socialist Yugoslavia would soon disintegrate, or rather be torn apart in 1991-1992,
and the author speaks about his political contribution to saving Yugoslavia. “I used
to love Yugoslavia,” he says in his Sjećanja, while in a different place he offers the
following explanation:

I was emotionally attached to Yugoslavia and, perhaps as a Muslim, I instinctively
felt that the break-up of Yugoslavia was not in our favor. Even though the highest
concentration of Muslims was in Bosnia, Muslims were also in Serbia, Montenegro,
Macedonia, Kosovo, and Croatia. (Izetbegovic, 2005, p. 76)

Then Chapter Four has pages of Sjećanja that are full of descriptions of the brutal aggressions and cataclysm of the Bosnian War from 1992-1995. The Srebrenica
genocide is described in Chapter Five, while Chapter Six has Sjećanja put a spotlight
on the many negotiating initiatives as well as attempts and labyrinths, ones where
the author often saw that not only himself but also many others who had not betrayed their human heart and moral upstanding had been caught up in Kafkaesque
forms of the demiurgic machineries of global diplomacy that easily get the better
of an individual. “The Dayton Diaries” makes Chapter Seven, and “After Dayton” is
Chapter Eight, the final chapter dedicated to the second post-war period the author
experienced, but now undoubtedly as a morally encouraged man whose human deeds
and political fights had saved Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state.

This is the external structure of Alija Izetbegović’s Sjećanja whose structure
addresses the author’s approximately 80 years. Still, Alija Izetbegović’s Sjećanja have
its powerful internal stems and threads. It is now time to say the most important
things about them.

Sjećanja from the Crossroads of Worlds

Sometimes the lives of later people so happen to often emerge as an inevitable interpretation of the lives of the people before them. As is the case with many lives,
so is this with many books, particularly when leafed through and read so as to bring
their pages into conversation. A good example of this may be found in Selimović and
Jerkov’s (2004, p. 310) novel Derviš i smrt [Death and the Dervish], where through
the hero Hasan, they say, “We live at a crossroads of worlds, at a border between
peoples, in everyone’s way.”

The literature and non-literary works in Bosnia and Herzegovina hardly contain
a work that would more impressive for interpreting the quote from Derviš i smrt
Selimović and Jerkov’s (2004) than Alija Izetbegović’s Sjećanja. For more than half