Alija Izetbegović

Alija Izetbegović is presented as a contested figure in the arguments surrounding the Bosnian War. At first, he stands for a besieged, multiethnic Sarajevo and for Bosnian Muslims understood as victims of Serbian aggression. Later, claims that he was a fundamentalist seeking an Islamic republic unsettle that picture. The narrative does not resolve the competing accounts; it uses their collision to examine how political sympathies, moral certainties, and claims of complexity shape what observers believe they see.

Identity and Initial Portrayal

When the fighting between Serbs and Croats shifted to Bosnia in the spring of 1992, Izetbegović was introduced as the elderly representative of Bosnia’s Muslims. The narrator describes him as having a handsome, humanist’s face. In the moral map then prevailing among the narrator’s acquaintances, Izetbegović and the Bosnian Muslims represented the victims of aggression, while Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić were cast as the villains. Sarajevo, associated with the Bosnian Muslim cause, became an emblem of the pluralist Europe those acquaintances believed was under threat.

That portrayal was strengthened by a contrast between an idealized image of Bosnian Muslims and the violence around them. The narrator recalls the sympathetic attention given to people in Sarajevo’s book-filled apartments, and the conviction that they embodied a harmonious, multiethnic society. Izetbegović’s presence within this account is political and symbolic: the passage supplies little about his personal history, instead making him the representative of a cause through which outsiders interpreted the war.

Competing Accounts of the War

The narrator later listens to commentators he calls subtle minds challenge the image of Izetbegović as an apostle of tolerance. They describe him as a Muslim fundamentalist surrounded by mujahideen and claim that he wanted to establish an Islamic republic in Sarajevo. They further allege that, unlike Milošević, he had a strong interest in keeping the siege and war going. These are presented as arguments the narrator encounters, not as independently established facts about Izetbegović.

The same revisionist case invokes the history of Serbs under Ottoman rule, suggesting that they did not want to be subjected to another such experience. It also disputes the apparent clarity of press photographs of Serbian violence, with the claim that close inspection showed many purported victims of the Serbs were themselves Serbs. The arguments recast the conflict from a simple opposition between aggressor and victim into a struggle in which identities, historical memories, and evidence are contested.

The Narrator’s Shifting Judgment

The movement between these accounts is central to Izetbegović’s role in the narrative. The narrator admits that he was susceptible to the last person who had spoken and that the skeptical arguments made him nod along with the refrain that things were more complicated than they seemed. His response records a change in judgment, but not a settled conclusion about Izetbegović’s intentions or responsibility.

Bernard-Henri Lévy objects to that refrain as a justification for resignation, delay, and diplomatic cowardice. He argues that invoking complexity in response to the ethnic cleansing carried out by Milošević and his associates obscures a situation he considers tragically simple. The narrator finds himself nodding to Lévy as well. Izetbegović consequently remains at the center of an unresolved interpretive conflict: the initial humanist emblem and the later figure of suspicion are both shown through the people arguing over Bosnia, while the narrator’s repeated assent reveals how readily his political understanding can shift.