1968), p. 72.
44
Atif Purivatra, Nacionalni i politički razvitak Muslimana – Rasprave i Članci (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 2nd ed.,
1970), p. 127.
 26

being wholly unrepresented.45 Thus, when the war ended, it became apparent that Muslims

‘would not receive equal recognition with Serbs and Croats’.46

This attitude went contrary to chapter 5, article 21 of the new Yugoslav constitution

that read ‘all citizens of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia are equal before the law’

and enjoy ‘equal rights regardless of nationality, race and creed’. Any attempt to grant

privileges or limit citizen rights on the grounds of difference and igniting ‘hatred and discord’

was contrary to the constitution.47 A collection of Yugoslav laws as well as the preliminary

draft of the new constitution went further, stating that the solution to the national question in

Yugoslavia rested on satisfying the working masses, which included granting

the Yugoslav peoples’ right to self-determination, inclusive of the right of

secession and union, the creation of a new federative State community and the
liquidation of all relationships of hegemony of one people over others and the
other forms of national oppression and inequality.48

This demonstrated that claims for national self-determination were legal; except, for Muslims,

the process was not simple. For the KPJ, the dilemma was whether to replicate the Soviet model

of five national republics, or recognise Bosnia-Hercegovina and establish a sixth republic.

After a ‘tug-of war’ between Serbian and Muslim delegates, the former wanting

Bosnia-Hercegovina to be incorporated into Serbia, and the latter vying for an independent

republic, a decision was made. Bosnia-Hercegovina was to become its own republic within a

federal Yugoslavia, but it would contain parts of the Croatian and Serbian nations as well, not

just a Bosnian or Muslim hegemony.49 This solution was accepted thanks to Muhamed

Filipović who suggested that the national equality of the Yugoslav people be extended to

Bosnia-Hercegovina. His aim was to ensure at least the de facto recognition of the Bosnian

45
Hoare, History of Bosnia, p. 289.
46
Zachary T. Irwin, ‘The Islamic Revival and the Muslims of Bosnia-Hercegovina’, East European Quarterly
17, no. 4 (January 1984), p. 440.
47
The Constitution of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in Collected Yugoslav Laws, vol. 1
(Beograd: Union of Jurists’ Associations of Yugoslavia, 1951), p. 4.
48
Collected Yugoslav Laws, vol. 1, p. i; Edvard Kardelj, On the Principles of the Preliminary Draft of the New
Constitution of Socialist Yugoslavia (Beograd: Jugoslavija, 1963), p. 2.
49
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 181.
 27

Muslims within Yugoslavia.50 Thus, after WWII, Yugoslavia became a Socialist Federal

Republic (SFRY) made up of six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia,

Montenegro and Macedonia, and two autonomous provinces Kosovo and Vojvodina. With the

exception of Bosnia-Hercegovina, all republics represented the national state of each of the

five Yugoslav peoples. The formation of SFRY was an attempt at solving the unresolved

national question.

In this respect, Bosnia-Hercegovina represented ‘a special people’s republic’ (posebna

cjelina): portrayed as ‘little Yugoslavia’, she was considered to be a multi-ethnic, multi-

religious, and multicultural country that embodied perfectly Tito’s slogan of bratstvo i

jedinstvo.51 In 1944, together with AVNOJ, the Anti-Fascist Council for the People’s

Liberation of Bosnia-Hercegovina (Zemaljsko antifašističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja

Bosne i Hercegovine – ZAVNOBiH) released a declaration of the rights of the citizens of

Bosnia, which stated that

The people of Bosnia-Hercegovina, freely and by its own will, associates with
the peoples of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro and Macedonia in a
common state… Bosnia-Hercegovina, in which Serbs, Muslims and Croats
will live completely equally and freely, is promised in democratic and
federative Yugoslavia all the rights that belong to every federated unit.52

This declaration highlighted Bosnia-Hercegovina’s sovereign status. In December 1947 the

Constitutional Assembly of Bosnia-Hercegovina further asserted that the republic expressed

the desire to live in equal union with the SFRY because such a unity would contribute to

the happier future of the Serbs, Muslims and Croats and other Yugoslav
peoples. In such a Federation every nation is guaranteed its national
development and flowering. In a Federation of this kind, sovereignty and the
independent exercise of government are guaranteed to every Republic, except
those rights that are voluntarily transferred to the Federative People’s
Republic of Yugoslavia. The peoples of Bosnia-Hercegovina express, on the
basis of this constitution, their statehood and sovereignty.53

50
Hoare, History of Bosnia, p. 290.
51
Collected Yugoslav Laws, vol. 1, p. ii; Atif Putrivatra, Nacionalni i politički razvitak muslimana (Sarajevo,
1972), p. 52-5.
52
Cited in Hoare, History of Bosnia, p. 296.
53
Ibid., p. 315.
 28

Even so, the de jure recognition of Muslims in Yugoslavia did not emerge completely until

1971. In the lead up to 1971, Muslims were identified as the ‘undeclared’ nationality within

Bosnia-Hercegovina, in contrast to the full recognition of Serbs and Croats. The closest

Muslims gained recognition as the sixth Yugoslav nation was through Tito’s speeches and

various Yugoslav proclamations. After the Germans surrendered, Tito immediately began

instilling national pride by announcing that the people of Yugoslavia had a new goal: to

preserve their new national entities, Montenegrins and Muslims.54 In another speech, Tito

proclaimed: ‘Peoples of Yugoslavia! Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins,

Muslims! The long-desired day has dawned which you have been waiting for… you are today

united in a new and happier Yugoslavia. Instead of the old Yugoslavia, rotten with corruption

and injustice, today we have the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia of equal peoples’.55

Tito’s words fell on deaf ears as the works put forth and propagated by Bosnian-Serb

nationalist, Veselin Masleša, began to gain traction and influence Partisan ranks within

Yugoslavia.56 Generally, Masleša argued that the solution to the national question was the

assimilation of Muslims into the Serb and Croat nations. His 1942 article titled Muslimansko

pitanje (‘The Muslim Question’) provided a Marxist analysis of pre-war Muslim politics and

contained a negative assessment of Muslims as an ethnic group.57 Known as one of KPJ’s

intellectuals and respected for his Marxist writings on the political situation in Yugoslavia,

Masleša wrote: ‘in [this] analysis of the origin and development of the “Muslim Question”, we

start from the belief that Muslims are not a distinct ethnic group’. ‘Therefore,’, he continues,

‘the Muslims of Bosnia-Hercegovina are not a nation’.58

54
Josip Broz Tito, ‘We Have Won Our Liberty’ [radio transcript] in Tito, New Yugoslavia, p. 6.
55
Josip Broz Tito, ‘Victory Day’ in Josip Broz Tito, The Selected Works of Josip Broz Tito (New York: Prism
Key Press, 2013 [1945]), pp. 26-7. See also Josip Broz Tito, Nacionalno pitanje u Jugoslaviji u svjetlosti
Narodnooslobodilačke borbe (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1945), p. 12.
56
Hoare, History of Bosnia, pp. 320-1.
57
See Veselin Masleša, Dela (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 2nd ed., 1954), pp. 148-66.
58
Ibid., pp. 151-2.
 29

To justify his claims, Masleša referred to Stalin’s criteria for nationhood, arguing that

Muslims did not have their own language, territorial continuity, economic ties, or distinct

cultural characteristics. In sum, they lacked ‘the objective ingredients of nationhood’.59 From

a Socialist standpoint, Masleša’s argument was based on the claim that Muslims were a feudal

class who exploited the religious sentiment of the masses for its own interest because the

medieval Bosnian nobility only converted to Islam to preserve its feudal privileges.60 As such,

the Communists faced a contradiction in their official view, or at least presentation of, Muslim

nationhood as they increasingly favoured Masleša’s ideology. It comes of no surprise, then,

that even the status of Bosnia-Hercegovina as a posebna cjelina proved to be ironic: by the

early 1990s, it experienced a bloody civil war in which thousands of Muslims, Serbs and Croats

were killed because of their ethnic and religious affiliation.

Yet, the KPJ from the late 1940s faced major problems in foreign policy that greatly

pushed back the resolution of the national question. As mentioned, Tito and the KPJ nurtured

Stalin’s cult of personality and followed his nationalities policy. However, relations between

SFRY and the Soviet Union began to weaken, and by the Summer of 1948, Stalin expelled

Yugoslavia from Cominform – the first official international communist forum, under the

guidance of the Soviet Union.61 This stemmed from a number of factors, with the primary

reason being a change in the KPJ’s approach to the nationalities policy.62 Writing in 1945,

Slovene and federal political leader of Yugoslavia, Edvard Kardelj, insisted that the KPJ’s link

with the people be based on practices of self-management, in which different nationalities

within Yugoslavia would, as discussed, confine themselves to specific republics.63 He later

59
Ibid.
60
Ibid.
61
Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Tito, Yugoslavia’s Great Dictator: A Reassessment (London: Ohio State University
Press, 1992), pp. 50-61; Izdavački Centar Komunist, Povjest saveza komunista Jugoslavije (Beograd: Narodna
Knjiga Rad, 1985), pp. 347-59.
62
See Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 267.
63
Edvard Kardelj, ‘Snaga narodnih masa’ in Edvard Kardelj, ed., Put Nove Jugoslavije: Članci i govori iz
narodnooslobodilačke borbe (Zagreb: Kulture, 1949), p. 130.
 30

wrote about the effects of this ideological move by the KPJ in his memoir, Reminiscences,

stating that although the tradition of the October Revolution and all socialist development

henceforth ‘were all factors which influenced us in making a large part of our Constitution’,

the final draft was only ‘in form’ a copy of the Soviet Constitution.64 This was because by the

end of the 1940s the KPJ began to develop their own voice in order to accommodate to its

unique multi-national structure. According to Noel Malcolm, this shift away from Stalin proved

that ‘Tito had always pursued an independent, liberal-minded and anti-Stalinist line’.65

This break with Stalin had far-reaching consequences within Yugoslavia. As Tito began

the gradual liberalisation of the Yugoslav society, the central structure that held Yugoslavia

together weakened as a rivalry between the Republic and the Yugoslav nation emerged.66 This

rivalry – largely between Muslims and the KPJ – challenged the KPJ’s ‘liberal’ ideology of

equality and freedom for all Yugoslav peoples as it did Tito’s slogan of bratstvo i jedinstvo.

The tension between Muslims and the KPJ was the result of the KPJ’s contradictory policy

toward the Muslim national question. On the one hand, the Party had a deep conviction that

Muslims could not be a nation, yet, in practice, they treated Muslims as an ethnic group on

equal national footing with Serbs and Croats. Gradually, Muslims were defined as being strictly

a religious group and from 1946, the KPJ began to suppress Muslim religious expression.

Muslims and the Census

While all three nations faced religious persecution under the Communist state, it was the

Islamic community that was the most targeted. For Sabrina P. Ramet this was because the

Islamic community was weak and the most pliable, in comparison to the Orthodox or Catholic

64
Edvard Kardelj, Reminiscences – The Struggle for Recognition and Independence: The New Yugoslavia,
1944-1957 (Wimbledon: Blond & Briggs, 1982), p. 73.
65
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 194.
66
Donia, Iznevjerena tradicija, p. 137; Warren Zimmerman, Origins of a Catastrophe (New York: Random
House, 1999), p. 16.
 31

churches.67 However, Malcolm maintains that it was because the KPJ was threatened by Islam’s

private practices and viewed Islam as being backward and Asiatic.68 He writes that the

suppression of Muslims in their daily activities under the Communist Yugoslav state began as

early as 1946 when courts of Islamic law were suppressed; in 1950 the Islamic mektebs

(schools) were closed down and the teaching of children in mosques deemed illegal. In

Sarajevo, the Muslim printing press was closed down until 1964 in an effort to stop the printing

and dissemination of Islamic textbooks and other materials.69 Muslim women were also

targeted. From 1947, the Anti-Fascist Front of Women attempted to persuade Muslim women

in Yugoslavia to abandon ‘oppressive’ Islamic wear – the veil, the hijab, and the burka. This

attempt failed, causing the Bosnian Parliament to condemn Muslim dress by passing a law on

20 September 1950.70 The oppression of Muslim women did not end in Yugoslavia. It

continued into the Bosnian War, where rape was used as a tool against the nation: ‘a raped

Croat or Bosniak woman stands for a raped Croatia or Bosnia’.71

It was during this time that the KPJ shifted the linguistic style and definition of the

Serbo-Croat word Musliman (Muslim). Here, Muslim identity was split into two distinct

categories based on the capitalisation of the letter ‘M’: in uppercase form the word Musliman

denoted a national identity, while lowercase ‘m’ referred to muslims as followers of Islam, or

members of the Islamic community, regardless of their national identity. Hoare maintains that

this transition of the term Musliman ‘signified the regime’s unambiguous reversion to the view

that the Muslims were simply a religious group rather than a nationality’.72 This very act

‘downgraded the autonomy of the Islamic community and the national status of the Muslim

67
Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias, p. 198.
68
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 195.
69
Ibid.
70
Hoare, History of Bosnia, p. 323.
71
Vesna Kesić, ‘Muslim Women, Croatian Women, Serbian Women, Albanian Women…’ in Dušan I. Bjelić
and Obrad Savić, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalisation and Fragmentation (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2002), p. 312.
72
Hoare, History of Bosnia, p. 323.
 32

nation’.73 This transition, along with the suppression of Islamic thought and practice, pushed

Muslim intellectuals to engage in the constitution of Yugoslavia Muslims as a nation with the

other five peoples of Yugoslavia. As noted, the status of Muslims was still based on de facto

recognition. The move, now, was for de jure recognition.

Foremost in this struggle were Husag Ćišić and Muhamed Hadžijahić. Their struggle

for the national recognition of Muslims was in reaction to the new Yugoslav coat of arms – an

emblem made up of five torches, representing the five recognised Yugoslav nations: Serbs,

Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and Montenegrins. Not included, was the Muslim nation. As a

delegate in the Yugoslav Constituent Assembly, Ćišić drafted an amendment to the accepted

coat of arms in an effort to ensure the addition of a sixth torch. However, his objective was not

to specifically recognise Muslims, but the Bosnian nation. His reasoning was based on the fact

that a ‘Muslim’ national denomination obscures the national consciousness of Bosnians.74 The

Constituent Assembly rejected his proposal, causing Ćišić to protest by being the only member

of the Constituent Assembly to vote against the decision. On the other hand, the scholar

Hadžijahić argued that ‘the Muslim masses are not satisfied by the state coat-of-arms showing

only five torches as the symbols of the five nations’, and demanded for the addition of a sixth

torch to ‘formally show that the Muslims are a subject equal to their brother Serbs, Croats,

Slovenes, Macedonians and Montenegrins…’75 The difference between Ćišić and Hadžijahić

was that the former wanted the recognition of a Bosnian nation while the latter emphasised

Muslim nationhood. Nevertheless, the Constituent Assembly, again, rejected the proposal.

Their reasoning was that the question of whether Muslims are a national group had no definitive

answer, for ‘that is a theoretical question over which people can argue one way or the other,

but which in any case cannot be solved by decree’.76

73
Ibid., pp. 323-4.
74
Filandra, Bošnjačka politika, pp. 202-4.
75
Quoted in ibid., p. 206.
76
Ibid.
 33

How the affirmation of the Bosniak nation developed from de facto to de jure

recognition can be best understood by analysing the census data carried out throughout

Communist Yugoslavia until 1991. Conducted by the state, censuses represent a form of

national accounting. For Anderson, they are a tool used by the state to determine what

‘belonged here, not there’, to make distinctions, draw borders and allow governments to

distinguish among religions, peoples, languages and regions.77 In this way, the census is an

apparatus used by the state to ‘make a society legible’.78 In the case of Yugoslavia, the changes

in census data from 1948 until 1991 illuminate how competing notions of ‘real’ identity can

scientifically legitimate the existence of a socially imagined group. Here, the nation is

nationalised, seen as an institutionalised form that is contingent and interchangeable.79 In

Yugoslavia, it was the Muslim nation that was subject to nationalism’s contingent nature.

In the 1948 census, religious identification by the peoples of Bosnia-Hercegovina was

proscribed because of its impact on Serbian and Croatian communities. This meant that it

would contradict KPJ’s efforts to separate national from religious identification.80 As a result,

the 1948 census provided three options for Muslims: they could identify as being either Muslim

Serbs, Muslim Croats or as neopredeljeni muslimani (‘Muslims, nationally undeclared’). While

still denied the opportunity of a national identity and further yet, having their ‘Muslim’ identity

divided into three parts, this option nevertheless allowed Bosnian Muslims to demonstrate their

unwillingness to be assimilated into the Serbian or Croatian nation. The 1948 census thus

reported that of the 885,689 Muslims living in Bosnia-Hercegovina, 71,991 declared

77
Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 184.
78
James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
(New York: Yale University, 1998), p. 2.
79
Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 164; Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, p. 18.
80
Irwin, ‘The Islamic Revival’, pp. 442-3.
 34

themselves as Serbs and 25,295 as Croats, with an overwhelming 778,403 registering as

‘Muslims, nationally undeclared’.81

The 1948 census proved controversial. So much so that the 1953 census dropped any

reference to Muslimani and replaced it with, instead, Jugosloveni neopredeljeni (‘Yugoslav,

nationally undeclared’).82 This was done by the KPJ in an attempt to rectify the religious and

national divide occurring throughout Yugoslavia; the official policy now promoted the spirit

of ‘Yugoslavism’ which came to life predominately after the Yugoslav conflict with the Soviet

Union. In Bosnia-Hercegovina, alone, the 1953 census recorded 891,800 ‘Yugoslavs,

nationally undeclared’ of which the majority were Muslims.83 Even the 1953 census became

controversial, particularly for Muslims on the basis that Yugoslav law ensures the freedom of

national expression and identification, which is the source for the equality of all Yugoslav

peoples and their nations (chapter 5, article 21 and 25 of the Constitution).84 Forcing Yugoslav

nationhood on an already distinct nation meant reverting back to the earlier period where

‘Muslims were determined to be Serbs or Croats from the national viewpoint’ and thus

suppressing religious and national expression.85 A similar concept arose in Soviet Russia,

where Soviet elites sought to organise a Soviet nation-state by introducing the doctrine of

sovetskii narod (Soviet People) as a ‘new historical community’.86 However, as with the case

of Yugoslavism, it was never completely institutionalised state-wide because the socialist

nationalities policy centred around the prerogative of sub-state ethnonational groups.87

81
Konačni rezultati popisa stanovništva od 15 Marta 1948 godine: Stanovništvo po narodnosti (Beograd:
Savezni zavod za statistiku, vol. IX, 1954), p. xviii.
82
Popis stanovništva 1953: Vitalna i etnička obeležja (Beograd: Savezni zavod za statistiku, vol. I, 1959), p.
xxxviii.
83
Ibid., p. lxviii; Džaja, Politička realnost Jugoslovenstva, pp. 262-3.
84
Collected Yugoslav Laws, vol. 1, p. 4.
85
Irwin, ‘The Islamic Revival’, p. 444.
86
Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda, Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR
(New York: Free Press, 1990), p. 186.
87
Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, p. 28.
 35

In the next census in 1961, the category Muslimani, etnički pripadnost (‘Muslim in the

ethnic sense’) was thus introduced. It recoded that 842,248 (25.70 per cent) of the population

of Bosnia-Hercegovina declared themselves as the latter.88 This led to the decline in the self-

identification as Yugoslav between 1961 and 1971 as Muslims continued to refuse to be

lumped together with the dominant national groups – Serbs and Croats.89 It was in 1968 when

Muslims were finally constitutionally recognised as Muslimani u smislu narodnosti (‘Muslims

as a nationality’).90 The Bosnian Constitution stated: ‘bound together by their past common

life, their quest and struggle for freedom and social progress, the Serbs, Muslims and Croats…

have found themselves for the first time free, equal and as close as brothers in their

Republic…’91 This decision was influenced by Muslim intellectuals and writers, like Avdo

Sućeska, who claimed that Muslim identity has a social basis. It is

an individual ethnic community which developed in Bosnia-Hercegovina as a

specific narod [nation] with certain interests and aspirations […] in contrast
with the non-Muslims […] Muslim society was total and complete, that it had
all social classes and groups: spahis, an ulema, an urban layer, a free peasantry
and serfs.92

Although he implied that the national determination of Muslims emerged as a result of the

socialist system, he nevertheless gave credit to the formation of a distinct national group.

Husein Đozo, one of the leaders of the Islamic community, also attempted to explain the

significance of the double meaning of Musliman upon stressing the benefits behind the

linguistic distinctions of the term. Writing in 1970, he explained:

From now on, the term musliman is no longer marked only by members of the
Islamic faith, but it also includes members of the Muslim nation, regardless if
the member is a believer of the Islamic faith or not […] It would seem that

88
Popis stanovništva 1961: Vitalna, etnička i migraciona obeležja (Beograd: Savezni zavod za statistiku, vol. I,
1970), pp. lvi, 26; Džaja, Politička realnost Jugoslovenstva, p. 263.
89
There was a 73 per cent drop in the self-identification as a Yugoslav. Ibid., p. 26; Duško Sukulić, et. al., ‘Who
Were the Yugoslavs? Failed Sources of a Common Identity in the Former Yugoslavia’, American Sociological
Review 59, no. 1 (February 1994), p. 84.
90
The Yugoslav census recognised Muslims in 1971. Popis stanovništva i stanova 1971: Stanovništvo –
Vitalna, etnička i migraciona obeležja (Beograd: Savezni zavod za statistiku, vol. I, 1974), p. 12.
91
Ustav Socialističke Republike Bosne i Hercegovine sa ustavnim amandmanima i ustavnim zakonima
(Sarajevo: Novinska ustanova ‘Službeni list SR BiH’, 1969), pp. 7-8.
92
Avdo Sućeska, ‘Istoriske osnove nacionalne posebnosti Bosanski-Hercegovackih Muslimana’, Jugoslovenski
Istoriski Časopis 30, no. 4 (1969), p. 50.
 36

this is where Islam loses. Undeniably, it is as if the formal word Musliman

stands separately and as distantly as possible from Islam. This is not the case.
I would say, that here is a case where the Islamic religion has returned rather
than been alienated. The lowercase ‘m’ does not indicate loss, rather it adds
[to the significance of the Islamic faith]. It is the uppercase ‘M’ that further
strengthens and solidifies [the national and religious entity of the Muslim
identity] … Indeed, the lowercase ‘m’ is the basis for the uppercase ‘M’
without which the term would remain empty – a phrase without a meaning.93

What his explanation of Muslim identity highlights is the way the Islamic community becomes

a substitute for the national institution of Bosnian Muslims. In this sense, the Islamic

community appears to be the vanguard in the affirmation of the Muslim nation.94 It is this role

of Islam in the Muslim national identity that explains how the Bosnian Muslim Islamic

movement, Mladi Muslimani, re-emerged, at least in form, in the 1960s, were charged with

religious fundamentalism, and faced oppression by the KPJ. Regardless, the census data

showed that the number of those who declared themselves Muslims increased with each data

collection, so that the last census collected before the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 indicated

that in Bosnia-Hercegovina alone, a relative majority (43.70 per cent) of Muslims subsided.95

The liberalisation of Yugoslav society gradually led to the reawakening of national

movements within Yugoslavia who sought greater rights for their nation and acknowledgement

of their national identity. These national movements were suppressed to ensure Communist

control over Yugoslavia. However, after Tito’s death in 1980 Yugoslavia faced a new wave of

nationalism and national recognition as cries of inequality developed. Evidently, Communist

Yugoslavia suffered from the very disease that destroyed its predecessor, the Kingdom of

93
Emphasis added. Husein Đozo, ‘Islam i Musliman’, Glasnik Vrhovnog islamskog starješinstva u SFRJ 33,
nos. 5-6 (May/June 1970), p. 205.
94
Xavier Bougarel, ‘Od “Muslimana” do “Bošnjaka”: Pitanje nacionalnog imena bosanskih muslimana’, in
Husnija Kamberović, ed., Rasprave o nacionalnom identitetu Bošnjaka: Zbornik radova (Sarajevo: Institut za
Istoriju, 2009), pp. 122-3.
95
Džaja, Politička realnost Jugoslovenstva, p. 265. Today, there are no reliable statistics available on the
population census for Bosnia-Hercegovina. This has been the result of war losses, post-war emigration, and
large-scale displacements within and outside the country. Writing in 2001, Drazen Simic argued that the
absence of a proper census count meant that political and quasi-national interests were being served, where the
population of Republika Srpska is exaggerated and the number of Croats living in Bosnia-Hercegovina
underestimated. Since 1991 census, census data remains disputed among the three nations. Drazen Simic, ‘How
Many Inhabitants Does Bosnia Have? The Only Country without a Population Census’, AIM (28 April 2001).
 37

Yugoslavia: the still unresolved national question. Yet since the death of Tito to the collapse

of Yugoslavia in 1990, there existed numerous attempts by the KPJ to save Yugoslavia and

prevent nationalist fire. As will be discussed in the following chapter, such attempts were

ordinary show trials against political opponents as was the case with the trial of Muslim

intellectuals in Sarajevo in 1983, presumed to have been led by Alija Izetbegović.

 38

CHAPTER TWO:
Alija Izetbegović and the 1983 Sarajevo Trials

The manifest feelings of the Muslim masses need an idea which would move
and direct them, but this cannot be just any idea. It must be one which
corresponds to their deepest feelings. It can only, therefore, be an Islamic idea.

– Alija Izetbegović, 1990 [1970]96

The illusion of bratstvo i jedinstvo led to the destabilisation of the Yugoslav state, and when

Yugoslavia eventually collapsed in the early 1990s, the Bosnian Muslim nation found itself in

a difficult position. Whereas other Yugoslav republics had long since acquired a national party

to not only represent their republic but the interests of their nation, Bosnian Muslims were

deprived of any sense of national affirmation.97 It was Alija Izetbegović, as a Muslim

intellectual, who attempted to reaffirm the national sovereignty of Bosnian Muslims. His

political agenda centred around the creation of an Islamic society and Islamic community in

Bosnia-Hercegovina; however, his ideology tended to shift, back and forth, from Islamic

conservatism to religious nationalism. This chapter examines how Izetbegović’s Islamska

Deklaracija, a manifesto published in 1970, caused a stir within Communist Yugoslavia for its

content on politics and Islam, which was often misinterpreted by Yugoslav authorities and

later, nationalist Serbs, as a manifesto of Sharia Law. While his book Islam između istoka i

zapada (Islam Between East and West), published in 1983, expressed more thoroughly the

place of Islam in the world, it was Islamska Deklaracija that thrust Izetbegović into prison with

thirteen others accused – albeit falsely – for collaborating with him.98 The chapter explores how

both his works influenced the re-emergence of separatist movements within Bosnia-

Hercegovina, such as the Mladi Muslimani, for their indirect political commentary on the

96
Alija Izetbegović, Islamska Deklaracija: Jedan program islamizacije muslimana i muslimanskih naroda
(Sarajevo: Bosna, 1990 [1970]), p. 20.
97
Mustafa Čengić, Alija Izetbegović: Jahac apokalipse ili anđeo mira (Sarajevo: Kult B, 2015), p. 103.
98
Alija Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions: Autobiographical Notes, trans. Saba Rissaluddin and Jasmina
Izetbegović (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 2003), pp. 31-33.
 39

ineffectiveness of the Communist regime. The Mladi Muslimani saw this as ammunition to

continue their struggle against Muslim suppression.99

Alija Izetbegović: A Political Dissident

Born in Bosanski Šamac, overlooking the rivers Bosna and Sava, Izetbegović later moved to

Sarajevo where he completed his studies in Agronomy and, afterward, Law. His grandmother

was Turkish and his grandfather had lived in Belgrade most his life, while both his parents

were born and bred in Bosnia. Izetbegović’s religiosity stemmed partly from his mother’s

devotion to Islam; however, by age fifteen, he wavered in his faith. In his memoir, he attributed

this doubt to the immense influence communist ideology had on the youth of his time of which

most communist propaganda was ‘disseminated illegally by means of various brochures that

circulated from hand to hand’. ‘In communist propaganda,’ he wrote, ‘God was on the side of

injustice, since the Communists saw religion as the “opium of the people” – a means of allaying

people’s unease so that they would not strive for a better life in the world of reality’.100 Despite

this, Izetbegović recalled feeling uneasy with such propaganda and made the conclusion that a

universe without God was a universe without meaning.101

Just months before the fall of Yugoslavia to the Axis powers, Izetbegović joined the

Mladi Muslimani, a movement of intellectuals claiming to be the voice of Bosnian Muslims

under the Communist regime. The movement based itself off Islam and two opposing forces:

anti-Fascism and anti-Communism. During its early political climate, from its formation in

1939 until the end of WWII, the Mladi Muslimani sought the spiritual, cultural and educational

revival of Bosnian Muslims under the principles of Islam. According to Izetbegović, it sprouted

under the circumstances in which ‘Mehmed Spaho had just died, the Muslim nation was

99
See Sead Trhulj, Mladi Muslimani (Zagreb: Globus, 1992).
100
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. 13.
101
Ibid.
 40

decapitated, the partition of Bosnia was implemented and the identity of the Muslims directly

threatened’.102 It was their goal, therefore, to unite ‘the Muslims of the whole world’ to establish

‘a great Muslim state’.103

The official launch of the organisation came in 1941 under the premises of the Muslim

society called Trezvenost, in which the founding assembly was led by medicine graduate from

Zagreb, Tarik Muftić. During its first meeting, the organisation aimed to register itself to the

authorities, but the outbreak of WWII prevented the registration and the organisation remained

illegal.104 While the political activity of the Mladi Muslimani was not seen as the major threat

to the Communists during this time, once the war ended, their mission to counter the

communist suppression of Muslim identity intensified and it was during this later period that

their political activity increased. In an effort to spread their Islamic ideology and inform the

Islamic world about the plight of Muslim worshippers under the communist Yugoslav regime,

members of the organisation travelled abroad to other Muslim-majority countries, primarily

Egypt and Turkey, and sought collaboration. This act horrified communist authorities who tried

to dissuade the group and, when unable to do so, began to arrest activists as early as 1946 –

making this group of Young Muslims the first to be charged and sentenced.105

No precise data exists on the number of members that were arrested due to the lack of

preserved records, though it is believed that most were condemned without a hearing and faced

either community service or two years in prison. However, this was not the case for all.

102
Quoted in Trhulj, Mladi Muslimani [interview with Izetbegović] (Zagreb: Globus, 1992), p. 57. In the first
decade of the existence of the Yugoslav state and between the two world wars, Mehmed Spaho was the most
prominent Bosniak politician. His political activity centred around the Jugoslav Muslim Organisation
(Jugoslavenska Muslimanska Organizacija – JMO), established in 1919. JMO acted as the patron of the
religious interests of Muslims within Yugoslavia, while also addressing the wider Islamic community. They
sought constitutional guarantees of equality of the Islamic Community and a special place in the agrarian
question, which became the central problem in early Yugoslavia. Husnija Kamberović, Mehmed Spaho (1883-
1939) Politička biografija (Sarajevo: Vijeće Kongresa bošnjački intelektualaca, 2009), pp. 25-7. For further
information on the JMO see Atif Purivatra, Jugoslavenska Muslimanska Organizacija u političkom životu
kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenca (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 2nd ed., 1977).
103
Ibid., p. 59.
104
Ibid., p. 58.
105
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, pp. 16-19.
 41

Assumptions range widely as to the number of members who faced trial and the circumstances

of their fate: ‘some are adamant that those convicted did not reach more than a thousand, though

there are thought to be nearly five thousand people either arrested, tortured, persecuted,

sentenced or killed during the investigation process and after the trial occurred’, of which a

majority were Muslim intellectuals.106 As a result of these trials, the Mladi Muslimani were

labelled a terrorist organisation – the enemy of communist ideology. In an interview with Sead

Trhulj, Izetbegović described the relationship between the KPJ and the Mladi Muslimani,

arguing that they were also anti-fascists, thus the grounds for persecution were unfounded:

The Communists have always had a tendency to look for a parallelism of the
three peoples in Bosnia-Hercegovina. So that if a wrong action is conducted
by the Serbian people, then it is also to be found among the Croatian people,
but it should be something like that for the Muslims. When it comes to war
engagements, it was a little difficult for Muslims to find the right thing that
would equate to the Ustaša or Četnik movement and crimes, and thus were the
Mladi Muslimani accused, which was completely groundless. The Mladi
Muslimani were anti-Communist, but they were also anti-Fascists.107

While Izetbegović was among those imprisoned from 1946 to 1949, he recounted that the worst

came in 1983 at the Sarajevo trials. For him, the initial trials only increased communist terror

against Muslim intellectuals, and were ‘part of the whole showdown, during which there were

mass arrests throughout Bosnia, beginning with a raid on the organisation in Mostar. With the

1949-51 trials, the organisation was completely destroyed – all its leading members were in

prison, the rest had fled or were in hiding…’.108

The persecution of the organisation also increased as a result of the publication of

Izetbegović’s Islamska Deklaracija. This manifesto was to indirectly become the strongest

ideological pillar of the organisation (and later the SDA), which brought not only Izetbegović

106
Those charged included: Hasan Biber, a locksmith from Sarajevo; Halid Kajtaz, a hođa (Imam) from
Sarajevo; Omer Stupac, an accountant from Mostar; Nusret Fazlibegović, a student from Mostar; Ismet
Serdarević, a student from Zagreb; Tarik Muftić, a graduate of medicine from Zagreb; Tawfiq Velagić,
agronomy student from Zagreb; Hilmi Muftić, a medical student from Sarajevo and Esad Kojic, a student of the
Madrasa in Sarajevo. The first three were sentenced to death by a firing squad, while Serdarević was sentenced
to twenty years, Muftić to sixteen years, Velagić to fifteen years, and the others received less than ten years.
Trhulj, Mladi Muslimani (Zagreb: Globus, 1992), pp. 20, 28.
107
Ibid., p. 60.
108
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, pp. 22-23.
 42

out of animosity, but most members of the movement like prominent political activist and later,

politician, Omer Behmen. As Charles Tilly argues, the effect of a social movement on a society

as a whole can occur from a movement’s claims, their actions, the effects of events and actions

outside their sphere, or all, or any combination of these three factors.109 It was Izetbegović’s

Islamska Deklaracija that definitely challenged, and changed, the fate of the Mladi Muslimani.

Islamska Deklaracija
In his introduction, Izetbegović states that Islamska Deklaracija is not written to prove the

superiority of Islam over other systems or schools of thought. Rather, he advocates for a deep

religious-political reform within the Muslim world, which, in short, is the Islamisation of

Muslims. However, this text stood in opposition to the socialist East and the capitalist West

who were attempting to impose their ideology onto Muslims; for Izetbegović, the Islamic world

did not belong to them, but to the Muslim peoples. He states that the aim of the declaration is

the ‘implementation of Islam in all areas of personal individual life, in the family and in society,

through the renewal of Islamic religious thought and the creation of a unified Islamic

community from Morocco to Indonesia’.110 The dominant idea in the declaration, thus, is that

‘only Islam can reawaken the imagination of the Muslim masses and render them capable of

being once again active participants in their own history’.111 It is for this reason that the

declaration makes no mention of Bosnia-Hercegovina, or Yugoslavia, and focuses instead on

the general Muslim masses and their struggle against oppression.

Despite his claims, the content of his declaration received backlash. Mustafa Čengić, a

graduate in literature studies from Sarajevo and apparent critic of Izetbegović, argued that

109
Charles Tilly, ‘Conclusion: From Interactions to Outcomes in Social Movements’, in Marco G. Giugni, Doug
McAdam and Charles Tilly, eds., How Social Movements Matter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), p. 269.
110
Izetbegović, Islamska Deklaracija, p. 3.
111
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. 25.
 43

politicians (i.e. Izetbegović) who theorise about power tend to produce concise works that

address core issues. But their works also tend to be simplified and synthesised, ‘leaving no

room for doubt or alternatives’.112 As such, he writes that Izetbegović’s Islamska Deklaracija

opened up a new avenue of conflict: it complicated the normalisation of interethnic relations

within Bosnia-Hercegovina, due to its insistence on ‘the full implementation of Sharia Law on

all spheres of life…’ and because Izetbegović ‘never clearly specified whether Islam was the

alternative to the modern, secularised society in Bosnia-Hercegovina’.113 Moreover, Čengić

quotes a passage from Izetbegović’s declaration to substantiate his claims. After stating that

everything Izetbegović advocated bared the stamp of Islam, he added:

There is no independence and freedom without Islam… A Muslim generally does not
exist as an individual. If they want to live and survive as a Muslim, he must change
the world or will have to be substituted. History does not know any true Islamic
movement that was not, too, a political movement.114

Isolating this passage from the declaration highlights one thing: the desire for a pan-Islamic

state, one which belittles and leaves no room for non-Muslims. The intention of this passage

as expressed by Izetbegović removes itself far from such claims. One thing is clear in his

Islamska Deklaracija: that there cannot be an Islamic government without an Islamic society,

and the latter only exists when the absolute majority of the people are sincere and practising

Muslims. ‘Without this majority’, he writes, ‘the Islamic order is reduced to mere power

(because an Islamic society is lacking), and can turn into tyranny.’115

Moreover, Izetbegović was one of the few politicians in the former Yugoslavia that

struggled the longest to keep Yugoslavia united, or at least, to avoid an outbreak of war in

Bosnia-Hercegovina. His concern stemmed from the increasing nationalistic and antagonistic

political climate throughout the 1980s, one which saw the development and publication of the

112
Čengić, Jahac apokalipse, pp. 141-2.
113
Ibid., pp. 139-40.
114
Izetbegović, Islamska Deklaracija, pp. 22, 35.
115
Ibid., p. 37.
 44

Serbian Memorandum in 1986. This memorandum proclaimed that the national question of the

Serbian people had been thwarted by the Communist regime, where the Serbian nation ‘did not

have the right, unlike national minorities, to use their own language and alphabet, to get

politically and culturally organised, to develop the unique culture of their nation’.116 Based on

this reasoning, it further stated that it is the ‘historical and democratic right of the Serbian

people to establish their full national integrity’ regardless of which republic they subside in.117

Recognising their struggle would mean the existence of a strong Yugoslavia.118 This

memorandum echoed earlier claims of Serbian hegemony.

Unlike the Memorandum, Islamska Deklaracija only once indirectly referred to the

political status of Bosnian Muslims in Yugoslavia at the time: ‘Muslim minorities comprised

in non-Muslim communities, so long as there is a guarantee of religious freedom and normal

life and development, are loyal and are obliged to carry out all obligations towards that

community, except those which harm Islam and Muslims’.119 Hoare asserts that Izetbegović’s

Islam was not ‘an expansionist, hegemonist religion to be imposed on non-Muslims by force’,

it was a ‘peaceful, inward-looking religion that would enable Muslims to achieve a harmonious

society independently from non-Muslims’.120 As such, in the early 1990s, Izetbegović shifted

his earlier outlook of a unified Bosnia-Hercegovina in which Muslims would be outnumbered

by Christians, in favour of a rump Bosnian republic with a Muslim majority. According to

Malcolm, this was because the Bosnian republic understood that ‘signs of religiously-

motivated politics among the Muslims’ as well as the ‘new alliance of nationalism and

Orthodoxy among the Serbs’ would, if provoked by the former, supply ammunition to the

latter.121 What prompted this change?

116
SANU, ‘Memorandum’, Naše teme 33, nos. 1-2 (1989), p. 139.
117
Ibid., p. 161.
118
Ibid., p. 163.
119
Izetbegović, Islamska Deklaracija, pp. 37-8.
120
Hoare, The History of Bosnia, p. 375.
121
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 207.
 45

For one, Izetbegović’s Islamska Deklaracija was written during his early political

activism. As a young dogmatic Mladi Musliman, Izetbegović carried with him both the

religious attitude inspired by his mother and the ideology of the early period of the Mladi

Muslimani. Indeed, Tarik Muftić, the head of the organisation, wrote about the position of

Islam in the world, which is echoed throughout Izetbegović’s declaration. Writing for the

review El-Hidaje in 1942, Muftić expressed his frustration at the ‘desperate state’ of the young

Bosnian Muslim, and thus proclaimed that the solution was to ‘return to the bosom of Islam,

because only through Islam will we find ourselves and would become once again men fit to

live, who could freely and without fear look to their future’.122 This can only be realised if Islam

is taken ‘as it is’. What he means by this is that there is a need to move away from the

reductionist view of Islam as relating to belief and the performance of rites. For him, Islam is

a way of life for ‘more than 400 million inhabitants belonging to the most diverse races and

peoples, but brothers [in religion]’.123 Moreover, when Izetbegović wrote and subsequently

published Islamska Deklaracija, it was during a time when the status of Bosnian Muslims was

still unclear as the communist authorities struggled to solve the Muslim national question. This

climate was full of uncertainty, and Izetbegović had only the Mladi Muslimani to rely on.

While Islam između istoka i zapada had a similar political and religious agenda as

Islamska Deklaracija, it expressed more thoroughly the place of Islam in the world. Influenced

by the Cold War climate, Izetbegović expressed in his Islam između istoka i zapada that

The modern world is characterised by a sharp ideological encounter. All of us

are involved in it, whether as its partakers or as its victims. What is the place
of Islam in this gigantic confrontation? Does it have a part in the shaping of
the present world?124

122
Cited in Xavier Bougarel, ‘From Young Muslims to Party of Democratic Action: The Emergence of a Pan-
Islamist Trend in Bosnia-Hercegovina’, trans. Asma Rashid, Islamic Studies 36, nos. 2-3 (Summer/Autumn
1997), p. 536
123
Ibid., p. 537.
124
Alija Izetbegović, Islam između istoka i zapada (Sarajevo: Svijetlost, 1984), p. xxv.
 46

A double meaning can be detracted from this written statement. Firstly, Izetbegović was

writing about the bipolar division of the world at the time – the division between the communist

East and the capitalist West that defined the Cold War. During this period there was a

continuing state of military tension, political conflict, and economic competition between

Western countries (primarily the USA) and the Eastern bloc (primarily the USSR). However,

he was also hinting at a deeper ideological conflict, that between religion and materialism, and

then asks whether Islam fits within or outside these two ideological spheres. His book thus is

about the presentation of the dualism of the world and attempts to place a third – Islam – into

the mix. He states that these three world views ‘reflect three elemental possibilities

(conscience, nature, and man)…’ and it is Islam that unifies ‘spirit and matter, the highest form

of which is man himself’.125 In this way, Islam acts as the ‘bipolar-unity’: the solution to the

dual conflict between religion and materialism.

Izetbegović moved away from the rigid understanding of Islam that influenced much

of the earlier members of the Mladi Muslimani and presented Islam as a principle:

The basic principle of Islam reminds us of the pattern in which life was
created… To define Islam as a principle is of essential importance for its
future development. It has been said many times – quite correctly – that Islam
and the Islamic world have become stereotyped and closed.126

By understanding Islam as a principle, the Muslim world is given the opportunity to progress

and develop. One of the many things that the Mladi Muslimani were concerned about was the

inability of the Muslim youth to gain a proper Islamic education due to atheist propaganda –

one that affected Izetbegović, too, in his youth. As a result of this, the Islamic community, or

ulema, failed in their task of providing spiritual and political leadership. In a conversation with

journalist Nedžad Latić, Izetbegović explained the reason behind the writing of Islam između

istoka i zapada: ‘When we write this, imagine before your eyes, a young Muslim, who will

125
Ibid.
126
Ibid., p. xxx.
 47

read the book somewhere in the Islamic world.’127 The difference between Islamska

Deklaracija and Islam između istoka i zapada, is that the former was produced during his early

political activity and expressed broadly the state of Muslims in the world, while the latter

provided insight into a more experienced and wise Islamic philosopher who placed Islam

between two dominant ideologies.

Although his Islam između istoka i zapada provided a concise and clear perspective on

Islam’s place in the world when it emerged in 1984 while Izetbegović was in prison, it was

Islamska Deklaracija that caused Izetbegović to face fourteen years in prison, with thirteen

others accused – albeit falsely – for collaborating with him. This was despite the fact that

Islamska Deklaracija was written approximately ten years after such accusations took place.

While ‘social movements are rational efforts aiming at social change,’ writes Giugni, ‘their

consequences are often unintended and are not always related to their demands’.128 There was

immediate concern regarding Izetbegović’s political and religious aspirations. In an interview

with Dani, Dr Halid Čaušević said that Alija Izetbegović ‘was an orthodox Muslim’ and it was

because of this that their friendship faced friction:

We saw each other, talked, but never did we converse about something that
was not interesting to Izetbegović, except the Islamisation of Muslims. This
was out of the ordinary because he knew that I had, in this respect, a liberal
view on the matter; especially when I read his Islamska Deklaracija, which to
me is fundamentally unacceptable. I then further told him, before the war:
“Alija, brother, where is this going? With these actions we will get nowhere
in Europe. In an instant we will be expelled from this little piece of Europe in
which we find ourselves.”129

While not directly expelled, Muslim intellectuals, some of whom were members of the Mladi

Muslimani, faced yet another set of trials in Sarajevo in 1983. Often referred to as the Sarajevo

Process, these trials gave Serbian and Croatian orientalists and communist propagandists the

127
Nedžad Latić, Boja Povijesti – Izetbegovićeve godine 1983-2003 (Brčko: Bemust, 2003), p. 158.
128
Marco G. Giugni, ‘Introduction – How Social Movements Matter: Past Research, Present Problems, Future
Developments’, in Marco G. Giugni, Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly, eds., How Social Movements Matter
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. xxi.
129
Nerzuk Ćurak, ‘Čaušević’, Dani (24 November 1997), p. 9.
 48

ammunition to discredit the Muslim nation in Yugoslavia by putting forth their hegemonic and

nationalistic ideologies. What these trials reveal is the way in which the Muslim nation faced

extreme suppression and backlash by the KPJ, rendering any progress that occurred earlier on

the Muslim national question, obsolete.

1983 Sarajevo Trials

In March 1983, a long-prepared police operation began throughout Bosnia-Hercegovina

against Bosnian Muslim intellectuals and their families. More than a thousand were detained

for questioning for committing ‘hostile and counter-revolutionary acts’ derived from ‘Muslim

nationalism’, i.e. the political and religious ideologies put forth by the Mladi Muslimani.130 The

leading defendant of this trial was Izetbegović solely because of his Islamska Deklaracija.

According to the prosecution, Islamska Deklaracija was a manifesto that called for the creation

of an ethnically pure Bosnian Muslim state. Despite refuting their claims by arguing that the

declaration made no reference to Bosnia-Hercegovina, or Yugoslavia for that matter, such

details did not detain the court.131 In his autobiography, Izetbegović wrote that ‘it was obvious

that the interrogators were not interested in the truth; their task was to accuse us and to prove

us guilty as charged.’132

The trial process was based off fabricated witness statements and accusations against

former members of the Mladi Muslimani. Izetbegović’s friend, Rušid Prguda, who avoided

being tried based on ill health and a year later died, had sent Izetbegović his written statement

drawn up during the interrogations. In his statement, Prguda could not understand why the state

needed to fabricate its enemies, ‘to trump up acts’ that no one committed. He then questioned

130
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 208.
131
Ibid.
132
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. 30. For a general overview of the trial, see Muzej Alija Izetbegović,
‘Biography – The Sarajevo Trial’. Available at: http://www.muzejalijaizetbegovic.ba/en/biografija.php?id=34,
accessed on 01/10/2016.
 49

the integrity of the trial, stating: ‘are believers second-class citizens in this country? Does the

state really feel itself threatened by twelve Muslim intellectuals… people who don’t even know

one another? Is the purpose to intimidate the Muslims?’133 These questions not only highlight

the unsubstantiated basis of the trials, but also show how the KPJ actively sought out to

incriminate Bosnian Muslims solely based on their faith. Still, the prosecution continued.

Using article 114 of the constitution (conspiracy against the state), the prosecutor

argued that Islamska Deklaracija was ‘an attack on the values of our social order. In it there

lie abstract danger, written and verbal delict, the consciousness of counter-revolutionary

activities… this is a case of incessant activities and intensive propaganda, which shade into

counter-revolutionary activities.’134 Ironically, this very ‘intensive propaganda’ was conducted

by the KPJ against Muslims before the trial began, and it, too, went against the Yugoslav

constitution, the slogan of bratstvo i jedinstvo, and Tito’s proclamation that there no longer be

the oppression of one nationality over the other.135 Norman Cigar writes that this hostility

toward the Bosnian Muslims emerged as a result of orientalist discourse. He observed:

Well before the breakup of Yugoslavia, influential figures in Serbia had begun
a stereotypical image of Muslims as alien, inferior, and a threat to all that the
Serbs held dear… In a narrower sense, Serbia’s Orientalists, scholars
specialising in the study of Islam, have also been a key factor in this process
by providing an academic armature to the campaign against Islam since the
1980s. By interpreting the Muslim community with a blending – and bending
– of scholarship and political rhetoric, they have contributed significantly to
making hostility toward the Muslims intellectually respectable among broad
strata of the Serbian population… At the very least, such academics…
crystallised and reinforced generalised stereotypes toward Islam and provided
a putatively scholarly justification for any measures the government might
take against the Muslims. Much as the Orientalists of an earlier colonial era
had done, their Serbian counterparts supported the national political interests
in relation to the objects of their study, but seldom has the linkage been so
immediate and so destructive as in the case of Bosnia-Hercegovina.136

133
Ibid., p. 34.
134
Ibid., p. 43
135
Josip Broz Tito, ‘Federative Yugoslavia – State of Brotherhood’ [speech], in New Yugoslavia, p. 10.
136
Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of “Ethnic Cleansing”’ (Texas: A&M University Press,
1995), pp. 24, 27.
 50

For Bakić-Hayden, it is the valorised dichotomy between east and west that has led to the

incorporation of ‘essences’ into patterns of representation by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims.137

Indeed, Serbian tendencies to essentialise Bosnian Muslims – to isolate distinct features – not

only makes those features seem as unchanging, but also as quintessential to Bosnian Muslims

and especially true of their identity in contrast to Serbs.138 Unsurprisingly, then, as trials were

being conducted, the newspaper Oslobođenje published several articles condemning the

political activity of Muslim intellectuals, arguing that they disrupted the bratstvo i jedinstvo

that held Yugoslavia together.

Using titles like ‘Counterrevolutionary Goals by Religious Platforms’, ‘An Attack on

the Achievements of the Revolution’, and ‘Enemies Sent to 90 Years in Prison’, the newspaper

portrayed members of the Mladi Muslimani as enemies of the state. Just as the trial began,

Oslobođenje reported that Islamska Deklaracija was written with the intention to break the

Yugoslav community of ‘equal nations and nationalities’, with both Izetbegović and Behmen

actively organising a ‘counterrevolutionary group’ to ‘compromise the social order’. It

proclaimed that Muslim intellectuals ‘advocated the creation of an “ethnically pure” Bosnia-

Hercegovina’.139 As the trial proceeded, Oslobođenje reported that it was not about attacking

the principle of religion, or restricting the practice of faith; rather, in the case of the Mladi

Muslimani, it was about attacking their method of manipulating the verses from the Qur’an to

brainwash the Muslim society. Public Prosecutor, Edina Rešidović, stated: ‘reading verses

from the Qur’an is not, nor can it be, a criminal offence. But, the sadistic splitting of the Qur’an,

abusing the words of the book and skilfully manipulating the feelings of believers, is not just

betraying the principles of religion, but it also incites public hatred and discord between our

137
Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms’, p. 917.
138
Ibid., p. 918; Arjun Appadurai, ‘Putting Hierarchy in Its Place’, Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1 (February
1988), pp. 40-1.
139
B. Romano, ‘Контрареволуционарни циљево с вјерске платформе’, Oslobođenje (19 July 1983), p. 4; B.
Romano, ‘Tendenciozne tvrdnje optuženog’, Oslobođenje (20 July 1983), p. 6.
 51

peoples.’140 Izetbegović had continually defended himself and those accused; still, the KPJ

sentenced him to fourteen years in prison. Later, the sentence was reduced to nine years by the

Federal Court, but Izetbegović was to serve only six from 1983 to 1988.141

News of the trials and Izetbegović’s arrest reached Western audiences. It was strongly

criticised by human rights organisations, such as Helsinki Watch and Amnesty International,

claiming that the case was a conscious act by the Yugoslav state, in the form of communist

propaganda, to incite public hatred against minority groups who were not being charged with

either advocating or using violence.142 As a result, Amnesty International labelled Izetbegović

a ‘prisoner of conscience’, together with thirteen other Muslim intellectuals.143 Along with the

accusation of creating an ‘ethnically pure’ Bosnia-Hercegovina, Izetbegović was also charged

for writing a ‘modernised platform and program [Islamska Deklaracija] of the former terrorist

organisation, Young Muslims’. Izetbegović denied such claims.144 Malika Salihbegović, a

female Bosniak activist, was also charged for an oral statement made to the Iranian leader,

Ayatollah Khomeini, and was accused of drafting a forward to the manifesto Islamska

Deklaracija in March 1982. Like Izetbegović, she denied such claims.145

In Australia, The Canberra Times reported that the denial by Muslim intellectuals of

these accusations was based on the right to the freedom of expression. Izetbegović argued that

his sentencing violated article 19, section 2, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political

Rights, ratified by Yugoslavia in 1971. The article states: ‘Everyone shall have the right to

freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart in formation

140
B. Romano and Z. Buljugić, ‘Атак на тековине ревољуције’, Oslobođenje (17 August 1983), p. 4.
141
Yugoslav News Agency, ‘Sentences Reduced on Muslim Nationalists’, Yugoslav News Agency (30 May
1984), section 2.
142
See Helsinki Watch, Violations of the Helsinki Accords: Yugoslavia (New York: The U.S. Helsinki Watch
Committee, 1986); Helsinki Watch, Human Rights in a Dissolving Yugoslavia (New York: Helsinki Watch /
Human Rights Watch, 1991), pp. 1-12.
143
Amnesty International, Yugoslavia Prisoners of Conscience (London: Amnesty International Publications,
1985), p. 56.
144
Ibid., p. 44.
145
Ibid., p. 45.
 52

and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers… through any other media of [their] choice’.146

Regardless of the fact that a majority of those accused had not read or seen Islamska

Deklaracija, this did not prevent the papers from comparing Izetbegović with Khomeini and

making statements that his manifesto was a conspiratorial document containing an elaborate

strategy for the overthrow of socialism.

Also, just before the attack on the Mladi Muslimani, other religious groups and political

activists faced persecution by the KPJ. This was also reported by Amnesty International, who

deemed all those fighting for religious and political freedom ‘prisoners of conscience’.147

Amnesty reported that in 1980, 553 people were charged with political crimes, which was an

eighty-three per cent increase over the previous year, and meant that seventy per cent of these

political offences stemmed from ‘nationalist and chauvinist’ positions.148 For example, Franjo

Tuđman, a historian and the future President of Croatia, was charged with ‘hostile propaganda’

and ‘incitement to national or religious hatred’, for interviews they had given to foreign

journalists.149 Amnesty International established that a majority of the ‘prisoners of conscience’

were convicted for private conversations, authorship of a literary work, letters they had written,

or for writing articles or giving interviews which were published aboard.150 Although the KPJ

did not tolerate any activity that threatened the regime, the case of the Bosnian Muslims was

unique. This was because the Bosniak national question continued to remain unresolved, and

the circumstances only worsened when war broke out in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Despite these circumstances, Islamska Deklaracija provided the decisive advantage in

the battle for the Bosniak national movement. Not only did it portray Izetbegović as an innocent

146
Amnesty International, ‘Lawyer Imprisoned for “Moslem Nationalism”’, The Canberra Times (31 July
1985), p. 16.
147
See Amnesty International, Yugoslavia, Prisoners of Conscience: An Amnesty International Report (London:
Amnesty International Publications, 1987).
148
Ibid., p. 7.
149
Ibid., p. 8.
150
Ibid., p. 13.
 53

victim of the communist regime as it highlighted his struggle against the restriction of religious

freedom, it played a key role in Izetbegović’s political ascent: from being an anonymous

lawyer, Izetbegović became the undisputed leader of Muslims in Bosnia-Hercegovina upon his

release from prison in 1988. Two years later, his Islamska Deklaracija was republished on the

brink of civil war, which gave Serbian and Croatian nationalists an opportunity to attack, once

more, the Bosniak political agenda. As we shall see in Chapter Three, Izetbegović and his

political party, the SDA, faced military pressure from opposing forces – Serbs and Croats –

and diplomatic pressure from the West who wanted to attain peace at any cost.
 54

CHAPTER THREE:
A New Nation, A New Beginning?

Like us today, a small nation once found itself faced with the same dramatic choice:
to bow its head, or to hold it proudly aloft – to be slaves, or to remain free people.
The poet of that nation responded with these famous words, with which I shall
conclude my speech: ‘I swear to God Almighty that we shall not be slaves!’

– Alija Izetbegović, 2003151

Bosnian Muslims were the victims of the nationalism of others. As explored in Chapter Two,

the role of religious movements in nationalist mobilisation was particularly apparent in the

Muslim community, in which a new wave of Islamic thought and action was re-established by

Izetbegović in an attempt to reignite Bosniak nationhood. When Izetbegović was released from

prison in 1988, he was able to bring together his representatives to establish the new Bosniak

political party Stranka Demokratske Akcije (SDA). Formed on 27 March 1990, the SDA

considered itself a ‘political alliance of the citizens of Yugoslavia belonging to the historical-

cultural sphere of Islam’.152 Soon enough, the SDA went on to declare a largely Muslim-led

independent Bosnia-Hercegovina. This chapter will tie together themes explored in Chapter

One and Two to argue that the national consciousness of Muslims developed in opposition to

the rise of Serbian and Croatian nationalism, only to become crystallised both during and after

the Bosnian War. It was Islamska Deklaracija that indirectly influenced the ideology of the

SDA and proved crucial to the development of the Muslim nation.

The SDA and National Self-Determination

The redistribution of Izetbegović’s Islamska Deklaracija in 1988 and republication in 1990

came at a perfect time: Yugoslavia was collapsing, and nations within it needed new, stronger

151
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. 106.
152
Stranka Demokratske Akcije, ‘Programska deklaracija’, Muslimanski Glas 1, no. 1 (November 1990), pp. 62-
64.
 55

identities, and new avenues in which to develop and assert their identities. During this time,

Muslims were again reminded of how distinctive they were from Serbs and Croats. This

resulted partly from the re-emergence of Islamska Deklaracija and partly from the

simultaneous rise of Serbian and Croatian nationalisms, their demands and struggle for power.

From 1989 onwards, the nationalisms put forth by Serbia and Croatia became intimidating and

aggressive, with the ambitions of their leaders – Milošević and Tuđman, respectively – hardly

concealed. Muslims reacted by emphasising both the religious component of their Muslim

nationalism, and the preservation of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious Bosnia-Hercegovina.153

While not directly affiliated with the Mladi Muslimani movement, the SDA did express

the religious ideology set forth earlier by the movement that was tied to Izetbegović’s Islamska

Deklaracija. This emerged because at least eight of the SDA’s members were also members of

the Mladi Muslimani, thus the programme of the SDA combined progressive and conservative

tendencies: progressive because they were in favour of technological, economic and scientific

advancement; conservative because it wished to do its ‘best to preserve the positive values of

the Islamic tradition’ and create a truly Bosnian society, not a facsimile of a Euro-American

society.154 While Izetbegović did personally identify with the religious element of the SDA, he

noted that the Mladi Muslimani and their agenda only survived through the individuals in the

SDA who were former members of the movement. He stated that ‘it is a fact that a large number

of these men… had subsequently participated in the creation of the SDA. Although there was

no other continuity, it [Mladi Muslimani] existed through this human factor and only through

it. It did not exist from the point of view of the programme and the organisation.’155

As a result, the political objectives of the SDA shifted toward the idea of sustaining a

Bosniak national identity. In an interview on 7 July 1990, Izetbegović stated that he saw

153
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 218.
154
Bougarel, ‘From Young Muslims to Party of Democratic Action’, p. 547.
155
Alija Izetbegović, ‘Mladi Muslimani su jedan od najsnažnjih otpora komunizmu u Jugoslaviji’ [interview], in
Zihad Ključanin, ed., Mladi Muslimani (Sarajevo: Biblioteka Kjučanin, 1991), p. 68.
 56

Bosnia-Hercegovina as the homeland of Muslims, as well as Serbs and Croats, because ‘even

though Muslims are the most numerous nation in the republic [of Bosnia], there are not enough

of them… they would have to comprise about seventy per cent of the population’.156 As shown

in the census data, the Bosnian Muslim population only reached 43.7 per cent in 1991.157

Furthermore, when friction arose between the SDA and the opposing political party

Muslimanska Bošnjačka Organizacija (MBO – Bosnian Muslim Organisation) led by Adil

Zulfikarpašić, Izetbegović emphasised the importance of the national component of the SDA.

Responding to the idea behind the MBO, in which members would vote on their choice of

political programs instead of simply asserting their national identity, Izetbegović stated that:

Perhaps… you cannot understand this, because for you Muslims are defined
by their faith, whereas here they are in the first place a national group. By their
oppression the Communists created this longing among people to express their
religious or national identity… For now, unfortunately, our party must be
sectional. The parties that try to represent everyone are small and weak. There
is a real risk of civil war here; our main aim as a party is to keep Bosnia-
Hercegovina together.158

Zulfikarpašić responded, asserting that although ‘we Muslims are frustrated, a little repressed,

and the reaction is to be reunited’, the ‘party of unity has to be a democratic, European party’.159

Regardless of his efforts, the vote in favour of the SDA by the Bosniak population

showed that the SDA represented Bosniaks by championing their national interest. Historian

Xavier Bougarel writes that this reaction arose solely by the ‘awakening of Muslim

nationalism’ that emerged gradually throughout the 1980s, and ‘not by any influence whatever

of pan-Islamism’.160 At the same time, Islamism did form the basis of the realisation of

Muslimanstvo (Muslimhood), or specifically, Bošnjaštvo (Bosniakdom), where the Bosnian

Muslim political movement had organised its structure within the historical traditional Muslim

156
Vlado Vurušić, ‘Mi nismo Turci’, Start Magazin [interview with Alija Izetbegović] (7 July 1990), p. 34.
157
Džaja, Politička realnost Jugoslovenstva, p. 265.
158
Mark Thompson, A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 99.
159
Ibid., p. 98.
160
Bougarel, ‘The Emergence of a Pan-Islamist Trend’, p. 548.
 57

movement who sought autonomy under Austro-Hungarian rule.161 Introduced by the Austro-

Hungarian minister, Benjamin Kállay, Bošnjaštvo was an ethno-national term used to develop

the national awareness of Bosnians within Bosnia-Hercegovina as a distinct national identity

from Serbs and Croats.162 However, the concept did not come to fruition as it was not able to

find a larger base. Within the political climate of the 1950s up until the 1980s, where Bosnian

Muslim intellectuals pressed for their recognition as a constituent nation equal to Serbs and

Croats, the concept gained a sharper outline; and when it did re-emerge, it did so as a form of

detachment from Serbian and Croatian nationalisms.

The SDA, in a similar vein, espoused this concept of Bošnjaštvo to emphasise Bosniak

cultural continuity. This cultural continuity was based on Islam, which acted as the core and

symbol of the Bosniak nation. Highlighting the cultural roots of the people in a common past

through their political declaration, the SDA allowed Bosnian Muslims to consider themselves

a nation through the process of national self-constitution. In the draft of the SDA’s manifesto,

article VII proclaimed:

Faced with the disregard of the national distinctiveness of the Muslims of

Bosnia-Hercegovina and of their usurpation on this basis, and rejecting these
aspirations as contrary not only to historical facts, but also to the clearly
expressed will of this people, we proclaim that the Muslims of Bosnia-
Hercegovina… are an indigenous Bosnian people and, accordingly, form one
of the six historical peoples of Yugoslavia, with their own historical name,
their own land, their own history, their own culture, their own religion… The
SDA will therefore revive the national consciousness of the Muslims of
Bosnia-Hercegovina and insist on respect of their national identity, with all
the legal and political consequences this entails.163

The very idea of Bošnjaštvo that emerged during the Austro-Hungarian period as a reaction to

Serb and Croat nationalism, also became a response to the nationalisms of Serbs and Croats in

the 1990s, who sought to restrict Bosnian cultural and national identity by waging war against

161
Predstavnika i Zastupnika Muslimanskog Naroda, Memorandum podnešen njegovom veličanstvu caru i
kralju Francu Josifu I i Memorandum podnešen njegovoj preuzvišenosti ministru Kalaju (Sarajevo: Srpska
štampira dra Svetozara Miletića, 1901), pp. 35-69.
162
Enver Redžić, Historijski pogledi na vjerske i nacionalne odnose u Bosni i Hercegovini (Sarajevo: Svjetlost,
2005), pp. 66-7.
163
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, pp. 68-9.
 58

Bosnian Muslims. Ironically, the success of SDA signifies the theoretical failure of

Izetbegović. This is because in his Islamska Deklaracija, Izetbegović wrote that ‘pan-Islamism

has always gushed forth from the very heart of the Muslim peoples’ and that ‘nationalism has

always been an imported merchandise’.164 Even so, the double objective presented by the SDA

– the conservative and the progressive – does not seem distant from, and in fact, slightly echoes

the ‘middle position’ of Islam championed by Izetbegović in Islam između istoka i zapada.

Both Izetbegović and the SDA realised that it was only by emphasising Bosniak nationalism

that, paradoxically, the Islamic element of Bosniak identity could emerge. But this only fuelled

the nationalistic fervour emerging throughout Serbia and, in some respects, Croatia, too.

Serbian and Croatian Reactions

Islamska Deklaracija has often been used by Serbian and Croatian nationalists as the blueprint

for the transformation of Bosnia-Hercegovina into an Islamic state built on fundamentalist

principles. This was despite the fact that neither the declaration nor the programme of the SDA

espoused such plans.165 Regardless, in 1989 senior Bosnian officials expressed fears about the

prospect that Serbia and Croatia were seeking to redraw the map of Bosnia-Hercegovina in an

attempt to split it between the two nations. In March 1990, a special joint session convened by

the Bosnian assembly, where they denounced ideas of any change to the current borders of

Bosnia-Hercegovina.166 This reaction by Serbs and Croats was stimulated because of the re-

emergence of Islamska Deklaracija and the stigma surrounding Alija Izetbegović himself.

Chief counsellor to Tuđman from 1992-3, Hrvoje Šarinić, for example, wrote that

Izetbegović’s motive centred around strengthening the influence of Islamic principles in

164
Izetbegović, Islamska Deklaracija, p. 51.
165
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 219.
166
Ibid., pp. 217-8.
 59

Bosnia-Hercegovina so much as to lean toward fundamentalism.167 This response was further

echoed by Tuđman, who asserted that Bosnian Muslims, under the leadership of Izetbegović,

were planning a ‘Greater Bosnia’, one that ‘spread to Turkey and Libya’. This meant, according

to him, that the Catholics and Orthodox would be eradicated.168 It is based on this reasoning

that Tuđman planned with Milošević to divide Bosnia-Hercegovina between them.

Ambassador for America at the time, Warren Zimmermann, recounts Tuđman saying: ‘let

Milošević take the larger part, Milošević controls it anyway’.169

Tuđman’s belief was based off earlier Croat sentiments that Bosnia-Hercegovina and

its Muslim population were only Islamised Croats. Indeed, Izetbegović recounts an experience

in Washington while visiting Croatian émigrés, in which Croats would laugh off any notion of

a distinct Bosniak nation, or even the idea of a unique Bosnian language. He writes, ‘they

launched into their tirade: they spoke about Bosnia as an integral part of independent Croatia,

said we were “Croats of the Islamic faith” … we failed to halt them in their encroachments on

us and Bosnia’.170 Even Serb Democrats – those who disagreed with Milošević and his policies

– expressed the same opinion regarding Croat attitudes toward Bosnia. When visiting

Izetbegović in Sarajevo, Serbian activist Mihajlo Mihajlov said to him, laughing: ‘Go ahead

[to see the Croats]. You won’t be able to convince them about anything; for them Bosnia was

and remains an ancient Croat land, and you Muslims are their “flowers”’.171 However, not all

Croats held this attitude. Ivo Banac, who was a columnist throughout the war years, criticised

Tuđman’s stance. He called for the territorial integrity of the Bosnian republic, arguing that

Bosnia-Hercegovina is ‘a historical entity which had its own identity and its own history’.172

167
Hrvoje Šarinić, Svi moji tajni pregovori sa Slobodanom Miloševićem 1993-95 (Zagreb: Globus, 1999), p.
140.
168
Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, Milosevic: Portrait of a Tyrant (New York: The Free Press, 1999) p. 119.
169
Zimmerman, Origins of a Catastrophe, p. 182.
170
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. 79.
171
Ibid.
172
Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifshultz, ‘Separating History from Myth: An Interview with Ivo Banac’, in Rabia
Ali and Lawrence Lifshultz, eds., Why Bosnia: Writings on the Balkan War (Stony Creek: Pamphleteer’s Press,
1993), p. 139.
 60

What Banac envisioned was the preservation of a multi-ethnic Bosnia together with the

acknowledgement of its unique national identity, as did the SDA.

The attitudes of many Serbs, on the other hand, displayed more aggressive tendencies.

For instance, while Tuđman was on record for believing that Bosnian Muslims were of

Croatian origin in which both Croatia and Bosnia form ‘an indivisible geographic and

economic entity’, Milošević and his political party – Socialistička Partija Srbije (SPS) – were

openly associated with the pan-Serb nationalist project, espoused by the Serbian Academy.173

This attitude was also championed by the Bosnian-Serb political party, Srpska Demokratska

Stranka (SDS), under the leadership of Radovan Karadžić. During the first half of 1991, the

SDS created a new autonomous region of Krajina in Croatia and then began demanding the

secession of large parts of western and northern Bosnia so as to form a new republic. This was

proceeded by secret arms deliveries to Bosnian Serbs, arranged by Milošević, as a military

vantage point.174 The military ambitions of the Serbs became more apparent as Serbian

extremist, Vojislav Šešelj, expressed expansionist plans in early August 1991. Having been

persecuted in 1985 for publishing a demand that Yugoslavia be split between Serbia and

Croatia, with Bosnia being shared between them, Šešelj expressed in an interview that ‘the

Muslims of Bosnia are in fact Islamised Serbs, and part of the population of so-called Croats

consists in fact of Catholic Serbs’. He then proclaimed that should Muslims resist the

suppression of their status as a nation, the Serbs would ‘kick them out of Bosnia… to Anatolia

[Turkey]’.175 What he hinted at was Bosniak inferiority within Yugoslavia, at least according

to nationalistic Serbs, and their view that Bosniaks belonged to their forefathers: the Turks.

173
Zachary T. Irwin, ‘The Fate of Islam in the Balkans: A Comparison of Four State Policies’, in Pedro Ramet,
ed., Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics (Durham: Duke Press Policy Studies, 1984),
p. 392.
174
Sabrina P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992), p. 259.
175
Malcolm, Bosnia, pp. 226-7.
 61

While some Bosniaks, like Sefer Halilović who served as commander of the Bosnian

Army from 1992-3, described Izetbegović and his vision as Machiavellian, charging him with

‘the misuse of religion for political purposes’, it became apparent to many Bosniak political

leaders that Serbs were advancing onto Bosnia, thus suppressing Bosniakdom.176 Muhamed

Filipović, the deputy leader of the MBO, proclaimed: ‘the Serbs are armed to the teeth, they

have created a state within a state in Bosnia… it is possible that a conflict between the Serbs

and Muslims will break out any day.’177 When Slovenia and Croatia declared independence,

Bosnian-Serb leader Karadžić expressed concern over the prospect of Bosnia following the

same path. His speech became world famous for its incitement of war and indirect threat on

the expansion of the Serbian territory. Speaking to the Bosnian Parliament in mid-October

1991, Karadžić proclaimed:

The road you are choosing for Bosnia-Hercegovina [i.e. Bosnian

independence from Yugoslavia] is the same highway to hell and suffering that
Slovenia and Croatia have already taken. Do not think that you won’t lead
Bosnia-Hercegovina into hell, and the Muslim people into extinction perhaps.
Because if there is a war, the Muslim people will not be able to defend
themselves.178

Izetbegović responded by saying that this is exactly the reason why Bosnia could not remain

in Yugoslavia. It was a vision that suited the Serbs, and only them.179 This opinion was echoed

by Malcolm who was in Bosnia during this political climate. He wrote that both Milošević and

Karadžić’s plan was for a ‘Yugoslavia in name, but Greater Serbia in reality’, with an enfeebled

Bosnia.180 The attitudes by Serbs and Croats were obvious reactions against the belief, albeit

misguided, that the SDA aimed to establish an Islamic state. They used this explanation to

excuse their actions throughout the war, and justify why the partition of Bosnia was necessary.

176
Sefer Halilović, Lukava strategija (Sarajevo: Matica, 3rd ed., 1998), pp. 154, 156, 20.
177
Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism, p. 260.
178
Radovan Karadžić, ‘Speech to the Parliament of Bosnia-Hercegovina’, RTV Sarajevo (15 October 1991)
[speech]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACHkmW8NGJU, accessed on 19/08/2016.
View from 3:34 to 3:46 minutes.
179
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. 95.
180
Noel Malcolm, ‘Waiting for a War’, The Spectator (19 October 1991), p. 16.
 62

Serbian propaganda has also attempted to de-legitimate Bosnia-Hercegovina’s right to

political independence. For example, The Suppressed Serbian Voice and the Free Press in

America, a Serbian émigré publication issued in Los Angeles, coincided with the 605th

anniversary of 1389 Battle of Kosovo, where the Ottoman army defeated Serbian Christian

soldiers.181 It was also a response to Izetbegović’s political manifesto. It stated that ‘the very

land [of Bosnia-Hercegovina] Izetbegović claims as Muslim was Serbian-dominated for

centuries’.182 Izetbegović is further portrayed as an Islamic fundamentalist, who threatens the

existence of Christian Europe, as he is ‘willing to sacrifice his own people to achieve his

religious goals – to be the first president of an Islamic state in Europe – however small’.183 For

British historian, Mark Almond, such claims were farfetched. He noted that although Serb

propaganda implied that Muslims lacked a historical right to any say in Bosnian matters

because of their affiliation with Islam, ‘men like Izetbegović had a longer Bosnian ancestry

than many Serbs who loudly proclaimed their devotion to their native soil’.184 Here, an irony

becomes apparent: Bosnian Muslims, according to Malcolm, are truly Slavs, while many

Bosnian-Serbs are descendants of the non-Slavic Vlach group.185

Attitudes and claims by the Serbs evidently continued to prosper despite wholehearted

attempts by Izetbegović to refute notions of a planned Islamic state, especially one that

stretched from Turkey to Libya as expressed by Tuđman. As early as 1990, Izetbegović

emphasised that the SDA sought to maintain a multi-ethnic, multi-religious Bosnia, but a

Bosnia with a Muslim majority. His reasoning was not so that Bosnian Muslims would

dominate the other two nationalities within the republic, but so as to grant Bosnian Muslims a

nation-state. For him, the aim was to change the status of Muslims from Yugoslavs to Bosniaks:

181
See William Dorich and Serbian American Voters’ Alliance, The Suppressed Serbian Voice and the Free
Press in America (Los Angeles: SAVA, 2nd ed., 1994).
182
Ibid., p. 114.
183
Ibid., p. 48.
184
Mark Almond, Europe’s Backyard War: The War in the Balkans (London: Heinemann, 1994), p. 268.
185
Malcolm, Bosnia, pp. 70-81.
 63

a title stressing their territorial rights, their right to the republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina as a

self-determined nation. In an interview with Start Magazin, Izetbegović stated that Bosnia has

always been a three-fold nation. It is a nation inclusive of the national identity of Bosniaks,

Croats and Serbs.186 He went on to say that establishing a Bosniak identity, or recognising the

Bosniak nation was crucial, for it would ‘close, in some way, the ongoing debate about whether

the Bosniaks are Serbs or Croats’.187 For him, therefore, the program of the SDA was about

preserving Bosnia-Hercegovina, to avoid the further suppression of Muslim identity, and to

refute negative claims about Islam and Bosniaks in Serbian media.188 He reiterated that Bosnian

Muslims ‘do not belong to the identity of the Turks’, and that putting forth a Bosniak identity

means emphasising the historical and cultural uniqueness of Bosnia and its people.189

However, Izetbegović was not without faults. Claims made against him regarding the

Islamisation of Bosnia-Hercegovina were not all ill-founded as Izetbegović himself wavered

between one objective and the other – no doubt an attempt to find the ‘middle ground’ between

East and West. In one interview with the German newspaper Stern, when asked whether reports

on the Islamisation of Bosnia were rumours, Izetbegović said they were not. ‘A return to the

faith is an almost universal phenomenon’, he said, ‘there is Islamisation, as you call it, but only

to the same extent as Christianisation…’190 When the interviewer stated that Izetbegović was

known as a Muslim of the European tradition, Izetbegović replied: ‘my tolerance is not of

European, but of Muslim origin. If I am tolerant, it is first and foremost as a Muslim, and only

then as a European. I value and appreciate Europe, but I think it has too high an opinion of

itself.’191 It can be seen why some would proclaim that Izetbegović was building an ‘Islamic

state’: he did expressly admit to a form Islamisation and, further, denounced Europe, or more

186
Vurušić, ‘Mi nismo Turci’ [interview with Alija Izetbegović], p. 34.
187
Ibid.
188
Ibid., pp. 34-5.
189
Ibid., p. 35.
190
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. 174.
191
Ibid., pp. 174-5.
 64

specifically, the European Union. Izetbegović expressed this view on 5 November 1995, before

the war came to a close. Though two years previously, on 27 August 1993 at a session of the

Assembly of the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina, a reporter from The Times asked

Izetbegović about ambitions to establish an Islamic state, to which Izetbegović replied: ‘I

would say that they are either ill-informed or ill-intentioned. I advocate the integrity of Bosnia-

Hercegovina… it is multi-national, [and therefore] cannot by definition be an Islamic state’.192

What this suggests is that Izetbegović was, at most times, a political opportunist: he

was prepared to make incompatible appeals to different audiences, and when it appeared

politically expedient, to allow Islamic principles to impeach on the legal aspect of his secular

state. But this attitude also had consequences on his relationship with the U.S., whom he relied

on to help bring peace to Bosnia-Hercegovina. According to Nikola Šainović:

America generally supported Bosnia-Hercegovina, however, Alija

Izetbegović was not given any real power. The Americans strengthened the
Serbian state because “Alija’s state” did not fit in with their ideas.193

This statement highlights the impact of Izetbegović’s ideology had, not just on Serbs and

Croats, but the West, too. His Islamska Deklaracija, espoused occasionally through the policies

and political decisions of the SDA, did not do him great favours. And so, Izetbegović found

himself pushed into the margins, which led to the development of a ‘two-headed government’

within Bosnia: ‘first a consensus is reached with the Croats, and only when they are ready to

make a decision, does the second consensus extend to the Serbs.’194 This attitude developed

despite claims made by Izetbegović that the true culprits of international agitation were those

who ‘launched the aggression against Bosnia-Hercegovina on the very day that [Bosnia] gained

international recognition… to bring us under the yoke of their own state construct, “Greater

192
Ibid., p. 257.
193
Nikola Šainović, ‘Amerikanci i Milošević su imali slične interese u Bosni’, Nedeljnik (11 August 2016).
Available from: http://www.nedeljnik.rs/nedeljnik/portalnews/nikola-sainovic-amerikanci-i-milosevic-su-imali-
slicne-interese-u-bosni/, accessed on 15/08/2016.
194
Ibid.
 65

Serbia”, in which both the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the Bosniak (Muslim) people

would have ceased to exist as a political factor…’195 Ultimately, Izetbegović’s goal was to

preserve the Islamic identity of the Bosniak people while maintaining a multi-ethnic, multi-

religious society ‘in which no one would be persecuted because of his faith, nationality, or

political convictions’.196 Sabrina Ramet’s metaphor of a ‘popper pot’ perfectly summarises the

program of the SDA and Izetbegović’s conflicting attitude: the SDA was neither based

completely on Islamic fundamentalism, nor was it leaning completely toward liberal

cosmopolitanism; rather, it was an opportunistic mix of both, blended together into a ‘pepper

pot’ into which ‘so many spices had been added, to please the diverse states of different

constituencies…’197 But what was achieved?

Izetbegović Strikes Back: Building the New Bosniak Nation

Izetbegović may have used both liberal rhetoric to please Western audiences and religious

rhetoric to appeal to Islamic audiences, but regardless of his objectives, he and the SDA did

aspire to achieve one thing: a recognised Bosnia-Hercegovina with a recognised Bosniak

nation. The difference between the earlier Muslim organisations – such as the Jugoslovenska

Muslimanska Organizacija (Yugoslav Muslim Organisation – JMO) that was led by Spaho in

the 1920s – and the SDA, was that the former emphasised the need to preserve the autonomy

of Islamic religious institutions with Bosnia-Hercegovina as a separate territorial unit, whereas

the latter strongly stressed the importance of the political sovereignty of the Bosniak nation

and, at the same time, sought to preserve the territorial integrity of Bosnia-Hercegovina. More

apparent was the prospect that the SDA was in favour of sacrificing the latter objective in

favour of the first objective.198

195
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. 201.
196
Ibid., pp. 201-2.
197
Ramet, Three Yugoslavias, p. 424.
198
Bougarel, ‘Od “Muslimana” do “Bošnjaka”’, p. 126.
 66

On 1 March 1992, Bosnia-Hercegovina declared independence after a referendum held

on 25 January recorded a ninety-nine per cent vote in favour of independence.199 For

Izetbegović, the fate of Bosnia-Hercegovina was decided, but ‘only in the formal, legal sense’

because the true fate of Bosnia ‘would be determined on the battlefield’.200 Still, this was an

effort by the SDA to highlight the fact that national consciousness in Bosnia-Hercegovina was

growing, not just among the Bosniaks themselves, but the general Bosnian population.

Brubaker argues that the call for independence is a response to the ‘weak’ position of Bosnian

Muslims as the ‘core’ nation of Bosnia-Hercegovina – ‘seen as a legacy of discrimination

against the nation before it attained independence’ – which led to the ‘compensatory’ project

of exercising state power to support the interests of Bosnian Muslims.201 While a victory for

the nation, Bosnia’s independence was not accepted by the SDS who responded by barricading

Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo. In fact, the very act of declaring independence, according to Hoare,

‘provided the post-facto justification for a Serbian war of annihilation against the state of

Bosnia-Hercegovina’.202 Soon enough, a peace plan was drafted by the international

community which favoured, or at least appeared to favour, the Serbian agenda. This was not

surprising considering, as Šainović stated, that the international community did not accept

Izetbegović’s Islamic vision as expressed in his Islamska Deklaracija.

The first talk began in October between Cyrus Vance, a representative of the United

Nations (UN), and Lord Owen, a representative of the European Community. They put forth a

preliminary document on the constitutional structure of Bosnia-Hercegovina and proposed a

decentralised state with ten provinces. This meant that Bosnia-Hercegovina would be divided

between Muslims, Serbs, and Croats, whereupon three provinces would be assigned to each

199
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. 112.
200
Ibid.
201
Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, p. 6.
202
Hoare, History of Bosnia, pp. 363-4.
 67

nationality, leaving Sarajevo as the tenth province under a weak central government.203 This

push for the partition of Bosnia-Hercegovina did not sit well with the SDA. The reason behind

this was that the Bosniaks, who formed 43.7 per cent of the, were only allocated approximately

25 per cent of Bosnia’s territory, with the Serbs receiving the majority – 43 per cent.204

Although clearly unfavourable, Izetbegović signed the proposal, albeit on the condition that

the war of aggression against Bosnia-Hercegovina stopped, and that the integrity and

sovereignty of Bosnia-Hercegovina as an independent state remained intact.205 While Croats,

too, accepted the proposal, Serb delegates voted against it.

The peace talks continued, though the proposals set forth continued to favour the

Serbian agenda of a ‘Greater Serbia’. After the Vance-Owen Peace Plan was rejected, the

Owen-Stoltenberg Plan was drawn up which proposed that Bosnia be partitioned between three

ethnic constituencies: 54 per cent of the land was to be allocated to Serbs, 30 per cent to

Muslims, and 16 per cent to Croats. This proved to be a major blow for the SDA who then

convened a special ‘Bosniak Assembly’ in Sarajevo on 27 September 1993 to decide whether

to vote for or against the peace plan. For Izetbegović, accepting the partition meant an end to

the war. A month earlier, he said to the Bosniak Assembly: ‘in the meantime it appears that we

must be partitioned. We can do this at the negotiating table, or on the battlefield in the war in

which unfortunately, all laws are gradually disappearing…’206 Simply, it was ‘either a just war

of defence or an unjust peace’.207 The Assembly voted against the plan. It was also during this

meeting that the national name of Bosnian Muslims was formally changed to Bosniaks.

203
Ibid., p. 378.
204
Ibid.; Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, pp. 250-2.
205
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. 252.
206
Quoted in Rushmir Mahmutćehajić, Čitanje historije i povjerenje u Bosni: Kriva politika (Tuzla: Radio
Kamelon Tuzla, 1998), p. 67.
207
United Nations General Assembly, ‘Address by Mr Alija Izetbegović, President of the Republic of Bosnia
and Hercegovina’, 20th Plenary Meeting, New York (7 October 1993), p. 2.
 68

This was a significant step in the national affirmation of Bosniak identity; it meant that

Bosniaks were not solely identified with the Islamic faith, but were also given a national

identity. This signified a shift from the policies set forth by the communists during post-WWII

Yugoslavia in which Bosnian Muslims could only identify with either Serb or Croat national

identity. Now, the new name encouraged Muslims to identify Bosnia-Hercegovina in unison

with Bosniaks, just as Serbs are in unity with Serbia and Croats with Croatia. This is not to say

that identification as a Bosniak did not exist prior to this time; in fact, one of the crucial

components of Bosniak identity was the Bosnian language. In many ways, denial of the

Bosnian language went hand in hand with the denial of the Bosniak nation. Alija Isaković

identified this correlation and wrote that

The Bosnian language exists as its own entity in the nation and in literature
inasmuch does the Serbian and the Croatian. If it is unknown to the general
public, the reasons are political and not of the linguistic nature... failure to
identify and acknowledge the Bosnian language was [is] in correlation with
the political reluctance to acknowledge the Bosnian nation, specifically the
Bosniaks. As such, the Bosnian language forms part of the Bosnian constituent
component of the Bosniak national identity and the language defines the new
social reality [of the Bosniaks].208

The ‘new social reality’ he was referring to back in 1991 was precisely the reality that had

emerged during the special Bosniak Assembly meeting in 1993. Here, the indirect role of

Islamska Deklaracija in the affirmation of Bosniak identity becomes apparent. Why Islamska

Deklaracija constituted a threat to the communist state as well as the other Yugoslav nations

is obvious, but its role and significance in the shaping of a new Muslim identity is not as

apparent, except when understood in combination with Tito’s changing approach to the Muslim

208
Alija Isaković, ‘Bosanski jezik’, in Alija Isaković, ed., Antologija Zla (Sarajevo: Ljiljan, 1994), p. 254.
Debate on the Bosnian language was not new. Early travel writings indicate that the Bosnians constantly sought
to assert their national identity by emphasising the linguistic differences between the Bosnian and Serbo-Croat
language. For example, Matija Mažuranić in his travels through Bosnia from 1839-40 recounts that the Illyrian
language was intermixed with Turkish words. He writes, ‘they englendiše Bošnjački [talk Bosnian] …’ but ‘they
could express all their thoughts also in the pure Illyrian language…’ However, Mažuranić saw the Bosniaks
during this time as ignorant and emphasised that the Bosniak language stemmed from the Ottomans, not the
other way around. Regardless, his travel account, more generally, provides insight into the national
consciousness of the Bosniaks and shows how they perceived themselves as being different to the Serbs as well
as the Ottomans. See Matija Mažuranić, A Glance into Ottoman Bosnia, trans. Branka Magaš (London: SAQI,
2007 [1842]), p. 87.
 69

question. As discussed in Chapter One, Tito aimed to construct a new ‘balanced’ state in which

no one nation would dominate the other. The opposite occurred, in which Muslims’ experience

of bratstvo i jedinstvo within Titoist Yugoslavia ‘denationalised them and robbed them of their

political cohesion’.209 As such, Islamska Deklaracija symbolised the push toward the

recognition of a Bosniak nation – Bosniak liberation struggle now endeavoured ‘to establish

circumstances in which they can freely and unrestrainedly express and entrench themselves…

that the goals of their liberation struggle necessarily and implicitly involve the survival of Islam

in the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina…’210

The transformation of the Bosnian Army into a Bosniak army further highlights how

Bosniak consciousness developed and increased. Paradoxically, it was by abandoning the

Muslim name that a reaffirmation of the Islamic identity of the Muslims emerged. Indeed, the

Bosnian Army, under the ideological guidance of Fikret Muslimović, the SDA’s top

intelligence and security official and former Titoist, became both literally and metaphorically

the symbol of Bosniak struggle: instead of the KPJ being the head party of the army, it was

now the SDA; Tito was replaced by Izetbegović as the figurehead on which the army’s cult of

personality rested; the ideological underpinning of the army switched from bratstvo i jedinstvo

to Bosniak nationalism; and Islam replaced Communism as the army’s ideological

inspiration.211 This shift in the Bosnian Army puzzled most during this time as Muslimović was

known to be a supporter of the Communist regime. He did, at one point, express that anyone

who attacked the conception of bratstvo i jedinstvo fell into anti-Communist deception.

However, his attitude changed when Yugoslavia collapsed, and in a twist of events, he became

the keynote speaker at the First Congress of Muslim Intellectuals in Sarajevo. Speculation as

209
Marko Attila Hoare, How Bosnia Armed (London: SAQI Books, 2004), p. 103.
210
Fikret Muslimović quoted in ibid., pp. 103-4. Muslimović was coming from the position of the aggressive
nature of the war, which saw attempts by Serbs to ‘cut off all spiritual and cultural traces of Bosniakhood in the
country…’ See Fikret Muslimović, ‘Actualni problemi i zadaci na izgradnji borbenog morala u jedinicama
Armije Republike BiH', in Fikret Muslimović, Odabrana Republike (Sarajevo: NIPP Liljan, 1995), p. 191.
211
Hoare, The History of Bosnia, p. 384.
 70

to this sudden shift highlighted that Muslimović ‘needed a new ideological anchor’ with the

sudden demise of Communism.212 Regardless, this change in the structure of the Bosnian Army

signifies the centuries’ long struggle by Bosniaks to move from the background into the

foreground and thus, ensure their political and national sovereignty.

One important factor of the Bosnian Army was that it completely identified with the

SDA and Izetbegović. Muslimović wrote in March 1994 that the success of the Bosniak

liberation struggle throughout the war rested on the ‘political organisation of the Bosniak

nation, to which the SDA gave its principal meaning and stamp’. He went further to say that

this particularly included the service of Izetbegović as the President of Bosnia-Hercegovina,

adding that ‘the prestige of our Army is at once the prestige of our nation, and the prestige of

our nation is inseparable from the prestige of the SDA’.213 This emphasised two things: firstly,

Izetbegović’s political and religious stature with the Bosniak community was held in high

regard, so much so, that the Bosnian Army gradually became aligned with the Islamic faith;

and secondly, this very shift was necessary as it gave the Bosnian Army a voice and reason to

fight back against Serbian and Croatian aggression. Without this voice, the Bosnian Army

would not have had the chance to develop and grow, and neither would Bosniaks have had the

chance to fight for the liberation of their own country.

The religious ideology of Izetbegović as expressed in his Islamska Deklaracija,

together with the political and national ambitions of the SDA, instigated the process toward the

national affirmation of Muslims. Prior to this, Muslims were wedged between two restrictions:

to be Muslim, identified with solely the Islamic faith; or, to express a national identity, but only

aligned with either Serb or Croat nationalism. Although Izetbegović was not able to secure

one-hundred per cent of Bosnian territory due to the Dayton Peace Agreement and subsequent

212
John R. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad (Minnesota: Zenith
Press, 2007), pp. 156-7.
213
Muslimović, ‘Aktualni problem i zadaci’, p. 199.
 71

pressure from the international community, as will be discussed in the closing statement of this

thesis, he nevertheless secured Bosniak consciousness and with it, a Bosniak nation with an

internationally recognised Bosnia-Hercegovina. It is this effort that led the Bosniaks to hail

him as the ‘father of the nation’ as it was he who caught the imagination of the outside world

of a Bosniak nation in 1995.214

214
See Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, pp. 337-449.
 72

CONCLUSION:
Post-Dayton Bosnia-Hercegovina

The tragedy of Bosnia is an unparalleled source of knowledge of the potential

of the human species, the worst and the best alike.
– Juan Goytisolo, 2012215

The initialising of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) on 21 November 1995 in Dayton, Ohio,

officially ended the Bosnian War – the worst case of human atrocity since WWII. That same

year, on 14 December, the document was signed in Paris.216 Although it came with serious

concessions to Bosnian territory and contradicted Izetbegović’s ideals, the DPA nevertheless

achieved the peace that Bosnia-Hercegovina needed in order to survive. Without its initiation,

the Bosniak nation would have fallen into the hands of its largely Serbian aggressors, and

would have thus played into their nationalistic favour. During the signing ceremony

Izetbegović proclaimed that Dayton became the historical symbol for Bosnia-Hercegovina

because the war was replaced by peace and ‘the documents we have just signed guarantee the

maintaining of a sovereign and integral Bosnia-Hercegovina and the further building of an open

society based on tolerance and freedom.’ He went on to say, ‘to my people… this might not be

a just peace, but… in the situation as it is, and in the world as it is, a better peace could not

have been achieved.’217

What did Izetbegović mean by not having attained a just peace? Tom Gallagher notes

that the fact that both Tuđman and Milošević had a seat at the table in the peace negotiations

showed how flawed the 1995 settlement was purely because both were aggressors ‘who had

wrought untold misery in Bosnia’ and toward the Bosniak people.218 Several years after the

DPA, Serbian and Croatian nationalists continued to find ways to preserve their war gains,

215
Quoted in Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. iii.
216
U.S. Department of State, ‘Dayton Accords’ (11 November 1995). Available from:
http://www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/or/dayton/, accessed on 07/09/2016.
217
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, pp. 237-8.
218
Tom Gallagher, The Balkans after the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 208.
 73

namely the full control over Bosnia-Hercegovina. This was despite the fact that the DPA had

already recognised Republika Srpska and the Croat Federation within Bosnia-Hercegovina,

effectively leaving Bosnia-Hercegovina partitioned. Thus, the DPA did not follow through

with the promises made by Richard Holbrooke that Bosnia was to remain a state with ‘a single

international personality’, where the rights of minorities were to be respected, and where those

responsible for the atrocities committed against the Bosniaks were to be brought to account.219

Instead, what had occurred was each side interpreted the DPA for their own benefit,

attempting to create the impression of cooperation whilst implementing only sections of the

DPA that suited their position of power.220 At Dayton, during roundtable discussions regarding

the peace agreement, Professor Neđo Miličević stressed that one of the main faults of the DPA

had been its constitution. The articles of which contained an open constitutional basis for

discrimination, in his words, caused ‘a large number of citizens in Bosnia-Hercegovina from

all of its three constituent peoples, as well as all citizens who are classified under the category

of “others”, to be deprived of their basic human rights.’221 It was this neglect and the emphasis

on ethnic collectives that caused the partition of Bosnia-Hercegovina into ‘ethnic statelets’.222

Bosnia-Hercegovina symbolised, yet again, ‘little Yugoslavia’.

There will never be a perfect negotiation and solution to any conflict, and the DPA is

one such example. Providing a brief overview of the DPA highlights the final hurdle that

Izetbegović went through in order to give the Bosniaks an independent state and recognition

as a distinct nation and national identity. This thesis argued that it was as a result of

Izetbegović’s political activism and the consequences following that led to the rise in the

national consciousness of the Bosniak nation. This is not to deny any previous attempts as well

219
Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 237.
220
BiH Roundtable, Dayton Peace Agreement: Four Years of Experience – Position of the Democratic
Alternative (Sarajevo: Helsinki Citizen’s Assembly, 2000), p. 8.
221
Ibid., p. 13.
222
Ibid., p. 73.
 74

as factors independent from Izetbegović that gave Muslims in Yugoslavia national

consciousness; instead, this thesis highlighted the important role Izetbegović, and other

prominent Muslim intellectuals, played in ensuring that the national consciousness of the

Bosniak nation did not perish under the Communist regime’s attempt at suppressing their

identity. As noted in Chapter One, a focus on the Muslim population of Yugoslavia raises

several important questions about the Communist state’s political organisation, which

included: accommodating Islamic values with Communist practices, understanding how the

relation of national and religious identity contributes to the rise of a distinct national group,

and the consequences of Islamic expression in a socialist state.

Often, Izetbegović is only remembered for his role as the President of Bosnia-

Hercegovina during the worst political climate in the twentieth century, following WWII. Very

rarely does scholarly literature acknowledge how Izetbegović’s political activism and Islamic

ideology positively contributed to Bosnia-Hercegovina’s historical development; whether

directly or indirectly, Izetbegović contributed to the establishment of a modern Bosnian nation-

state. In order to understand his contribution, this thesis traced the development in the national

recognition of Bosniak identity from post-WWII Yugoslavia – a time where both their national

and religious identity was suppressed; only to re-emerge as a distinct nation by the end of the

Bosnian War in 1995. This development also highlights how nationalisms of other ethnic

groups shapes the development of another ethnic group, i.e. the development of extreme

Serbian and Croatian nationalism contributed to the rise in the national consciousness of

Bosniaks. This was because the nationalisms espoused by both Serbs and Croats centered

around homogeneity and the partition of Bosnian territory – an aspiration that would have seen

the assimilation, as well as the eventual disappearance, of Bosniak identity.

This thesis argued that in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the Muslim national ideologies

manifested in two facets: in the former facet, the ideology was in an official non-sanctioned
 75

religious form, which elaborated and justified the belated acknowledgement of Muslims as the

sixth constituent Yugoslav nation in 1968; and in the latter facet, a pan-Islamist national

ideology arose, which continued the practice of the political movement called Mladi

Muslimani. Of the two, it was the second form that was officially banned by the KPJ, leading

to the trial of its adherents in the 1940s as well as in the 1980s. It was this pan-Islamist ideology

of Muslim nationalism that, too, regarded Islam as the core of Muslim national identity as

expressed in Izetbegović’s Islamska Deklaracija.

Although seen as a threat to the Communist regime because of its ‘expansionist’

ideology, Izetbegović’s Islamska Deklaracija began the first step of linking Muslim national

identity with politics in a comprehensible manner: it is the Islamic religion that delineates

national identity, and as it delineates one’s identity, it also explains their political inclinations.

As discussed in Chapter Three, the SDA emerged as the first openly Muslim political party

that catered to both the national and religious identity of the Bosniaks. This development from

the belated recognition of the Muslim nation, to the dissemination of a pan-Islamist ideology

by Izetbegović and other Muslim intellectuals, enabled the SDA to ensure that the spiritual

regeneration of the Muslim nation remained intact.

The political significance of the development of Bosniak identity has already attracted

the attention of historians. I have orientated my historical analysis around the way in which

political activity has the potential to, directly or indirectly, give rise to national consciousness

of a certain ethnic group. Although this process is not new in general discussions on

nationalism and the development of national identity, my focus on Bosniak identity highlights

how a hyphenated identity challenges not only state systems, but what it means to be a ‘nation’,

i.e. how an identity can change its meaning when placed in different contexts. For instance, at

one stage, being a Muslim meant being an adherent of the Islamic state; in Communist

Yugoslavia, the Muslim identity was affiliated with the national; and throughout the 1990s,
 76

this identity was merged to incorporate both aspects so as to ensure the political sovereignty of

Bosnia-Hercegovina itself.

Izetbegović encapsulated the significance of national self-determination, in a climate

of aggression and hostility. In an interview with Belgrade’s NIN, two years after the

implementation of the DPA, Izetbegović was asked:

Do you believe in the possibility of a united Bosnia-Hercegovina’s survival?

Why didn’t you accept the entrance of Bosnia-Hercegovina into a ‘shortened’
Yugoslavia?

To which Izetbegović replied:

Not only do I believe in but I also work for the survival of a united Bosnia. I
have the full support of my people and the result cannot be escaped from.
Considering the second part of your question, the answer is simple: because
we could not accept being second rate citizens, and that is what could have
happened to us at least. That subordinate status we carried for 100 years. But
then we decided to risk going it alone because we are a proud people.223

Not only has Izetbegović highlighted the national self-awareness of Bosniaks, who exist as a

separate identity from Serbs and Croats, he also hinted at the importance of the need to

understand Bosniak identity and how it came to fruition as both a religious and national

identity. As a result of the Bosnian War, many Bosniaks have been displaced, are confused, or

are still looking for peace in the form of justice. However, because scholarship often focuses

on the war and how Bosniaks felt during and in the aftermath of the war, many Bosniaks tend

to think that the war was only a response to the development of national aggression by Serbs

and Croats. Seldom do they realise that the war not only played a constructive role in the

national development of their identity because Bosniak resistance against the perpetrators

strengthened their national consciousness, but also, the war was a symbol – the final stretch –

in the assertion of their national identity. In a bitter sweet way, the war was necessary for the

establishment and, recognition of, both the Bosniak nation and the integrity of the territory of

Bosnia-Hercegovina. Of course, its significance only stems from both the long historical

223
Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions, p. 383.
 77

struggle against Muslim suppression, and because of Alija Izetbegović’s attempts to reignite

Bosniak national consciousness.

 78

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Amnesty International, ‘Lawyer Imprisoned for “Moslem Nationalism”’, The Canberra

Times (31 July 1985), p. 16.

Amnesty International, Yugoslavia Prisoners of Conscience (London: Amnesty International

Publications, 1985).

Amnesty International, Yugoslavia, Prisoners of Conscience: An Amnesty International

Report (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1987).

BiH Roundtable, Dayton Peace Agreement: Four Years of Experience - Position of the

Democratic Alternative (Sarajevo: Helsinki Citizen’s Assembly, 2000).

Collected Yugoslav Laws (Beograd: Union of Jurists’ Associations of Yugoslavia, vol. 1,

1951).

Ćurak, Nerzuk, ‘Čaušević’, Dani (24 November 1997), pp. 8-32.

Dorich, William and Serbian American Voters’ Alliance, The Suppressed Serbian Voice and

the Free Press in America (Los Angeles: SAVA, 2nd ed., 1994).

Đozo, Husein, ‘Islam i Musliman’, Glasnik 33, nos. 5-6 (May/June 1970), pp. 201-206.

Drakulić, Slavenka, The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War (New York:

W. W. Norton, 1993).

Halilović, Sefer, Lukava strategija (Sarajevo: Matica, 3rd ed., 1998).

Helsinki Watch, Human Rights in a Dissolving Yugoslavia (New York: Helsinki Watch /

Human Rights Watch, 1991).

Helsinki Watch, Violations of the Helsinki Accords: Yugoslavia (New York: The U.S.

Helsinki Watch Committee, 1986).

Holbrooke, Richard, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998).

 79

Isaković, Alija, ‘Bosanski jezik’, in Alija Isaković, ed., Antologija Zla (Sarajevo: Ljiljan,

1994), pp. 254-6.

Izdavački Centar Komunist, Povjest saveza komunista Jugoslavije (Beograd: Narodna knjiga

Rad, 1985).

Izetbegović, Alija, ‘Mladi Muslimani su jedan od najsnažnjih otpora komunizmu u

Jugoslaviji’ [interview], in Zihad Ključanin, ed., Mladi Muslimani (Sarajevo:

Biblioteka Kjučanin, 1991), pp. 53-69.

Izetbegović, Alija, Inescapable Questions: Autobiographical Notes, trans. Saba Rissaluddin

and Jasmina Izetbegović (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 2003).

Izetbegović, Alija, Islam između istoka i zapada (Sarajevo: Svijetlost, 1984).

Izetbegović, Alija, Islamska Deklaracija: Jedan program islamizacije muslimana i

muslimanskih naroda (Sarajevo: Bosna, 1990 [1970]).

Karadžić, Radovan, ‘Speech to the Parliament of Bosnia-Hercegovina’, RTV Sarajevo (15

October 1991) [speech]. Available from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACHkmW8NGJU, accessed on 19/08/2016.

Kardelj, Edvard, ‘Snaga narodnih masa’, in Edvard Kardelj, ed., Put Nove Jugoslavije:

Članci i govori iz narodnooslobodilačke borbe (Zagreb: Kulture, 1949), pp. 119-143.

Kardelj, Edvard, On the Principles of the Preliminary Draft of the New Constitution of

Socialist Yugoslavia (Beograd: Jugoslavija, 1963).

Kardelj, Edvard, Reminiscences – The Struggle for Recognition and Independence: The New

Yugoslavia, 1944-1957 (Wimbledon: Blond & Briggs, 1982).

Konačni rezultati popisa stanovništva od 15 Marta 1948 godine: Stanovništvo po narodnosti

(Beograd: Savezni zavod za statistiku, vol. IX, 1954).

Latić, Nedžad, Boja Povijesti – Izetbegovićeve godine 1983-2003 (Brčko: Bemust, 2003).
 80

Mahmutćehajić, Rushmir, Čitanje historije i povjerenje u Bosni: Kriva politika (Tuzla: Radio

Kamelon Tuzla, 1998).

Malcolm, Noel, ‘Waiting for a War’, The Spectator (19 October 1991), pp. 14-6.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Books, 2002).

Masleša, Veselin, Dela (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 2nd ed., 1954).

Mažuranić, Matija, A Glance into Ottoman Bosnia, trans. Branka Magaš (London: SAQI,

2007 [1842]).

Muslimović, Fikret, ‘Aktualni problemi i zadaci na izgradnji borbenog morala u jedinicama

Armije Republike BiH', in Fikret Muslimović, Odbrana Republike (Sarajevo: NIPP

Liljan, 1995), pp. 191-99.

Popis stanovništva 1953: Vitalna i etnička obeležja (Beograd: Savezni zavod za statistiku,

vol. I, 1959).

Popis stanovništva 1961: Vitalna, etnička i migraciona obeležja (Beograd: Savezni zavod za

statistiku, vol. I, 1970).

Popis stanovništva i stanova 1971: Stanovništvo – Vitalna, etnička i migraciona obeležja

(Beograd: Savezni zavod za statistiku, vol. I, 1974).

Predstavnika i Zastupnika Muslimanskog Naroda, Memorandum podnešen njegovom

veličanstvu caru i kralju Francu Josifu I i Memorandum podnešen njegovoj

preuzvišenosti ministru Kalaju (Sarajevo: Srpska štampira dra Svetozara Miletića,

1901).

Romano, B. and Z. Buljugić, ‘Атак на тековине ревољуције’, Oslobođenje (17 August

1983), p. 4.

Romano, B., ‘Tendenciozne tvrdnje optuženog’, Oslobođenje (20 July 1983), p. 6.

Romano, B., ‘Контрареволуционарни циљево с вјерске платформе’, Oslobođenje (19 July

1983), p. 4.
 81

SANU, ‘Memorandum’, Naše teme 33, nos. 1-2 (1989), pp. 128-63.

Šarinić, Hrvoje, Svi moji tajni pregovori sa Slobodanom Miloševićem 1993-95 (Zagreb:

Globus, 1999).

Stalin, J. V., Marxism and the National Question (New York: International Publishers, 1942).

Stranka Demokratske Akcije, ‘Programska deklaracija’, Muslimanski Glas 1, no. 1

(November 1990), pp. 62-4.

Sućeska, Avdo, ‘Istoriske osnove nacionalne posebnosti Bosanski-Hercegovackih

Muslimana’, Jugoslovenski Istoriski Časopis 30, no. 4 (1969), pp. 47-54.

Thompson, Mark, A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (London: Vintage, 1992).

Tito, Josip Broz, ‘Federative Yugoslavia – State of Brotherhood’ [speech], in Josip Broz Tito,

New Yugoslavia: Speeches by Marshal Josip Broz Tito (Sydney: Yugoslav

Immigrants’ Association of Australia, 1945), pp. 9-17.

Tito, Josip Broz, ‘We Have Won Our Liberty’ [radio transcript], in Josip Broz Tito, New

Yugoslavia: Speeches by Marshal Josip Broz Tito (Sydney: Yugoslav Immigrants’

Association of Australia, 1945), pp. 5-8.

Tito, Josip Broz, Nacionalno pitanje i revolucija (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1977).

Tito, Josip Broz, Nacionalno pitanje u Jugoslaviji u svjetlosti Narodnooslobodilačke borbe

(Zagreb: Naprijed, 1945).

Tito, Josip Broz, The Selected Works of Josip Broz Tito (New York: Prism Key Press, 2013

[1945]).

U.S. Department of State, ‘Dayton Accords’ (11 November 1995). Available from:

http://www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/or/dayton/, accessed on 07/09/2016.

United Nations General Assembly, ‘Address by Mr Alija Izetbegović, President of the

Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina’, 20th Plenary Meeting, New York (7 October

1993), pp. 1-21.

 82

Ustav Socialističke Republike Bosne i Hercegovine sa ustavnim amandmanima i ustavnim

zakonima (Sarajevo: Novinska ustanova ‘Službeni list SR BiH’, 1969).

Vurušić, Vlado, ‘Mi nismo Turci’ [interview with Alija Izetbegović], Start Magazin (7 July

1990), pp. 34-7.

Yugoslav News Agency, ‘Sentences Reduced on Muslim Nationalists’, Yugoslav News

Agency (30 May 1984), section 2.

Zimmerman, Warren, Origins of a Catastrophe (New York: Random House, 1999).

Secondary Sources

Ali, Rabia and Lawrence Lifshultz, ‘Separating History from Myth: An Interview with Ivo

Banac’, in Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifshultz, eds., Why Bosnia: Writings on the

Balkan War (Stony Creek: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1993), pp. 134-64.

Almond, Mark, Europe’s Backyard War: The War in the Balkans (London: Heinemann,

1994).

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism (London: Verso, 1996).

Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Putting Hierarchy in Its Place’, Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1 (February

1988), pp. 36-49.

Bakić-Hayden, Milica, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of the Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic

Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995), pp. 917-31.

Banac, Ivo, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca and

London: Cornell University Press, 1984).

Bjelić, Dušan, ‘Introduction: Blowing Up the Bridge’, in Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić, eds.,

Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalisation and Fragmentation (Cambridge: MIT

Press, 2002), pp. 1-22.

 83

Bougarel, Xavier, ‘Bosnia and Hercegovina: State and Communitarianism’, in David A.

Dyker and Ivan Vejvoda, eds., Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation,

Despair and Rebirth (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 87-115.

Bougarel, Xavier, ‘From Young Muslims to Party of Democratic Action: The Emergence of a

Pan-Islamist Trend in Bosnia-Hercegovina’, trans. Asma Rashid, Islamic Studies 36,

nos. 2-3 (Summer/Autumn 1997), pp. 533-49.

Bougarel, Xavier, ‘Od “Muslimana” do “Bošnjaka”: Pitanje nacionalnog imena bosanskih

muslimana’, in Husnija Kamberović, ed., Rasprave o nacionalnom identitetu

Bošnjaka: Zbornik radova (Sarajevo: Institut za Istoriju, 2009), pp. 117-135.

Bringa, Tone, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian

Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Brubaker, Rogers and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond “Identity”’, in Rogers Brubaker, ed.,

Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 28-63.

Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New

Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Čengić, Mustafa, Alija Izetbegović: Jahac apokalipse ili anđeo mira (Sarajevo: Kult B,

2015).

Cigar, Norman, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of “Ethnic Cleansing”’ (Texas: A&M

University Press, 1995).

Crnobrnja, Mihailo, The Yugoslav Drama (Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2nd ed.,

1996).

Doder, Dusko and Louise Branson, Milosevic: Portrait of a Tyrant (New York: The Free

Press, 1999).

Donia, Robert J. and John V. A. Fine Jnr., Bosna i Hercegovina: Iznevjerena tradicija

(Sarajevo: Institut za Istoriju, 2011).

 84

Džaja, Srećko M., Politička realnost Jugoslovenstva-sa posebnim osvrtom na BiH (Sarajevo-

Zagreb: Svijetlo Riječi, 2004).

Filandra, Šaćir, Bošnjačka politika u XX. stoljeću (Sarajevo: Sejtarija, 1998).

Gallagher, Tom, The Balkans after the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2003).

Giugni, Marco G., ‘Introduction – How Social Movements Matter: Past Research, Present

Problems, Future Developments’, in Marco G. Giugni, Doug McAdam and Charles

Tilly, eds., How Social Movements Matter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1999), pp. xiii-xxxiii.

Hoare, Marko Attila, How Bosnia Armed (London: SAQI Books, 2004).

Hoare, Marko Attila, The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day

(London: SAQI, 2007).

Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Horvat, Ana, ‘Autohtone Nacionalne Manjine i Ustavne Promjene 2009 – 2010’, Zbornik

PFZ 60, no. 2 (2010), pp. 555-85.

Irwin, Zachary T., ‘The Fate of Islam in the Balkans: A Comparison of Four State Policies’,

in Pedro Ramet, ed., Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics

(Durham: Duke Press Policy Studies, 1984), pp. 376-407.

Irwin, Zachary T., ‘The Islamic Revival and the Muslims of Bosnia-Hercegovina’, East

European Quarterly 17, no. 4 (January 1984), pp. 437-458.

Jelić-Butić, Fikreta, Ustaše i NDH 1941-1945 (Zagreb: Sveučilinšta Naklada Liber, 1978).

Judah, Tim, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1997).

Kamberović, Husnija, Mehmed Spaho (1883-1939) Politička biografija (Sarajevo: Vijeće

Kongresa bošnjački intelektualaca, 2009).

 85

Kesić, Vesna, ‘Muslim Women, Croatian Women, Serbian Women, Albanian Women…’ in

Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalisation

and Fragmentation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 311-322.

Lukač, Dušan, Radnički pokret u Jugoslaviji u nacionalno pitanje 1918-1941 (Belgrade:

Institut za savremenu istoriju i NIP export-press, 1972).

Malcolm, Noel, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

Mazower, Mark, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin Books,

1999).

Nahaylo, Bohdan and Victor Swoboda, Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities

Problem in the USSR (New York: Free Press, 1990).

Pavlowitch, Stevan K., Tito, Yugoslavia’s Great Dictator: A Reassessment (London: Ohio

State University Press, 1992).

Petranović, Branko and Čedomir Štrbac, Istorija socialističke Jugoslavije (Belgrade:

Radnička Štampa, 1977).

Purivatra, Atif, Nacionalni i politički razvitak Muslimana – Rasprave i Članci (Sarajevo:

Svjetlost, 2nd ed., 1970).

Ramet, Sabrina P., Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991 (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1992).

Ramet, Sabrina P., The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918-2005

(Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2006).

Redžić, Enver, Historijski pogledi na vjerske i nacionalne odnose u Bosni i Hercegovini

(Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 2005).

Ryan, Stephen, Ethnic Conflict and International Relations (Aldershot: Dartmouth

Publishing Company, 1995).

 86

Šainović, Nikola, ‘Amerikanci i Milošević su imali slične interese u Bosni’, Nedeljnik (11

August 2016). Available from: http://www.nedeljnik.rs/nedeljnik/portalnews/nikola-

sainovic-amerikanci-i-milosevic-su-imali-slicne-interese-u-bosni/, accessed on

15/08/2016.

Schindler, John R., Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad

(Minnesota: Zenith Press, 2007).

Schlesinger, Philip, ‘Collective Identities, Friends, Enemies’, Innovation 12, no. 4 (1999), pp.

461-69.

Scott, James C., Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition

Have Failed (New York: Yale University, 1998).

Shoup, Paul, Communism and the National Question (New York: Colombia University Press,

1968).

Simic, Drazen, ‘How Many Inhabitants Does Bosnia Have? The Only Country without a

Population Census’, AIM (28 April 2001).

Sukulić, Duško, Garth Massey and Randy Hodson, ‘Who Were the Yugoslavs? Failed

Sources of a Common Identity in the Former Yugoslavia’, American Sociological

Review 59, no. 1 (February 1994), pp. 83-97.

Suljević, Kasim, Nacionalnost Muslimana (Rijeka: Otokar Keršovani, 1981).

Tilly, Charles, ‘Conclusion: From Interactions to Outcomes in Social Movements’, in Marco

G. Giugni, Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly, eds., How Social Movements Matter

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 253-70.

Trhulj, Sead, Mladi Muslimani (Zagreb: Globus, 1992).