Nedzib Sacirbey, a ‘founding father’ of independent Bosnia, dies at 94 of the coronavirus

Nedzib Sacirbey was considered one of the “founding fathers” of the Balkan state of Bosnia, which declared its independence in 1992 after the breakup of communist Yugoslavia but thereafter endured an ethnic war among its Bosniak (mainly Muslim), Serb (mainly Orthodox Christian) and Croat (mainly Roman Catholic) populations.

After acts of genocide committed by Bosnian Serbian military forces, including the Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in July 1995, a massive air and ground campaign by NATO forces in August and September of that year finally silenced the guns.

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.

Nedzib Sacirbey - pronounced Ned-jeeb Shacheer-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.

Nedzib 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, Sacirbegovic 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 Jews, Serbs and Bosnia’s Roma population, though not against Muslims. 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, 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.