Sulejman Tihić

Sulejman Tihić (26 November 1951 – 25 September 2014) was a Bosnian politician. He was a Bosniak member of the tripartite Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina and former President of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA).

Tihić was born in the town of Bosanski Šamac in northern Bosnia. He obtained a degree from the Sarajevo Law School in 1975. Tihić returned to Bosanski Šamac where he worked as a judge, prosecutor and a lawyer.

In 1990, he was one of the founding members of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA). On 13 October 2001, Tihić was chosen to succeed Alija Izetbegović as head of the SDA party. He was elected to the Presidency on 5 October 2002. He won the elections once more in 2005. He was chairman of the House of Peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 14 November 2007 to 14 July 2008. Francis A. Boyle stated in his correspondence to the public that Sulejman Tihić and Sakib Softić had ordered the restitution request from his original lawsuit in the Bosnian Genocide Case to be voided, thereby returning a favor to his coalition partners Alliance of Independent Social Democrats in Republika Srpska.

When the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina started in April 1992, Tihić was captured by Serb soldiers and was tortured in three concentration camps in Bosnia (in Bosanski Šamac, Brčko, and the Batković camp in Bijeljina) before being taken by helicopter to the Batajnica neighborhood of Belgrade in Serbia. He was also later tortured in a prison in Sremska Mitrovica.

Tihić had a tumor on his colon removed in January 2008 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. On 30 September 2013 it was announced that Tihić had been diagnosed with cancer. He was treated surgically in Germany on 4 October 2013; doctors expressed satisfaction with his recovery. On 22 August 2014, he was hospitalized at the Clinical Center of the University of Sarajevo and died there on 25 September 2014, aged 62. He was buried in the cemetery of the White Mosque in his hometown of Bosanski Šamac two days later.