Ivo Komsic, mayor of Sarajevo, Bosnia. “As mayor, I am committed to the entire war being looked at on a scholarly basis and not just the assassination on its own,” he said. Photograph: Thomas Brey
By Thomas Brey
A Serb, Gavrilo Princip, triggered off World War I when he assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
Almost a century later it’s still being debated whether Princip was a terrorist or a patriot. On that summer’s day in central Sarajevo, the 20-year-old Serb nationalist from Bosnia fired two shots into the royal motorcade, killing the archduke and his wife Sophie and starting the impossible political demands that led to World War I.
The Austro-Hungarian monarchy delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, which the country rejected. The Habsburg empire, backed by Germany, then declared war on Serbia.
Various treaty obligations saw Russia, France and Britain side with the Serbs and the Great War was under way. The four years of carnage killed 17mn people and changed the map of Europe forever.
As the anniversary approaches next year, Princip remains a controversial figure in the Balkans. Were Princip and the group he was belonged to terrorists and the forerunners to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, as some historians maintain?
Or were they freedom fighters struggling to liberate their country from the Habsburg yoke? Serbs — already burdened with the main share of the blame for the bloody 1991-99 Balkan wars — fear another round of loathing, where they will also be held responsible for WWI.
At a recent commemoration of the 99th anniversary of the battle of Cer, one of the first major battles of the war, Serbia’s Prime Minister Ivica Dacic warned against any “falsification of history.”
“If the First World War was triggered by insanity of the Serbs, we would have had no allies,” he said.
Dacic said that “decades of propaganda” have portrayed the Serbs as the troublemakers of the Balkans. In reality, he said, Serbia had to resist the “imperialist and hegemonic empires” of the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians.
Many Bosnians, however, take a different view of what happened in their capital that day. The revolutionary organisation which Princip belonged to aspired to the creation of a “Greater Serbia,” says Mirsad Avdic, curator of the 1878 to 1918 period at the Sarajevo Museum.
Thus Bosnians consider the movement to be a precursor to the late 20th century Balkan wars, when Serbia again tried to subjugate Bosnia. Princip and two accomplices were recruited by a Serbian secret society, the ‘Black Hand’.
They were given shooting lessons in a Belgrade park and equipped with pistols and bombs to carry out the assassination.
After the attack the assassins narrowly escaped being lynched by an angry mob. They were taken into police custody. Heavy prison sentences were handed down to all those involved in the plot and Princip was given 20 years.
He died in April 1918 of tuberculosis in a prison located in what is now the Czech Republic. The Serbian side is already preparing for the 2014 anniversary.
The chapel in the Sarajevo cemetery where the assassin is buried was recently renovated and Princip’s childhood home in the village of Obljaj near Grahovo, which was destroyed by Croatian units during the 1992-95 war, is to be rebuilt with private funding.
In Belgrade an international historical conference is planned.
Equating Princip with bin Laden is “idiotic,” says academic Dragoljub Zivojinovic, who is responsible for the programme at the conference.
The Belgrade newspaper Blic surveyed a range of Serbian historians, who generally concurred: “Princip was not a terrorist.”
“At that time there was no terrorism in the modern sense. Such attacks were narrowly targetted on crowned heads of state,” said Zivojinovic.
Historian Avdic from the Sarajevo Museum says Serbs later “venerated” Princip, even though the states of Serbia and later Yugoslavia officially dissociated themselves from his actions.
Under the Communists in the 1950s, Princip came to be seen as representing the “revolutionary roots of the people.”
After the bloody 1990s civil war, Princip was again banished from the history books and a bridge named after him in Sarajevo was renamed.
The view of Bosnian historians about the period of Habsburg rule of their country (1878-1918) is not nearly as negative as that of their Serbian counterparts. For example they argue that the Habsburgs built infrastructure such as streets, water supply and sewerage and established good systems of administration, justice and education.
In particular, Vienna is credited with protecting Muslims from attacks by the Serbs. However, Serbian academic Zivojinovic disagrees with that. He speaks of a falsification of history and says that the Habsburg reign was bad for the entire population, the Muslims included.
He contends the EU has an imperative to “shift the responsibility for the war onto Russia and Serbia,” because it needs to uphold unity between the warring parties of 1914-18 among its members. The conference planned for next June is supposed to attract 100 foreign academics but the agenda has already caused controversy.
Ivo Komsic, the mayor of Sarajevo, has no desire to see old wounds opened. “As mayor, I am committed to the entire war being looked at on a scholarly basis and not just the assassination on its own,” he said.
French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have already scheduled their attendance at next year’s ceremony to mark Princip’s fateful act of a century ago, organisers say. — DPA
