Muhamed Sacirbey: Bosnian Ambassador to the U.N.

By Ian Williams

The Bosnians are on the verge of being cast as the Palestinians of Europe in the next century. They have been driven out of their towns and villages, massacred and besieged while the rest of the world finds excuses not to help. So it is fitting that the ambassador of Bosnia-Hercegovina to the United Nations should be a Muslim who has been a long-time supporter of Palestinian rights and who is well aware of the irony that the issue of Bosnia is one in which the Arab League and Organization of the Islamic Conference are joined by Israel in their complaints about U.N. apathy.

Muhamed Sacirbey was born in Sarajevo in 1956 but left in 1963 with his parents for Turkey and North Africa. Four years later, in 1967, he moved to the U.S. Describing himself as an "all-American boy," who toyed with the idea of West Point and passed up Harvard and Yale to take a football scholarship at Tulane University, he never forgot his origins.

"I think that my American roots are also very consistent with my Bosnian roots," he explains, "because Bosnia is also a multicultural society, and put a high premium on tolerance and coexistence."

In Sarajevo, his parents both had been active members of the Young Muslim group, which tried to maintain a cultural identity in the face of pressure from the surrounding Serbs and Croats. He cites his mother as someone who was devout but tolerant, observing prayers and fasts, but strong on women's rights. Many members of Bosnia's present government were in the same group, so he was well-connected.

When the Bosnians elected to pull out of the former Yugoslavia, Sacirbey was an investment banker in the U.S. He believed he could best contribute to his former homeland's initial development as an independent nation by helping it to secure foreign investment.

"I believed that we had something really unique there, which was a multicultural state, which would be well suited for international investment and which would attract money from East and West," he explains. When Bosnia became independent, he worked on its admission to the U.N. "I didn't think that my role would expand much beyond being a caretaker until someone else came in," he says of the days before the tragedy unfolded. Instead, the Bosnia government called upon him to represent it before the international body.

No longer risking his neck playing football, Ambassador Sacirbey is a keen skier, on snow and water, but the slippery slopes of Balkan diplomacy have left him and his wife little time for such pursuits. For a start, he has to observe security precautions. On Wall Street, making a killing was a metaphor. In Bosnia it is a grim reality.

Sacirbey says bluntly that "the U.N. failed the Bosnians." The Bosnian government had asked the U.N. to install UNPROFOR observers, "especially on our border with Serbia," for months before the first massacre.

"Putting forces there to avert war, instead of waiting until afterwards, would have been a small deviation from U.N. policy but we would probably have avoided all this bloodshed if it had been done," Ambassador Sacirbey says.

He is more critical of individual member states than of the U.N. itself.

"This new world order has proven to be the 'new selective application world order,' so there is no world order," he says. "The U.N. hierarchy should act independently of the countries that make up the Security Council and the General Assembly, in the sense that they have an obligation to promote ideas that are ultimately going to create some new world order. Instead they are reacting to the wishes and the manipulation of the most powerful."

He describes the sense of disappointment of the people of Sarajevo when they discovered that the forces that they thought had come to rescue them had instead a mandate limited to ensuring food supplies. "Our people wanted to know, how come the international community is going to feed us, but while we are at the dining table, we are shelled by the surrounding Serbs," he comments acidly.

He thinks that the U.N. has lost sight of its original purpose, which is to end the aggression. "If they are not willing to do it, then they need to take a step back and say that since they have not fulfilled their obligation, Bosnia-Hercegovina has the unlimited right to defend itself."

Instead the Security Council members express concern about adding weapons to the area. "Our answer is that indeed there are already a lot of weapons, but they are all owned by the other side," Sacirbey explains. He stresses that Bosnia only wants defensive weapons—artillery and anti-tank weapons to counter the massive superiority of their opponents.

"At the moment, most of the deaths of this war are not caused by sophisticated weaponry, but by ethnic cleansing of civilians. It's very low technology murder—beatings, throat-cuaing and bullets to the back of the head—along with torture and shelling. When you shell a city packed with civilians, then you don't have to worry where the shells fall. They are going to hit the target."

Sacirbey wonders whether there is, consciously or otherwise, bias among Western nations against the idea of a Muslim head of state in Europe appealing for help to maintain the democratic secular state of Bosnia-Hercegovina. "Perhaps because the image of Islam here is that it does not stand for democracy, for secularity," he speculates. "Those are attributes that we reserve for the West."

He warns "those who see partition as the only answer" that "partition would mean a Muslim ghetto, filled with very unhappy people, radicalized people. You will have a Muslim state in Europe—it might be a lot smaller, but it would be a lot more radicalized."

The nature of Islam in Bosnia-Hercegovina is not conducive to fundamentalism, Sacirbey explains. "But it certainly would be possible to radicalize our politics if we see ourselves as the victims, rather than the beneficiaries of Western democracy."

Ian Williams is a British free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.