This is 'Dedo'

Alija Izetbegovic was affectionately known as 'Dedo' (grandfather in Bosnian) by many Bosnian Muslims. He passed away from this world on October 19, 2003.

Some excerpts from his preface to Notes from Prison: 1983-1988:

-what the reader is about to embark upon (and perhaps read) is my escape to freedom. To my regret, this, of course, was not a real escape, but I wish it were. This was the only possible escape from the Foca prison, with its high walls and iron bars - an escape of mind and thought.

-I could not speak, but I could think, and I decided to use that possibility to the maximum. At first I had silent discussions on all kinds of things and I commented on the books I was reading and the events taking place outside. I then started taking notes, secretly at first, but I then became quite "arrogant" - I sat, read and wrote.

-the value of these thoughts, therefore, is not in the thoughts themselves, but rather in the circumstances they were written in. On the side of the wall there was the total silence of the prison, and on the outside there were inklings of a tempest that was to become a hurricane in 1988 that would crush the Berlin Wall, sweep away Honecker and Ceausescu, destroy the Warsaw Treaty and shake the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. I had an almost physical sensation of the passage of time and its phases changing right before my eyes.

-these are thoughts on freedom, the physical and the inner, on life and destiny, on people and events, on books read and their authors, on imagined, unwritten letters to my children- in other words, on everything that could have crossed a prisoner's mind during those long 2,000 days (and nights).

May God Almighty expand his grave, and raise him as a just ruler on the last Day.