Politics & Power Quote by Alija Izetbegovic

Bosnia, in Izetbegovic's framing, isn't a romantic melting pot gone wrong; it's an inventory of fault lines. The cadence is deliberate: three religions, three nations, and then the acid add-on, those "others". The scare quotes do heavy moral work. They expose how a multiethnic society gets administratively degraded into a remainder category, a bureaucratic shrug that still carries social danger. It's not just description; it's a quiet indictment of a political order that pretends to recognize diversity while reinforcing hierarchy.

Calling nationalism "strong in all three" is the kind of evenhandedness that reads less like neutrality than strategy. As an activist-turned-statesman speaking in the shadow of Yugoslavia's collapse and Bosnia's looming (and then ongoing) catastrophe, he has to name the problem without sounding like he's assigning sole blame. The sharper line follows anyway: in two of them there are "a lot of racism, chauvinism, separatism". He doesn't need to name which two; in the context of the early 1990s, everyone listening would. The omission is its own political calculus, a way to state a truth while leaving room to negotiate with people who might deny it.

The final clause, "and now we are supposed to make a state out of that", lands like exhausted realism. It's not resignation so much as a critique of international optimism and constitutional engineering: the idea that a state can be assembled from mutually suspicious identities by decree. The intent is warning, but also permission-granting - to admit Bosnia's problem isn't cultural "complexity" in the abstract; it's weaponized identity, and the timetable is unforgiving.