The war formally ended through the U.S.-brokered Dayton peace accords reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in November 1995, led by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and his assistant and chief negotiator, Richard Holbrooke.
Dr. Sacirbey, a psychiatrist by calling, was present at the peace conference as a confidant, adviser and right-hand-man to Bosnia’s first president, Alija Izetbegovic, and went on to serve as the new state’s global ambassador at large, including as its first envoy to the United States, although without the formal title of ambassador.
Having settled in McLean, Va., and becoming a U.S. citizen, he spent his later years practicing psychiatry while lobbying for Bosnia in Washington and at the United Nations in New York. His elder son, Muhamed “Mo” Sacirbey, also a U.S. citizen, became Bosnia’s first ambassador to the United Nations.
Dr. Sacirbey — his name was pronounced Ned-jeeb Shach-eer-bay — died Feb. 23 at his son Mo’s home in Key West, Fla. He was 94 and the cause was complications from covid-19, according to his sons Mo and Omar Sacirbey.
edzib Sacirbegovic (he shortened his name when he settled in the United States) was born April 23, 1926, in Travnik, at the time part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia under ethnic Serb King Alexander I. He was 9 when his father, a journalist and businessman, moved the family to Sarajevo, now the capital of Bosnia.
He attended a state school in Sarajevo where he, a Muslim, recalled that his two best friends were an ethnic Serb (Orthodox Christian) and an ethnic Croat (Roman Catholic) at a time when young people of all three ethnic groups mixed and played freely together.
Both those two friends later emigrated to the United States as ethnic tensions flared in the 1990s, and all three met regularly in the Washington area for the rest of their lives.
In 1943, aged 17, he joined his friend Izetbegovic in the Mladi Muslimani (Young Muslims) movement at a time, during World War II, when Sarajevo was controlled by the Ustaša, well-armed Catholic Croatians who collaborated with the Nazis and perpetrated atrocities against Muslims, Jews, Serbs and Bosnia’s Roma population.
He was jailed for three months for refusing conscription into the Ustaša army. In 1944, he married fellow Muslim activist Aziza Alajbegovic.
In 1946, a year after the war ended, Dr. Sacirbey, his wife, Izetbegovic and other Muslim rights activists were jailed by the new communist regime of Marshal Josip Broz Tito for their continuing activities with the Young Muslims.
Tito had led one of Europe’s most successful partisan guerrilla groups against the Nazis and the Ustaša and would go on to be president of Yugoslavia until his death in 1980. As Tito began distancing himself from the Soviet Union and Stalinism, Dr. Sacirbey was released after two years, his wife after one, both of them resisting aggressive pressure to join the Communist Party.
In 1955, the couple enrolled at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, in a city located at the time in Yugoslavia but now is the capital of Croatia. They both graduated in 1959, returned to Sarajevo to practice medicine and continued to advocate greater freedom in communist Yugoslavia.
Dr. Sacirbey also taught psychiatry, one of his students being Radovan Karadzic, who would many years later become the infamous leader of Bosnia’s Serbs during the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995. Karadzic, who oversaw the ethnic cleansing of Muslims during the war, is now serving life imprisonment in The Hague for genocide and other crimes against humanity after being convicted in 2016 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Always under surveillance by Tito’s secret police for their pro-Muslim, anti-communist activism, and still refusing to join the Communist Party, Dr. Sacirbey and his wife decided to practice medicine elsewhere.
They were first granted visas to work in Libya in 1963, where Dr. Sacirbey became a district health officer and his wife a gynecologist whose patients included Libya’s Queen Fatimah el-Sharif. In June 1967, with their son Muhamed, they flew to New York City as political refugees. Their son Omar was born in Columbus, Ohio, later that year, and the entire family, previously Yugoslav nationals, became U.S. citizens, adding Bosnian nationality once the latter had become independent in 1992.
Both parents continued practicing medicine, first at the Orient State Institute in Columbus and later at the Cleveland Psychiatric Institute.
Having moved to McLean in 1974, Dr. Sacirbey became a staff psychiatrist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Washington, where one of his first priorities was dealing with the post-traumatic stress disorder of Vietnam War vets. His wife was a gynecologist at what is now Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia.
At the same time, Dr. Sacirbey continued to lobby on behalf of Bosnian Muslims, particularly during the 1992-95 war. He retired in 1995 just before he attended the Dayton peace conference and spent the next two years as Bosnian envoy to the United Nations, where his son Muhamed was Ambassador from 1992 to 2000, except for a seven-month stint as foreign minister in 1995.
His wife died in 1988. In addition to his sons, Muhamed and Omar, a Boston-based journalist, survivors include a sister and two grandsons.
Omar Sacirbey recalled that his father had once told him how, in 1967, Libya had refused to extend his and his wife’s visas. Fearing further imprisonment in Yugoslavia, the couple had two choices of destination — majority-Muslim Turkey or the United States.
“While living in a country where most people were Muslims like them was appealing,” Omar said, “they were more drawn to the opportunity to live in a pluralistic democracy where individual rights were respected regardless of race, religion or ethnicity.”
Conflict in Former Yugoslavia | C-SPAN.org (c-span.org)
In memoriam - Dr. Nedžib Šaćirbegović 1926 - 2021 (icnab.com)
Nedžib Šaćirbegović preselio na Ahiret (stav.ba)
No comments:
Post a Comment