Politics & Power Quote by Alija Izetbegovic

A bleak kind of optimism runs through Izetbegovic's line: the promise of survival is posed as the only victory that can be guaranteed. Written in the language of attrition rather than triumph, it sidesteps the heroic rhetoric leaders often reach for in crisis. Instead of selling an end date, he sells endurance. That choice matters. In wars and state-building projects, deadlines are propaganda; admitting "years" is an attempt to immunize the public against disillusionment.

The most striking move is the recalibration of what "winning" even means. "Our people won't die anymore" is a moral floor, not a banner. It frames peace less as reconciliation than as the cessation of slaughter - a modesty that reads as honesty, but also as a tactical lowering of expectations. When he says he isn't sure "how much we will be able to win", he is quietly confessing the asymmetry of power and the volatility of international promises. The pivot to certainty - "we won't lose anything that we have now" - is political triage: if maximal goals are unattainable, preserving the minimum becomes the mission.

Context sharpens the subtext. Izetbegovic, as a Bosnian leader associated with both activism and governance during the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian War, had to speak to a population exhausted by siege logic and to allies eager for clean narratives. The slightly awkward phrasing (the near-contradiction between "not sure we can win" and "certain we won't lose") captures a leader trying to hold a line: to keep people from betting their lives on miracles, without letting them surrender to despair.