In Sarajevo, Divisions That Drove an Assassin Have Only Begun to Heal
John F. burns
The New York Times, June 26, 2014
Nationalist and sectarian passions continue to haunt Bosnia, which was ravaged by a civil war just two decades ago and is even now the scene of dueling efforts to define Gavrilo Princip’s legacy.
SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — As the 100th anniversary approaches, the clusters of visitors have thickened at the street-corner museum in Sarajevo’s old town that stands where Gavrilo Princip claimed his place in history on June 28, 1914, firing the shots that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, and setting off World War I.
But for all the excited chatter among the tourists on the sidewalk where the 19-year-old Princip fired his Browning semiautomatic pistol, killing the 50-year-old heir to the Hapsburg throne and his pregnant consort, there is a pervasive ordinariness in the setting. Little about it conveys the enormity of the assassination and its aftermath: the major European powers and their allies — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires — marching in lock step into war.
In the centenary commemorations in Sarajevo, culminating on Saturday with a concert in the old city hall, peace is the official theme. But the ethnic and nationalist divisions that motivated Princip are anything but history in this part of the world, which was ravaged only two decades ago by bloody sectarian fighting and is even now the scene of dueling efforts to define Princip’s legacy. As Europe diligently promotes an ideology of harmony, broad areas of the continent, the Middle East and elsewhere continue to struggle with versions of the destructive forces unleashed that day.
“To me, what is happening across Bosnia today, and what is happening in many other parts of the world, is very much like the beginning of the 20th century,” said Vera Katz, a scholar at the University of Sarajevo’s History Institute. “Seeing how some of our communities have made Princip into a mythical figure has made me think that we have hardly moved on at all.”
The archducal couple were on their way to a civic reception in the yellow-and orange-banded city hall, an endowment of the Hapsburg era that borrowed from Moorish Spain, when the violence began, with a conspirator tossing a homemade bomb from a bridge over the Miljacka River. It bounced off the folded canopy of the archduke’s car before exploding.
What ensued stands as a monument to imperial folly and to the role of chance and mischance in history. Shortly before 11 a.m., the couple left the reception, deeply shaken by the bombing but determined to see the day’s formalities through. With the archduke in a military tunic and helmet, and the duchess in a dress of white filigreed lace with a matching hat and parasol, they headed back along the lightly guarded Miljacka embankment — and, 500 yards on, to their fateful encounter with Princip.
A mural at Andricgrad — a model village in Visegrad, Bosnia, based on old Serb traditions — depicts the archduke's assassin, Gavrilo Princip, and his fellow conspirators.
Andrew Testa for The New York Times
The sepia photographs in glass cases at the museum show Princip as a slight, whispery-mustached man with staring eyes, otherwise forgettable in his homespun jacket and collarless shirt. Raised in a poor family in northwest Bosnia, he was one of a group of Serbian conspirators — members of a revolutionary nationalist group, Young Bosnia — lurking among the cheering crowds.
He told the Sarajevo court empaneled hastily to try him and his fellow conspirators that he had lost hope of killing the couple and retreated into a corner delicatessen, now the museum. But then a wrong turn by the archduke’s driver and the lack of a reverse gear forced security men to push the car out of the narrow street, presenting Princip his victims at close range.
A century later, Bosnia’s Serbs, Muslims and Croats remain deeply divided in their attitudes toward Princip. Many Serbs view him as a heroic fighter against Austro-Hungarian rule — on behalf of Serbs first, but also, they say, on behalf of Croats and Muslims — and thus as an early standard-bearer for the South Slav kingdom of Yugoslavia, which emerged from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and disintegrated amid the resurgent nationalist and sectarian passions of the 1990s.
1910
1922
POLAND
AUSTRIA
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
HUNGARY
ROMANIA
ROMANIA
YUGOSLAVIA
SERBIA
Sarajevo
Sarajevo
BULGARIA
BULGARIA
ITALY
ITALY
OTTOMAN EMPIRE
GREECE
GREECE
200 MILES
200 MILES
Among the largely Catholic Croats and some Bosnian Muslims, many of whom looked to the authorities in Vienna at the time of the assassination for protection against Balkan domination by the mainly Orthodox Serbs, it is more common to condemn Princip as an anarchist or terrorist, as the Sarajevo court did when it sentenced him to 20 years’ imprisonment. He died of tuberculosis, proud and unrepentant, in a Hungarian prison in 1918.
So it is small wonder that the centenary has revived the passions that made Bosnia a hotbed of violence in both world wars and again in the 1990s. In the last conflict, a vote by Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992 to secede from Yugoslavia set off a civil war with Serbs in which about 110,000 people were killed, including more than 11,500 under artillery siege in Sarajevo, according to records compiled since the war.
Inevitably, the ghost of Princip has been exhumed as part of the newly embittered debate. It has been only a few years since he found a peace of his own in St. Mark Cemetery in the heart of Sarajevo, where a mausoleum built for him and 10 of his fellow conspirators under Yugoslav rule was desecrated in the 1990s, then restored by the Serbian Orthodox keepers of the cemetery.
Archduke Francis Ferdinand Is Assassinated
The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by a Serbian nationalist set off a series of events that led to the start of World War I. See full article in TimesMachine
The New York Herald
As a result of the political tug of war, commemorations of the assassination, like so much else in Bosnia, have been divided along sectarian lines. Serb hard-liners have chosen to boycott events financed by the European Union in favor of their own ceremonies, complete with new statues and mosaics of Princip and speeches and banquets in his honor. These alternative events are being held in parts of the country assigned to Serb control in the American-sponsored Dayton peace accords of 1995, which ended that decade’s conflict.
The concert, which will be broadcast live in 40 countries, is the centerpiece of a two-week program of conferences, concerts, poetry readings, plays and sporting performances whose organizers are determined not to take sides in the Princip dispute.
The commemorations — sponsored by France and Austria, along with other European governments and $2.5 million from the European Union — have involved an element of historical amnesia. In 1914, France was, with Russia, the closest ally of Serbia: the newly independent nation that Princip saw as the linchpin of a new order in the Balkans, one that would unite all Balkan Serbs in a “greater Serbia” once the colonial hold of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans had been broken.
Modern-day Austria and Hungary, with their strong historical sympathies for the murdered couple, emerged from the breakup of the Hapsburg empire codified by the Treaty of Versailles, which reset the map of Europe and the Middle East after World War I.
Despite the boycott by hard-line Serbs, the hope is that the centenary can be used to move sectarian groups toward a new sense of the benefits of a shared political life, and away from the political paralysis that has characterized Bosnia since the Dayton agreement.
That accord, which ended the 1990s blood bath, gave Bosnia a multilayered political structure, with more than a dozen governmental and parliamentary bodies — all elected on sectarian lines, and all now tottering under the weight of endemic corruption and fierce personal rivalries.
Nearly two decades later, Bosnia remains one of the poorest nations in Europe. It has an official youth unemployment rate nearing 50 percent and an economy that is still 20 percent smaller than it was when the fighting broke out here in 1992. Hundreds of thousands of refugees remain scattered across Europe, wide areas of the country are virtually depopulated, and tens of thousands of homes are still abandoned and in ruins. Seething popular discontent led to days of protests and rioting this year, including the firebombing of government buildings in Sarajevo and other cities.
After those upheavals, Mayor Ivo Komsic of Sarajevo, a Bosnian Croat, appealed to the country’s 3.8 million people to make the 1914 centenary an occasion to renounce sectarian animosities in favor of a new beginning that could carry Bosnia to membership in the European Union — a status Croatia has already achieved and Serbia is nearing. “The eyes of the world will be focused on Sarajevo once more,” Mr. Komsic said, “and it is important that we send messages completely different from the messages of war we sent in 1914 and 1992.”
Many Bosnians of all creeds say the country has already turned that corner. What is impeding the building of a modern, multidenominational state, they say, are the narrow-minded, sectarian politicians empowered by the Dayton accords, and not the ancient hatreds limned by the Nobel Prize-winning author Ivo Andric in his oft-quoted “Letter From 1920.” In it, he described the depth of “tenderness and loving passion” among the people of Sarajevo, but wrote, “In secret depths underneath all this hide burning hatreds, entire hurricanes of tethered and compressed hatreds maturing and awaiting their hour.”
To a reporter returning to Sarajevo for the first time since the siege of the early 1990s, the evidence of a new beginning is palpable. Even in driving rain, bars and restaurants are packed past midnight, laughter seems contagious, and joy at the achievement of the Bosnian soccer team in reaching the World Cup in Brazil seems boundless — and not only among Muslims and Croats, whose communities account for a majority of the players. When shells and mortars were falling in the 1990s and Serb artillery batteries were targeting bread and water lines, hospitals and schools, it seemed chimerical to think the city would ever prosper again.
Against this, there are the unresolved animosities among sectarian hard-liners, including some who are involved in the parallel centenary commemorations. Among them is the Sarajevo-born film director Emir Kusturica, 59, who is of Muslim descent but converted to Serbian Orthodoxy after the turmoil of the 1990s. He is the driving force behind ceremonies honoring Princip that will be held on a peninsula jutting into the Drina River at Visegrad, about 70 miles from Sarajevo on the border between Bosnia and Serbia.
Visegrad, whose population was once two-thirds Muslim, is overwhelmingly Serb now. It suffered some of the worst Serb atrocities, including mass rapes and incinerations of whole families locked into burning homes, in the first months of “ethnic cleansing” in eastern Bosnia in 1992. As part of a bid to regenerate the town, Mr. Kusturica has overseen the construction of a $20 million model village, Andricgrad, based on old Serb traditions. It is there that the most elaborate ceremonies for Princip will be held, in the presence of leaders from Serbia.
Mr. Kusturica’s case for Princip is that political assassinations have been common drivers of history, and that Westerners who condemn Princip but supported the hanging of Saddam Hussein or the mob killing of Muammar el-Qaddafi are hypocrites.
“Gavrilo Princip was our national pride, a revolutionary who helped us to get rid of slavery,” he told visitors from Sarajevo as some 200 workers hastened about under a mosaic of Princip and his fellow conspirators, putting the final touches on the village. “Bosnia and Herzegovina was the last European colony on Slav soil, and what he did on June 28, 1914, was a blow for our liberation.”
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