First published on Salon Blogs
Sometimes I don’t feel safe in my own neighborhood. By “neighborhood”, I mean the United States of America, home of 3,000 dead agnates. Reading Alija Izetbegovic’s obituary can give you some pretty good insight into the source of my anxiety. He was a waffler, a Muslim, a good man.
Like all nationalists, he wanted a place to call “home”. To be safe there. He made the mistake of trusting a United States Ambassador.
He hosted Usama bin Laden. He was one of three leaders to sign the Dayton Peace Plan, the necessity of which is one of the more disgusting recent facts of American lameness. He thought we would help him. 8,000 dead in Srebrenica proved him wrong.
Please, let’s find the new Izetbegovic(es), beat a path to their doors, ask them to be our friend, back it up with earnest action, and maybe they won’t have Usama bin Laden over for lunch.
Here’s an excerpt from the NYT obit:
Indecision gripped Mr. Izetbegovic, who had made scant preparation for war. On Feb. 23, in Lisbon, he signed, along with leaders of Bosnia’s Croats and Serbs, a European-brokered agreement creating a confederal structure for the three Bosnian ethnic groups. A few days later, influenced by what he saw as an encouraging conversation with Warren Zimmermann, the United States ambassador, he changed his mind.
The Izetbegovic government then staged a countrywide referendum on the issue of Bosnian independence. Muslims and Croats endorsed independence by 99.4 percent while the Serbs boycotted a vote their leaders said was illegal.
Street fighting broke out in Sarajevo on April 5. The next day, the European Union recognized Bosnia, and the United States did so a day later. By then, the Serbs were already shelling Sarajevo, and a concerted campaign to drive Muslims from their homes along the Drina, Bosna and Sava rivers in eastern and northern Bosnia had begun.
Through the summer, Bosnian Serb forces seized 70 percent of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, expelling hundreds of thousands of Muslims. Many were herded into detention camps where men of fighting age were sometimes executed; women and children were pushed across the lines after suffering abuse and humiliation.
With neither the United States nor the European Union ready to go to war for the state they had recognized, Mr. Izetbegovic turned increasingly to Islamic states, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya, for assistance. Osama bin Laden visited him in Sarajevo in 1993 and sponsored some fighters from Arabic countries to fight on the Muslims’ side in Bosnia, according to a report in the German magazine Der Spiegel.