Eurasia Press & News
The son of the uncontested Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) leader, the late Alija Izetbegovic, says he’ll pull out of politics if he fails to become the new president of the ruling Bosnian Party of Democratic Action, SDA.
With this statement, the usually cautious Bakir Izetbegovic has apparently gone beyond the point of no-return and raised the stakes even further in the escalating race for the new Bosniak leader, media reported on Monday.
“Either I will take full responsibility for what I am doing now or I will completely wave that responsibility. I am not ready to do things half-way thought no more,” Bakir Izetbegovic said over the weekend.
The race for the new Bosniak leader will affect political positioning of the biggest ethnic group in Bosnia and as such will be detrimental for the development of the future political situation in the tense country.
Because of its importance, this race has been already drawing increased public attention for weeks. This situation has peaked over the weekend after the SDA’s main board held a closed door session at which it started preparing key principles and mechanisms for the selection of its new leader.
“Who will be the new president of the SDA,” asked Vildana Selimbegovic, the editor-in-chief of the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje in her column on Monday.
Candidates for the SDA leadership will be known only shortly ahead of the elections, but the main contesters at the moment appear to be the current SDA president Sulejman Tihic and his two vice-presidents Bakir Izetbegovic and Adnan Terzic.
Since its establishment in 1991, the SDA was run and tightly controlled by its main founder Aija Izetbegovic, until 2000 when he officially withdrew from political scene due to his worsening health. Alija Izetbegovic surprised many when he left the party to the lesser known, uncharismatic Sulejman Tihic, instead of his own son and closest aide Bakir.
Bakir Izetbegovic apparently obeyed his father’s choice and refused to challenge the post although he was directly offered party leadership after Alija Izetbegovic died in 2003, and several times afterwards.
Yet growing political infighting over the past few years within different wings in SDA party, as well as between SDA and the second-strongest Bosnian Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina, SZBH, has seriously weakened the Bosniaks’ political position in the country.
This clash increased even further over the past few months, when moderate Tihic, together with the Bosnian Serb and Croat leaders, Milorad Dodik and Dragan Covic, formed the so-called Prud Group and started negotiating solutions to Bosnia’s mounting problems without wider support from his party.
This development and several reconciliatory statements towards Bosnian Serbs have won Tihic overwhelming support from the international community, but have seriously depleted his support within the SDA.
At this point Bakir Izetbegovic stepped in and announced his challenge for the throne.
Many international officials and analysts believe that Bakir Izetbegovic’s victory would only further escalate ethnic tensions and animosities among top Bosnian Serb, Croat and Muslim politicians.
Former Bosnian state premier Adnan Terzic has also announced his candidacy, although he seems to be out of his league when running against Izetbegovic and Tihic. However, he counts on his broad popularity among people as well as on hopes SDA leaders could pick him, in order to avoid further divisions between Tihic and Izetbegovic’s supporters.
Terzic, who surprisingly won an online survey done by the Hayat television on Saturday, told Hayat that SDA’s main board session on Saturday looked like “calm seas with sharks swimming underneath.”
Leader of the influential Islamic Community, Reis Mustafa Ceric and owner of the strongest Sarajevo daily Dnevni Avaz, Fahrudin Radoncic, have been two key elements which in the past were crucial in determining power-sharing among Bosniaks. Yet both of them still refuse to openly show if they have any preferences in this important race.
