Zlatko Lagumdžija

Zlatko Lagumdžija (born 26 December 1955) is a Bosnian former politician.[1] He was the President of the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SDP BiH) from 1997 until 2014.

Zlatko Lagumdžija
Minister of Foreign Affairs
In office 12 January 2012 – 31 March 2015
Prime Minister	Vjekoslav Bevanda
Preceded by	Sven Alkalaj
Succeeded by	Igor Crnadak
In office 22 February 2001 – 23 December 2002
Prime Minister	Božidar Matić Himself Dragan Mikerević
Preceded by	Jadranko Prlić
Succeeded by	Mladen Ivanić
Member of the House of Representatives
In office 23 December 2002 – 12 January 2012
4th Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina
In office 18 July 2001 – 15 March 2002
President	Beriz Belkić Živko Radišić Jozo Križanović
Preceded by	Božidar Matić
Succeeded by	Dragan Mikerević
President of the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina
In office 6 April 1997 – 7 December 2014
Preceded by	Nijaz Duraković
Succeeded by	Nermin Nikšić
Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina
In office 25 October 1993 – 30 January 1996
Prime Minister	Haris Silajdžić
Preceded by	Božidar Matić
Succeeded by	Dragan Mikerević
Personal details
Born	26 December 1955 Sarajevo, PR Bosnia and Herzegovina, FPR Yugoslavia
Political party	Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–2019)
Other political affiliations	League of Communists of Yugoslavia (1973–1992)
Spouse(s)	Amina Lagumdžija
Children	3
Residence	Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Alma mater	University of Sarajevo

Lagumdžija served as Minister of Foreign Affairs on two occasions and also served once as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Education

Lagumdžija earned his high school diploma as a part of the Youth for Understanding[2] exchange student program in Allen Park, Michigan in 1973.

His subsequent education was at the University of Sarajevo, where he earned a B.Sc in 1977, an M.Sc in 1981 and a PhD in 1988 in the field of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

In 1989, as a Fulbright program participant, he did postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona in the Department of Management Information Systems and the Center for the Management of Information.

Academic career

Lagumdžija began teaching at the University of Sarajevo in 1989 as a professor of Management Information Systems (MIS) and Informatics at the Economics Faculty and Projected Information Systems and Group Support Systems at the Electrical Engineering Faculty

He served as the chair of the department of Management and Information Systems at the Economics Faculty since 1994 and the director of the director of the Management and Information Technologies Center (an organizational unit of the Economics Faculty) since 1995.

His particular academic interests lie in the areas of Group Support Systems and Management Information Systems. He is the author of six books and over a hundred papers in the field of Management Information Systems.[3]

At the end of the war, Lagumdžija helped to secure funds from the Soros Foundation with which to rebuild the Group Support System facility at the University of Sarajevo. The strategic objective of the Management and Information Technologies Center, which housed the GSS facility, was to "assist and promote the transition of Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H) to a democratic, market-driven economy."[4]

As part of that mandate, the Center held sessions for key business and government leaders as well as students at the University of Sarajevo utilizing GSS technology to assist them in thinking about and planning for the economic reconstruction of Sarajevo.

Political career

Lagumdžija with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, 4 March 2011

Wartime political career

Lagumdžija began his political career during the war as the Deputy Prime Minister, advising then-president Alija Izetbegović.

In one particular case he advised him not to sign the Vance-Owen peace plan: "Mr Izetbegović was not endorsing it, but thinking out loud and saying perhaps the plan would not be so bad, that we could live with it. And some of us told him, 'Anyone who signs this plan will be dead, and not just politically…'" he told a New York Times reporter in February 1993.[5]

Izetbegović signed the peace plan in March 1993. In May 1992, Lagumdžija was with Alija Izetbegović, Izetbegović’s daughter Sabina and his bodyguard, returning from the Lisbon negotiations, when they were surrounded at the Sarajevo airport by the JNA, kidnapped and driven in a convoy to Lukavica, in Serb-held territory.[6]

In April 1993, Lagumdžija met with a group of citizens from Srebrenica who had journeyed through the Serb lines to Sarajevo. They informed him of the desperate situation of Srebrenica and the eastern Bosnian enclaves. In an effort to highlight the plight of Srebrenica, Lagumdžija suspended humanitarian aid donations for Sarajevo until aid was delivered to the eastern enclaves. A month later, UN Commander Philippe Morillon visited Srebrenica and declared the citizens under the protection of the UN.

Post-war political career

Lagumdžija with Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sebastian Kurz in Vienna, 3 June 2014

As a member of the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SDP BiH), Lagumdžija has served as a member of the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly from 2002 until 2012. He was the president of the SDP from 1997 to 2014.

At the 2000 parliamentary election, the SDP formed a coalition with the Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina (SBiH), a party founded and led by former wartime prime minister Haris Silajdžić, to gain the majority and force the nationalist parties out of power. They gathered a coalition of many other small parties to create the "Alliance for Change." Lagumdžija became the Foreign Minister, a post he served in from 2001 until 2002, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers, (i.e. the Prime Minister, as which he served until 2002).

When the SDP came into political power on a platform of economic reform and anti-corruption, Lagumdžija was lauded by the Western powers as the hopeful "face of a pluralistic, united Bosnia."[7]

The SDP-led government facilitated the passage of the Election Law, which was not only an important step towards democracy, but also a prerequisite to Bosnia's accession to the Council of Europe.[8]

The SDP led the coalition government until the October 2002 general election, when the public, dissatisfied at the pace of political reform, elected the nationalist parties back into power.[9]

On 18 May 2019, he was removed from the SDP due to his political activity in his own new political party.[10]

Controversies

Algerian Six

Lagumdžija in 2001

At the end of 2001, six citizens of Algerian origin (the so-called "Algerian Six") were accused of planning a terrorist attack on the US embassy in Sarajevo. They were taken into custody in October, and the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Lagumdžija then being prime minister) revoked their citizenship in November. After a 3-month-process, the Supreme Court of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina ordered their release based on lack of evidence.

However, Washington came out with a request for their extradition because "the US still believes they are a threat to American interests and that the US Government refused to publicly disclose evidence to the court in Bosnia and Herzegovina because it would endanger its methods of intelligence-gathering." While the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina was deciding about this request, protests broke out in front of the Sarajevo prison. Eventually, Lagumdžija's government yielded to the demand, and the six were deported to Guantanamo Bay [11] In 2009, an investigation by the Cantonal prosecution of Sarajevo against Lagumdžija, the ex-Minister of intern affairs of the Federation Tomislav Limov and others involved was launched but later dropped. Another one was launched three years later, but it was dropped quickly too. Two of the three that returned to Bosnia still hold Lagumdžija responsible for their illegal imprisonment and filed a lawsuit against the state.[12]

"Coup d'état affair"

In September 2003, Lagumdžija and Munir Alibabić, the former director of the Federation Intelligence and Security Service (FOSS), were accused of conspiring to take over the government by Ivan Vuksić, the FOSS director at the time. The accusations were based on the illegal recordings of telephone conversations between the two men. The Sarajevo daily paper Dnevni Avaz, picked up the story and ran a series of articles which attacked Lagumdžija and blamed him of being behind the August 2003 explosions that had taken place in Sarajevo. Lagumdžija denied the accusations and released a public statement to the court, which read in part, "Any well-informed and well-intentioned person will know that all these accusations are based on vicious lies, and that their progenitors are provoking a situation, which would bring them to face justice in court in any organized democratic state."[13] The courts dismissed the accusations, Lagumdžija eventually sued Dnevni Avaz for libel and the newspaper was ordered to pay him 10,000 BAM in damages.

Personal life

Lagumdžija is married to Amina, and has three children. His father Salko (1921–1973) was the 22nd mayor of Sarajevo from 1965 until 1967.[14]

References

1. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 6 October 2010. Retrieved 6 October 2010.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
2. "Zlatko Lagumdzija".
3. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 20 October 2007. Retrieved 3 November 2006.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
4. Zlatko Lagumdzija, Mark Adkins, Doug Vogel, "Rebuilding Sarajevo Using Partnerships" hicss, pg. 479, 30th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) Volume 2: Information Systems Track-Collaboration Systems and Technology, 1997.
5. Gelb, Leslie H. "Sarajevo, Dead and Alive. [Op-Ed]" The New York Times, 7 February 1993, pg. E21.
6. Silber, L., & A. Little. (1996). Yugoslavia: Death of a nation, New York: Penguin, pp. 231-43.<--ISSN/ISBN needed
7. Kaminski, Matthew. "The West’s man in Bosnia", Wall Street Journal, 28 June 2000: A16.
8. "ohr.int". Retrieved 3 November 2006.
9. "Country not found country update - European Forum - for Democracy and Solidarity". Europeanforum.net. Archived from the original on 15 August 2016. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
10. "Zlatko Lagumdžija i još sedam istaknutih članova SDP-a isključeni iz stranke".
11. "Alžirska grupa u Sarajevu predata vojnim snagama SAD-a 18/1/02 - 2002-01-18". Ba.voanews.com. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
12. "Tužbe protiv BiH zbog 7 godina u Guantanamu". Balkans.aljazeera.net. 11 January 2013. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
13. Alic, A. (2003). Quelling coups. Transitions Online
14. http://vlasenickilikovi.blogger.ba/arhiva/2010/04/16/2477096/

External links

• Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina