Once a Hero, Bosnian President Now Ignored, Criticized : Balkans: Blunders and nearly two years of a losing war have taken their toll. Izetbegovic is unlikely to ever regain real power.

President Alija Izetbegovic, once revered by Bosnian Muslims as their spiritual father, has been knocked from his esteemed pedestal by nearly 20 months of a losing war and a seemingly endless series of misjudgments.

Yet, rather than submitting to a demoralizing leadership change to replace the man who has ruled during Bosnia’s progressive destruction, detractors and supporters alike appear to be working around him.

A new government headed by Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic, the former foreign minister, took office earlier this month and has quietly shifted more authority to the previously powerless Cabinet.

The newly appointed ministers include fewer Serbs and Croats than the prewar government. But they have won high marks from non-Muslim officials for technical expertise and commitment to the multicultural lifestyle for which Sarajevo was famous before Serb nationalists launched their war for territory and segregation.

Some top officials make no effort to hide their differences with Izetbegovic, openly criticizing his failure to rein in renegade elements of the Bosnian army and his tolerance--even encouragement--of Muslim nationalism in central Bosnia.

Even fellow members of the collective presidency are quick to point out that Izetbegovic is just one of seven co-equals in a purportedly revolving office long overdue for rotation.

Stjepan Kljujic, one of two Croats in the presidency, suggested in an interview that Izetbegovic, like the leaders of Bosnia’s Serbian and Croatian political parties, should be considered ineligible to participate in any postwar leadership.

While careful to make a distinction between Izetbegovic’s political mistakes and the other ethnic leaders’ alleged war crimes, Kljujic said the Muslim president bore much of the responsibility for the devastating collapse of Muslim-Croat unity in Bosnia.

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He accused Izetbegovic of cutting a deal last year with Croatian President Franjo Tudjman that allowed him to retain the Bosnian presidency under proclaimed emergency powers, in exchange for replacing Kljujic with Croat nationalist Mate Boban as head of the Bosnian Croat political party.

Boban’s HVO militants immediately turned on the Sarajevo government, seizing territory and expelling Muslims.

Kljujic, who ranks second only to Silajdzic in recent popularity polls, contends that the Sarajevo leadership is no longer beholden to the commitments made by Izetbegovic in peace talks with nationalist enemies in Geneva.

“Everything stated by President Izetbegovic was his personal opinion,” Kljujic insisted, adding that the only legally binding decision was the Bosnian Parliament’s vote to reject a purported peace plan drafted by Boban and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

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A senior military commander in the Bosnian army, who spoke about the leadership’s internal frictions on condition he not be identified, assailed Izetbegovic for appointing Rasim Delic as army chief of staff last summer.

He accused Delic of harboring Muslim nationalist tendencies and pointed to a recent ceremony in which the extremist 7th Mountain Brigade was awarded a presidential flag of honor for its capture of Vares, where the Muslim forces engaged in looting and brutalized Croat civilians.

“I think Izetbegovic has had bad military advisers around him throughout the war,” said the high-ranking official, noting that Delic’s predecessor as chief of staff, Sefer Halilovic, is under house arrest and being investigated for provoking tensions with previously allied Croat forces.

But the officer expressed confidence in Silajdzic and what he described as an apparent effort to relegate the office of president to a figurehead role.

After the controversial honor accorded the notorious 7th Mountain Brigade, Izetbegovic compounded his image problems by warning in a speech in ethnically tense Zenica that his armed forces would be moving from a defensive strategy to a war of liberation.

Looking all of his 68 years and exuding both weariness and frustration, Izetbegovic appeared on television last week to say he had not meant to suggest Muslims should leave the moral high ground. He sought to assure his beleaguered people they were not being committed to an endless war.

The television interview was seen by other officials as an exercise in damage control likely executed from the prime minister’s office.

Silajdzic is closely allied with Izetbegovic and is considered by some to be his political heir apparent. But the 48-year-old government chief who has spent most of the past two years campaigning for Western support for his embattled nation also appears to have fundamental differences with Izetbegovic.

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It was reportedly Silajdzic who ordered a recent crackdown on war profiteers and criminal gangs, as a condition for taking the post of prime minister.

That compelled Izetbegovic to turn against the underworld elements on whom he was forced to rely for the initial defense of Sarajevo when the Serb-run Yugoslav People’s Army threw its considerable arsenal in with insurgent Bosnian Serbs.

Although at least 30 alleged criminals and hostages were killed, the crackdown has boosted public confidence in the new government and rid the capital of its two most dangerous Muslim warlords.

Asked at a news conference earlier this month why it took the leadership so long to confront the unruly gangs, Bosnian Interior Minister Bakir Alispahic, in another illustration of Izetbegovic’s disrepute, remarked that it took that long to receive an order from the president.

“He’s an honorable man who means well, but he has been a disaster as a politician,” observed a diplomat in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital from which most Western countries post their watch on war-torn Bosnia. “He may be the least responsible of the ethnic leaders for what has happened, but it happened on his watch and some of his actions have served to make matters worse.”

In more than a year of fruitless peace talks held under U.N. auspices in Geneva, Izetbegovic often seesawed on his commitment to preserving Bosnia as a unified, integrated country. While his wavering was the result of intense pressure from Western mediators and opportunist rivals, his eventual capitulation to division as the price for ending the war served to discredit him with both defenders and opponents of the proposed peace plan.

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Those willing to accept defeat and division were disappointed when the president’s weak appeal for parliamentary endorsement failed. And those opposed now have to deal with the diplomatic complexity of having a president who has made commitments they disagree with.

Silajdzic and Ejup Ganic, a Muslim member of the presidency, repeatedly have stated their moral opposition to an ethnic partitioning they consider an internationally endorsed apartheid.

They have been lobbying for fresh negotiations and insisting the international community belatedly make good on promises made during an August, 1992, peace conference in London to break the artillery siege of Sarajevo and to preserve Bosnia’s territorial integrity.

That the sitting president has lent his signature to Western-mediated agreements for an ethnic division is something the more high-profile figures in the Bosnian leadership have chosen to treat as little more than a regrettable misjudgment by a powerless man.