ADIL ZULFIKARPAŠIĆ

Adil Zulfikarpašić was a descendant of an old Bosnian noble family, the Čengić beys. He was born in Foča on 23rd of December 1921. His father, Husein-bey, was a landowner, former mayor of Foča, and a member of the Waqf Assembly in Sarajevo, while his mother was Zahida-hanuma Čengić.

He grew up in an intellectual and patriarchal-religious environment, which early on sparked his interest in building a fairer social order. As a high school student, at the age of sixteen, he joined the communist youth, and soon after was admitted to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.

In 1937, he was expelled from the Foča High School for participating in organizing a strike in the local wood industry. After two years, he clashed with the Party, as he aligned himself with the views of the communist writer Miroslav Krleža, who was expelled from the Party due to "ideological deviations." As a result, Zulfikarpašić was also expelled from the Party.

Before World War II, he was reinstated into the Party and became a prominent activist, working illegally in Foča and Sarajevo. In 1941, he enrolled in the Higher School of Economics in Belgrade. The war caught him in Foča, where he began working on forming a partisan unit.

After a while, he was sent to Sarajevo for anti-fascist work. In the fall of 1941, he joined the Kalinovac Partisan Unit to work politically with the youth, and soon after moved to the newly-formed Zvijezda unit near Vareš.

In February 1942, Zulfikarpašić was arrested by Ustaše in Sarajevo, tortured, and sentenced to death. Due to his prominent family and the fact that his brother was killed by the Chetniks, his sentence was commuted to twenty years of imprisonment. He served his sentence in Zenica and Sremska Mitrovica, and was then transported to Lepoglava, from where he managed to escape. He reached Cazin, then Jajce, where he established the Higher Party School.

When the people's government was established, he was appointed head of the personnel department. He later worked in the Regional Committee in Mostar. Near the end of the war, he was transferred to liberated Sarajevo, where he represented the civilian government until the arrival of the official government.

In the first government of the People's Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, he was appointed assistant minister of trade. Soon after, he realized that, instead of the idealism of the early years of struggle, the leading communist layer was focused on the pursuit of material wealth and a comfortable life. Losing faith in the possibility of establishing social justice, he faced a dilemma: to reconcile with the reality and live in the "safety" of the state's elite or to leave everything behind and start anew outside the country for which he had fought.

He decided to leave everything behind and emigrate. In early February 1946, he moved to Trieste, Italy, where he was granted political asylum. From there, he moved to Rome, supported for a time by relatives from Turkey. In October 1946, he moved to Austria, where he studied political science in Innsbruck and Graz, and wrote articles about Marxism for an American news agency.

In 1954, he moved to Switzerland. There, he began his political struggle for Bosniaks, becoming an influential representative of the Bosniak diaspora. He joined the Liberal International and served as the continental secretary and a member of its Executive Committee. This position gave him access to elite political and economic circles in Europe. He gathered prominent Bosniak Muslims in the diaspora and worked on creating the Bosniak Democratic Organization.

From Switzerland, Zulfikarpašić maintained close ties with Vienna, where the new nucleus of Bosniak democratic emigration had already formed. He published numerous articles about Bosnia in newspapers for Croatian emigrants in America. In 1960, he began publishing the political-cultural monthly Bosanski pogledi (Bosnian Views) in Vienna.

His first collaborators included prominent Bosniak intellectuals and public and political figures from pre-war Yugoslavia. Bosanski pogledi was published until 1967, gathering Muslim émigrés from around the world who, under the influence of various national and political currents in exile, were increasingly at risk of losing their cultural and national identity.

In 1963, with a group of Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Bosniak democratic intellectuals and politicians, he founded a movement called Democratic Alternative in Stansted, England. This movement developed a program for the reform of Yugoslavia as a decentralized and democratically organized community, with full equality for all nations. In 1964, together with democratically oriented Bosniaks gathered around Bosanski pogledi, he initiated the foundation of the Liberal Union of Bosniaks. The congress in Munich, chaired by Zulfikarpašić, included eighty representatives from twenty countries. The organization sought to establish cooperation with people from the country without entering into the structures of émigré politics.

From 1965 to 1976, Zulfikarpašić developed a successful business career, establishing his own import-export and financial firm. He traveled extensively, both as a businessman and a politician, meeting numerous scientists, artists, and politicians from abroad, as well as from Bosnia and the diaspora.

In the early 1980s, he liquidated his business to fully dedicate himself to political and cultural work for Bosnia. His goal was to establish a cultural institution in the free world to study Bosnia’s history and promote its culture. He began enriching his already vast library by collecting books and documents about Bosnia from both the homeland and abroad.

Zulfikarpašić’s return to active political life was marked by his interview Bosnian Muslims – A Factor for Peace Between Serbs and Croats, published at the end of 1983 in the London magazine Poruka slobodne Hrvatske (Message of Free Croatia). This interview was a sort of political manifesto for Bosniaks, which later became the ideological basis for the Bosniak Muslim Organization and, subsequently, the Liberal Bosniak Party after the fall of the communist regime in Yugoslavia. The interview-manifesto garnered significant attention among Bosniaks and the democratic world in Yugoslavia, being translated and published in several foreign languages.

In June 1988, Zulfikarpašić founded the Bosniaken Institut in Zurich, with the status of a foundation (waqf). He purchased a large building within the university complex, renovated it to house the modern institute, and moved his library and art collection into it. The institute was the result of his long-standing efforts to gather, classify, and systematize historical, literary, journalistic, manuscript, archival, and folkloric material about Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as its neighboring countries and their peoples. The institute published several books that could not be published in Bosnia at the time, and began issuing the cultural-historical scientific journal Islam und der Westen, in both German and partially in Bosnian.

Zulfikarpašić’s return to his homeland coincided with the fall of the communist regime and the beginning of democratic processes in former Yugoslavia. Together with Alija Izetbegović, he initiated the creation of the Party of Democratic Action. However, his liberal and democratic views on the ongoing processes and the future of Bosnia soon conflicted with the extremism of the party’s right wing, which led him to form the Bosniak Muslim Organization. In March 1991, Zulfikarpašić began publishing the weekly newspaper Bosanski pogledi in Sarajevo, which was edited by a group of young journalists. The primary focus of Bosanski pogledi was the effort to preserve the unity of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Sensing the impending war in Bosnia, in the summer of 1991, Zulfikarpašić attempted to realize a settlement with the Serbs, known as the Historical Agreement. When these efforts seemed to yield results in easing inter-ethnic tensions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegović and the Party of Democratic Action rejected Zulfikarpašić’s initiative.

In late June 1990, the Bosniak Institute and the weekly Naši dani (Our Days) organized the symposium Bosnia and Bosniakism in Sarajevo, attended by numerous scientists, historians, and writers. A book of presentations from the event was published in September. Simultaneously, the book Povratak u Bosnu (Return to Bosnia) was published in Sarajevo, containing numerous contributions to the biography of Adil Zulfikarpašić.

From 1992 to 1994, Zulfikarpašić primarily resided in Zurich, traveling occasionally to Bosnia and Herzegovina as the president of the Bosniak Muslim Organization. He also traveled to various countries for meetings with politicians and other influential figures, searching for solutions to Bosnia’s issues. He assisted Bosniaks in exile and promoted their gathering around the Bosniak Cultural Foundation, to which he provided space and infrastructure at the Bosniak Institute in Zurich. The institute became a place for intellectual encounters between Bosnia and the world. The dominant idea guiding all his activities was the preservation of Bosnia as a unified and integral country.

In 1991, the Bosniak Institute’s branch in Sarajevo was opened and operated during the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995. Three years later, Zulfikarpašić decided to move the Bosniak Institute from Zurich to Sarajevo.

On 24th of May 2001, the modern and well-equipped Bosniak Institute – Adil Zulfikarpašić Foundation was officially opened in Sarajevo, fulfilling Zulfikarpašić’s wish to provide his country and people with a waqf through which future generations would be able to explore the history and culture of the Bosniaks and other peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

All the main collections from the Zurich Institute were transferred to the Bosniak Institute in Sarajevo. Adil Zulfikarpašić worked to develop the activities and operations of the Bosniak Institute in Sarajevo, establishing numerous contacts and contributing to its foundation as one of the most respected and significant institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the fields of science and culture.

Adil Zulfikarpašić lived with his wife Tatjana in Zurich, frequently staying in Sarajevo, where he passed away on 21st of July 2008, after a short and serious illness. He was buried in the tomb in front of the Bosniak Institute.