Repaying Debt

What kind of a state will Moslems in Bosnia have? Alija Izetbegovic and Fikret Abdic, whose old rivalry has until recently been skilfully concealed by their political alliance, are now openly warring over the right to answer the above question.

The Yugoslav news agency Tanjug last Thursday said that in the first few days of October alone, 50 people were killed in north-western Bosnia-Herzegovina in armed clashes between forces loyal to Izetbegovic and units commanded by Abdic in ``Western Bosnia.'' Izetbegovic, the legal President, has proclaimed Abdic a traitor who is trying to put the Moslems 50 years back at the very moment they have become a ``historical nation'' able to found their own state; the excommunicated Abdic retorted by citing that 200,000 Moslems have so far lost their lives for ``the defeated concept of Alija's state.''

These are not the first recriminations of these two men, who had together and under the same flag--that of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA)--set out to topple the Bosnian authorities in autumn 1990, nor are these the first treacheries the two have committed against each other. The Moslem fratricidal war, however, did not begin last year, when Abdic openly traded and secretly negotiated with Serbs, who had driven his countrymen out of their centuries-old homes, nor did it begin this summer, when he did not permit the Moslem-Croat slaughter to cast a shadow over his neighborly relations with Croatia. Alija Izetbegovic, whose nerves are obviously in great shape and who likes to evoke ``Eastern wisdom,'' did not excommunicate Abdic even in June, a turning-point for the Moslem cause, when the European Community took advantage of the latter's ``cooperativeness'' to force Izetbegovic to approach the round table with the Serbo-Croat proposal on Bosnia-Herzegovina's division into three ethnic states. The conflict was then merely smoldering. Its eruption was caused by Fikret Abdic, who burnt down the last bridge with Sarajevo by proclaiming an autonomous ``Western Bosnia.''

Why has Abdic drawn the first move of no return and why was he the first whose nerves failed him? As long as there was at least a remote chance of Bosnia remaining united, the inter-Moslem dissensions, disagreements and intolerances were suppressed. Had Alija's risky gambit succeeded, had Bosnia remained united with the help of a Western formula of a majority democracy (which would have secured the Moslems a superiority in all democratically-elected institutions of the system, in all elections governed by the principle ``one man-one vote''), Izetbegovic would have remained untouchable and the two might not have had openly clashed. In such a Bosnia, Abdic would have probably remained what he had been in the Communist era and during Izetbegovic's reign--the largest fish among small fry, the inviolable ruler of his own territory, a ruler occasionally ridiculed but also feared by the central authorities.

Developments had, however, taken another course: it is now clear that Bosnia will be divided and the Sarajevo authorities have not forgotten that Fikret Abdic is one of those to deserve ``credit'' for such a turn of developments. What's done can't be undone: for the first time in history, Bosnian Moslems will have their own state. It was enough to see Izetbegovic's appearance in the Bosnian Parliament last week (with Clinton's Balkan envoy Charles Redman on his left and the Iranian Ambassador to Bosnia on his right) to know that there is practically no chance that this state will stand the regional chieftains and local power-wielders which the Communists had tolerated and wooed in their awkward attempts to manage the economy and society.

Alija Izetbegovic is indubitably the political, military and ideological leader of the Bosnian Moslems. In state and political affairs, Fikret Abdic is merely his accidental fellow-traveller.

The two leaders' rivalry is usually said to have begun with the million votes Fikret Abdic won at the November 1990 Presidency elections and Izetbegovic's alleged envy because he had won several hundred thousand votes less.

At that time, the common priority of the three national parties--the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS)--was to topple the Communist regime. This was not difficult on the parliamentary level. However, in order to secure their candidates' election to the Bosnia-Herzegovina Presidency, the three parties had to cede each other the votes of their members and sympathisers. Nikola Koljevic and Biljana Plavsic (now both Vice-Presidents in the Serb Republic in B-H), for instance, would probably not have been elected if they had won merely the Serbian votes; they needed the votes of SDA and HDZ members. (The two of them had by the skin of their teeth beaten Nenad Kecmanovic, who had carried off a large number of votes of Communist--and Reformist-oriented Moslems). Fikret Abdic had been the candidate who least repelled voters of all creeds and religions; he was the only one to enjoy the undivided sympathy of the public as an innocent victim of the Communists' legal persecution (he spent 500 days on trial because of the ``Agrokomerc'' scandal--his hands were obviously not too clean but he had made no personal gains--the whole scandal was actually a showdown between political power-wielders). Even at the time of the greatest election campaign idyll of the three national leaders Radovan Karadzic, Alija Izetbegovic and Stjepan Kljuic, the people suspected no good would come out of it; Abdic seemed the most benign, the most harmless candidate they could vote for. Although a well-liked figure, Abdic was not a political leader. It would therefore be inane to interpret the million votes as a sign of his major political influence upon the masses.

Just before the the first multi-party elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the new and old parties began vying for Abdic's affections. All of them fought for him; they rightly thought that Abdic would bring the party he joined a dowry of Cazin Krajina's 200,000 votes. No-one considered Abdic a nationalist, ideology did not interest him. The Reformists believed that Abdic, a businessmen, was made for their party and Kecmanovic and film director Emil Kusturica spent four hours trying to convince him to join them. To no avail.

Abdic's approach to politics has been businesslike. He had correctly estimated that the SDA would triumph at the elections; this meant that, if he invested his prestige (and the 200,000 votes he had at his disposal) well, he could count on the highest profits when the time for paying off his election services comes. He was interested solely in the well-being of ``Agrokomerc,'' the firm he managed. Abdic had built his career of an economist-wizard with the generous help of the state and influential politicians. He now did not find the idea of rebuilding his ``Agrokomerc'' with the help of the ruling party repulsive. As opposed to Abdic, Izetbegovic is a professional politician, one could even say a professional revolutionary. From his youth (he was a member of the ``Young Moslems'' in occupied Sarajevo in 1944), he fought for one idea, was imprisoned because of it and staked all he had upon it. As a man of one idea, he can feel only contempt for Abdic's self-interest, pragmatism and short-term political and economic aims. (``He is breaking us up into tribes, he is trying to feudalise us, ceding our territories to Serbs and Croats,'' Izetbegovic has recently been storming over Sarajevo Radio and TV). Izetbegovic had until now been patiently paying Abdic for his services. The pay-offs began right after the elections ended, with Abdic's people taking over numerous key posts in the new government.

Abdic was given the choice of the Minister of Internal Affairs, and he opted for Alija Delimustafic, the well-known owner of ``Cenex,'' a company which greatly increased its assets during the ``tri-partite coalition.'' The SDA had probably profited from Cenex's sales of Serbia's food to Croatia just as the SDS had at the time gotten rich from selling gasoline from Federal Reserves. People who have recently come from Sarajevo swear that the Cenex building is one of the rare ones on which no shells have fallen.

Economic power, no doubt, gives rise to political ambitions. As soon as the war broke out, Abdic and the co-opted Presidency member Nenad Kecmanovic began planning to oust Izetbegovic. Delimustafic had meanwhile bought all the Sarajevo media (and so acquired most of the shares of the ``Oslobodjenje'' printing-house). He was replaced and forced to leave wartime Sarajevo, but his brother remained in the Bosnian capital. The latter even managed to invest Cenex's capital and found several heralds. Judging by foreign journalists' reports, at least one newspaper financed by the Delimustafics appears in Sarajevo. They probably favour Abdic's political interests, if only to make the life of ``Alija's state'' miserable. The independent weekly ``Blic,'' for instance, has been carrying the texts of Oslobodjenje's reporters which the Sarajevo daily has refused to print. ``Blic'' has also carried Abdic's open letter to Izetbegovic, which ``Oslobodjenje'' had refused to publish a long time before Abdic was officially excommunicated from the Bosnia--Herzegovina Presidency and the SDA.