Fikret Abdić

Fikret Abdić (born 29 September 1939) is a Bosnian politician and businessman who first rose to prominence in the 1980s for his role in turning the Velika Kladuša-based agriculture company Agrokomerc into one of the biggest conglomerates in SFR Yugoslavia.
In the early 1990s, during the Bosnian War, Abdić declared his opposition to the official Bosnian government, and established the Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia, a small and short-lived province in the northwestern corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina composed of the town of Velika Kladuša and nearby villages.
The mini-state existed between 1993 and 1995 and was allied with the Army of Republika Srpska. In 2002 he was convicted on charges of war crimes against Bosniaks loyal to the Bosnian government by a court in Croatia and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, which was later reduced on appeal to 15 years by the Supreme Court of Croatia.
On 9 March 2012, he was released after having served two thirds of his reduced sentence.

Early life

Fikret Abdić was born in the village of Donja Vidovska, Velika Kladuša, Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 29 September 1939.

Early career

Before the war, Abdić was the director of Agrokomerc, a company based in Velika Kladuša that he raised from a small agricultural cooperative into a modern food combine which employed over 13,000 workers, and which boosted the economy of the entire area. Agrokomerc transformed Velika Kladuša from a poverty-struck region to a regional powerhouse. Local residents of Velika Kladuša reportedly called him Babo (Daddy). He ran the company with strong political backing from influential politician Hamdija Pozderac and his brother, Hakija.

In the late 1987, just before the death of Hamdija Pozderac, Raif Dizdarević was about to take over the annual Presidency of Yugoslavia, during which a scandal arose. Abdić found himself imprisoned for alleged financial improprieties, and Hamdija Pozderac resigned. The scandal shook not only the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but the whole of Yugoslavia. Another of his controversial moves was erecting a monument to an Ottoman Bosnian başbölükbaşı, Mujo Hrnjica, on a hill above Velika Kladuša.

After his release from prison, he made a last-moment decision to join the Party of Democratic Action and ran for the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990 elections. Under the constitution, voters elected seven members to the presidency; two Bosniaks, two Serbs, two Croats and one Yugoslav.

He and his future rival Alija Izetbegović ran for the two Bosniak positions, and were both elected. Once the positions were filled, the members of the presidency elected a President of the Presidency who acted as its head. Abdić won more popular votes than Izetbegović but did not assume office for reasons which remain unclear.

Bosnian War

According to NIN, when the Bosnian War broke out, Abdić briefly appeared in Sarajevo hoping to assume the presidency after Izetbegović had been arrested by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA). However, he was preempted as Izetbegović had already named Ejup Ganić for that position.

A few months later, Abdić decided to return to Bihać. Popular locally, having ties to both Belgrade and Zagreb, Abdić was concerned with business interests in his fiefdom, and opposed Izetbegović's government He established the Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia (APZB), a move which the government characterised as treason. He made peace deals with Croat (14 September 1993) and Serb leaders (22 October 1993) who were pleased to weaken the Bosnian government in the light of the Karađorđevo and Graz agreements which aimed to partition Bosnia and Herzegovina between Croatia and Serbia.

Abdić established prison camps for those who fought for the Bosnian government. Detainees at the camps were subjected to killings, torture, sexual assaults, beatings and other cruel and inhumane treatment. In addition to Abdić's paramilitary forces, a paramilitary unit from Serbia known as the Scorpions participated in the war crimes on Bosniaks.

When the 5th Corps of Army of Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), based in the south part of the Bihać pocket in western Bosnia tried to end the existence of APZB, Abdić raised an army which was supplied, trained, financed by (and fought alongside) the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) and Serbian counterintelligence against the ARBiH and Bosniaks loyal to Izetbegović. The Serbs took advantage of the situation and strengthened their and Abdić's positions. In August 1995, an ARBiH offensive ended the APZB forcing him to flee to Croatia.

Lord Owen, a British diplomat and co-author of the Vance-Owen and Owen-Stoltenberg peace plans described Abdić as "forthright, confident and different from the Sarajevan Muslims. He was in favour of negotiating and compromising with Croats and Serbs to achieve a settlement, and scathing about those Muslims who wanted to block any such settlement."

After the war

After the war he was granted political asylum and citizenship by the Croatian President Franjo Tuđman, and lived near Rijeka. The government of Bosnia-Herzegovina charged him with the deaths of 121 civilians, three POWs and the wounding of 400 civilians at Bihać. Croatia refused, however, to extradite him. After Tuđman's death in 1999, and the change in government in Croatia the following year, Croatian authorities arrested and tried him. In 2002 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for war crimes committed in the area of the "Bihać pocket”. In 2005 the Croatian Supreme Court reduced the sentence to 15 years.

Abdić ran for the position of Bosniak member of the Bosnian presidency in 2002 on the Democratic People's Community party ticket in 2002 and won 4.1% of the vote. Bosnian law does not bar him from running for office since his conviction is in Croatia. He was released from prison on 8 March 2012, after serving ten of his 15-years sentence.

Abdić was LS BiH's candidate for the mayor of Velika Kladuša in the Bosnian municipal elections, 2016. He received 9,026 votes, or 48.10%, and was elected as the new mayor.