Tangled path to war

Published on Thursday 24 July 2008 21:26

It's all the fault of the Serbs and Radovan Karadzic (your report, 23 July). Why then was the Dayton Agreement not reached before the Bosnian wars broke out?

There was, after all, the confederal-cantonal Cutileiro Plan, provisionally agreed by Bosnia's three ethnic leaders at negotiations hosted by the European Community in Lisbon on 23 February, 1992. The Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic, who all along wanted a centrally governed Bosnia, flew back to Sarajevo and met the US ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann. Encouraged by Mr Zimmermann, Mr Izetbegovic disowned the plan. Washington had, in effect, pushed the Europeans aside and paved the way for war. Some three-and-a-half years later, Washington was congratulating itself for having engineered the confederal-cantonal Dayton Agreement.

The beliefs of the West's favourite leader, Alija Izetbegovic, echoed those of Islamists. His authorship of The Islamic Declaration in 1970 earned him a prison sentence. In it, he yearned for a caliphate subject to Islamic law from Morocco to Indonesia, and ultimately elsewhere whenever and wherever Muslims attained a majority.

Irony abounds. Just as many in the West today fear Islamist organisations advocating a caliphate, so Bosnia's Serbs and Croats feared a centrally governed, Izetbegovic-led Bosnia. Moreover, if Izetbegovic were alive today, he would not be granted entry into the US.

YUGO KOVACH

The Barons

Twickenham, Middlesex