The town that Emir Kusturica built
Peter AspdenBy Peter Aspden
A century after Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shot in Sarajevo, the Serbian film director explains why the extraordinary town he has built is a ‘symbol of pacifism’
A mural of Gavrilo Princip and comrades in AndricgradA mosaic mural of Gavrilo Princip and comrades in Andricgrad©Matt Lutton/Boreal CollectiveThe mural in Andricgrad, viewed from the town squareThe mural in Andricgrad, viewed from the town square©Matt Lutton/Boreal CollectiveCinema with mosaic mural featuring Emir Kusturica©Dragan KaradarevicOn the Gavrilo Princip mural, the slogan (partly missing here) reads: ‘Our shadows will be wandering through Vienna, strolling through the court, frightening the lords’©Matt Lutton/Boreal CollectiveStatue of Ivo Andric in Francisco Goya square©Matt Lutton/Boreal CollectiveThe ‘Secession’ café with its portraits of Che Guevara and Vladimir Putin©Matt Lutton/Boreal CollectivePeter Aspden (in dark sweater) talks to Emir Kusturica©Dragan KaradarevicFilm director Emir Kusturica©Dragan KaradarevicEmir Kusturica with local children©Dragan KaradarevicBridge over the River Drina©Matt Lutton/Boreal Collective
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One hundred years ago today, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, ambushed and assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in the streets of Sarajevo, an event that triggered the beginning of the first world war.
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The details of the killing read like farce: another attempt on the archduke had failed earlier in the day and his car had taken a wrong turning before encountering Princip, whose two shots also killed Franz Ferdinand’s wife Sophie. Princip himself twice tried to commit suicide but bungled it. He escaped the death penalty because of his tender years but died in prison in April 1918, a few months before the end of the war he had helped bring into being.
The anniversary will be commemorated on Saturday with due solemnity in Sarajevo, present-day capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A series of cultural events will be led by a concert from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, in a spirit of co-operation between two countries whose enmity led to the assassination, and to the war. A modest plaque on a street corner marks the spot where Princip took his deadly aim. On the day I visited, there were two burning candles in front of it. Apart from that, there will be little mention of the figure who has been routinely denounced as a terrorist.
A couple of hours east of Sarajevo, on the border between the Serbian part of Bosnia, the Republika Srpska, and Serbia itself, another commemoration is planned. This one, devised by the Serbian film director Emir Kusturica, in the town of Andricgrad, by contrast places the young assassin at the centre of events. For Serbs, Princip was a revolutionary hero whose actions constituted an act of rebellion against an empire that was suppressing his people. The commemoration will consist of a “dramatic reconstruction” of the day’s events, and Princip’s subsequent trial.
There will also be an unveiling of a mosaic of Princip and his colleagues from the Young Bosnia movement. The mosaic shows Princip with a soft, pacific expression. “Look,” says Kusturica, 59, pointing to his figure. “I never knew he had blue eyes!” The slogan at the bottom of the mosaic reproduces the less-than-pacific last words scrawled by Princip in his cell before his death: “Our shadows will be walking through Vienna, strolling through the court, frightening the lords”.
Kusturica, twice-garlanded with the Palme d’Or at Cannes for his highly acclaimed films When Father Was Away on Business (1985) and Underground (1995), says the assassination was first and foremost an act of political liberation against an illegal regime. “It is funny,” he says with combative sarcasm, “how the BBC and CNN showed us the fall of Saddam Hussein – a tyrant; Gaddafi – a tyrant. Apparently Franz Ferdinand wasn’t a tyrant. But he was.”
The contrast between the two views of Princip summarises the way in which history is politicised in this highly charged part of the world. The first world war was far from the end of the region’s problems, however; it was only a recycling of centuries-old inter-ethnic rivalries that continue to this day.
. . .
I am speaking to Kusturica in the Ivo Andric Institute, in the centre of Andricgrad. Both building and town have been named after the Serbian author (1892-1975), who won the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature. If both the building and its pristine surrounds have an oddly antiseptic look about them, it is because they are brand new. Today’s unveiling of the Princip mosaic is also the official opening of a town. The Republika Srpska’s tourist organisation, which has high hopes for Andricgrad as a visitor attraction, is hosting my trip.
The project began when Kusturica had the idea of revivifying a nondescript part of the town of Visegrad by putting up new buildings devoted to cultural and educational projects. He has made it happen in three years, at a cost of $17m, garnered from public and private sources. “That,” he says emphatically, “is much less than the cost of many movies.”
Built on a small peninsula between the rivers Drina and Rzav, with riverside views that would have estate agents salivating, Andricgrad is entered through an arch, where the visitor is confronted by a dizzying variety of architectural styles. On the left, an Islamic (non-practising) mosque and minaret, with a caravanserai in the adjacent square; on the right, a Byzantine-style edifice. A small Austro-Hungarian section of buildings confirms the route we are taking is a potted history of Visegrad. “I didn’t follow any architectural rules, I followed my instincts, like the ancient Greeks,” says Kusturica as he shows me around. It is a cross between a film set, a theme park and a folly. The high street is dominated by a cinema and opens out into a wide square containing a café called Goya, after Andric’s favourite painter. Opposite there is an ice-cream parlour, inside which there are giant portraits of the Apache leader Geronimo, Gandhi, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Vladimir Putin. When I tell Kusturica it is one of the most surreal locations I have ever seen, he laughs out loud. The portraits, he says, are “an exhibition by an artist based in New York. Imagine – Geronimo and Putin, put together by a New Yorker!” Kusturica, whose favourite film directors are Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick, is no stranger to surrealism.
“I think the city is the strongest social memory organ of humanity,” explains the film-maker when I ask him what prompted him to move from creating film sets to real places. He describes Andricgrad as his “biggest achievement”. “By making this time-machine city, we are respecting all the influences that have shaped this place over the centuries. Except that we have added the Renaissance form of wide public squares, which never happened here, because of the Ottoman occupation. Squares where people meet and talk about issues. Because in the Balkans, we use squares just to regroup, and then go to destroy something.”
. . .
Andricgrad is Kusturica’s personal homage to Andric, whose acclaimed novel, The Bridge on the Drina (1945) is a beautifully written historical account of the changing fortunes of Visegrad over four centuries, encompassing foreign occupation, religious conflict, war, revolution and love. Kusturica, and many others besides, describes it as a “masterpiece”, which has motivated “all my projects, and shaped my views of this country’s past”.
The eponymous bridge is an architectural tour de force, built in 1577 by Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic, grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire, who had been born a Serb in a nearby village, taken to Turkey to become a janissary at the age of 15, and risen through the army ranks. The bridge was a token of remembrance towards his homeland and is the central character in Andric’s novel, both meeting place for the town’s inhabitants and witness to its fluctuating fortunes.
I am a man with a lot of passion. I will always fight for peace. But, unfortunately, it is war that drives us forward
One does not have to reach far into history to find examples of the terrors that the bridge has seen unravel before it. During the Bosnian war of the 1990s, Visegrad was a notorious example of the ethnic cleansing policy pursued by Bosnian Serbs towards the Bosnian Muslim population. Hundreds were massacred. Before the war, the town’s population was about two-thirds Muslim; today there are virtually none left.
There is no mention of any of this in Andricgrad or Visegrad. Of the people I spoke to involved in Kusturica’s project, including the director himself, none referred to the events of 20 years ago, delving far more comfortably into more distant history. It is not uncommon here for any conversation on religious conflict to begin in the medieval period and dribble away somewhere after the second world war. Kusturica, who was born into a Muslim family in Sarajevo but converted to the Orthodox church in 2005, was a controversial figure during the war in Yugoslavia. He filmed Underground, a rambunctious wartime fable centring on the fate of two best friends from the 1940s to the 1990s, during the course of the conflict, and was widely condemned for his refusal to condemn Serbian atrocities. (One of his most vociferous critics, the French academic Alain Finkielkraut, confessed after his attack on Underground to not even having seen the film, arguing that “that offensive and stupid falsification of the traitor taking the palm of martyrdom had to be denounced immediately”.)
Kusturica says shooting the film was “suicidal. I was struggling to survive. It was not easy for me. But I knew what I was doing. It was a testament to a country that vanished. Yugoslavia was the best solution for all of us.” The most widely-held criticism of Kusturica is that he refuses in his work to provide any political context to the events in his homeland, preferring, instead, to portray a savagery among its people that appears almost innate. In this, he is not so dissimilar from his hero, Ivo Andric. In Andric’s short story “Letter from 1920”, published in 1946, a young Jewish doctor from Sarajevo writes a letter to explain to a childhood friend why he had left Bosnia. “Bosnia is a country of hatred,” he begins. “Lack of understanding, periodically spilling over into open hatred, is the general characteristic of its people. The rifts between the different faiths are so deep that hatred alone can sometimes succeed in crossing them . . . You are condemned to live on deep layers of explosive which are lit from time to time by the very sparks of your loves and your fiery and violent emotion.” At one point during the writing of the story, Andric considered setting it in the future rather than the past. He nearly called it “Letter from 1992”.
Can Andricgrad change any of this? Kusturica, who is resolutely unsentimental in conversation, declares himself an optimist, though he shares some of Andric’s cynicism. In “Letter from 1920”, he says, Andric was trying “to explore the roots of our atavistic nature, trying to touch the button from which we go so wild.” The same could be said of Underground. He is dismissive of those who talk too glibly of multicultural crossroads, which is achievable, he says, in “the stable world of empires but not so easily when you are living on the outskirts”.
The creation of Andricgrad, with its commitment to cultural activities and to providing a multinational platform for debate, is a shamelessly idealistic project. The town, says Kusturica, should be “a symbol of pacifism . . . the heart that has to beat a great idea, to encourage eastern Bosnia as a symbol of peace”. But for every benign intention, he adds a bracing note of realism. “I am a man with a lot of passion,” he says. “I will always fight for peace. But, unfortunately, it is war that drives us forward. It is war that makes the major turns. It makes Wall Street function, it makes all the bastards in the Balkans function. What would happen if an angel appeared before the American president and told him there was no more need for war? Everything would collapse.”
. . .
We walk around the town for a little while. Kusturica is often stopped by visitors who ask for their children to be photographed next to him. I ask a local journalist what he makes of Andricgrad and he describes it as a “miracle”. I tell Kusturica that I visited the cinema the night before and had seen a film that hadn’t yet opened in London. He looks the happiest he has been all day. “Make sure you write that down!” he says.
The finishing touches are being applied to the mural of Princip and the Young Bosnians, which Kusturica says is meant to be “in the spirit of Delacroix”. Next to it there is another mural, more in the spirit of a mock-heroic cartoon: it shows Kusturica and Milorad Dodik, president of the Republika Srpska, pulling on a rope, hauling the bricks that will build Andricgrad. Any pretensions of grandeur are subverted by the figure of Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic, a friend of Kusturica, observing the scene quizzically in the background.
Andricgrad is built for the future, and for culture. Kusturica hopes to build a new university there, in addition to the Andric Institute for Slavic languages, an academy of fine arts, and a theatre. But for every move forward, there seems to be more than a selective backward glance. Today’s commemoration of Sarajevo’s assassination is loaded with political resonance. Kusturica is determined the event should not be hijacked by “revisionist historians” who would shift blame for the first world war towards Serbian aggression. Remembrance is everything but can it, in this febrile corner of Europe, ever be prevented from spilling into recrimination?
We take a boat ride down the river Drina. Kusturica points to the poverty of the urban mise en scène on the banks, next to which Andricgrad seems to glow with prestige. His pride is palpable. About an hour into our journey, he points to a small church, built, he explains, to commemorate the massacre of 6,000 Serbs by the pro-Nazi Croatian Ustasha during the second world war. He says he wants to open a restaurant on the other side of the bank. During our return to Andricgrad, he informs me the river is “very dangerous”. Because of its currents, I ask him? “No. Because of everything that has happened here.”
Peter Aspden is the FT’s arts writer
Additional research by Tatjana Mitevska
Како ББЦ са старом дописником из Рата СФРЈ изманипулише 1914 у садашња констекс!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-28062876
How the Guardian played down the assassination that sparked world war
Murder of archduke would have no 'salient effect' on Europe, declared Manchester Guardian, just 37 days before war erupted
Richard Norton-Taylor
"It is not to be supposed," wrote a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian analysing the significance of the assassination 100 years ago on Saturday, "that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe."
Thirty-seven days later, Britain declared war on Germany and Europe was plunged into a worldwide conflict in which more than 16 million people died in four years.
But it is hardly surprising that the Guardian did not predict the unimaginable horror to come. The newspaper's editorial of 29 June 1914, the day after the assassination, dwelt on the archduke's personality and on the narrow implications it might have for the internal politics of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
"What its motives may have been we do not know, nor do they greatly matter," it advised its readers. "It is a difficult and at present an ungracious task to speculate on what influence the crime of yesterday may have on Austrian politics."
The archduke, the editorial noted, was "a great gardener", adding that "in England, under other conditions of life, he would have been an ideal country squire". Franz Ferdinand was described as "a simple and amiable man, but very passionate and, in anger, uncalculable".
The Manchester Guardian, then edited by the legendary CP Scott, was far from alone in playing down the significance of the death of the archduke, shot by the young radical Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo. The Sleepwalkers, historian Christopher Clark's seminal work on how Europe went to war in 1914, reflects the mixture of complacency and rhetoric Europe indulged in.
Bosnian-Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip
Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian-Serb nationalist who assassinated archduke. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP
But the Guardian did devote the bulk of its main news page, illustrated by a small map and family tree of the Austrian royal house, to the shooting.
Reports from correspondents of the news agency Reuters in Sarajevo and Vienna detailed the circumstances surrounding the assassination and described an earlier attempt shortly before Princip fired the shots that killed the archduke and his wife.
The assassins were "almost lynched by the infuriated crowds … many people wept", Reuters reported.
The next day, 30 June 1914, a Guardian headline read "World's Sympathy with Aged Emperor". The paper noted that the archduke and his wife had recently visited London and, his uncle, emperor Franz Joseph, held the title of a British field marshal.
The article added: "Comments on the crime, all expressing friendly feelings for the Emperor, are made by all the European papers, most of them, as is natural while the shock is still fresh, attaching an over-importance to the political consequences."
Though the newspaper's first analysis – headlined What the Murders May Mean – played down the "immediate or salient" effect on European politics, it did warn of the dangers of increased hostility between Austria and Serbia. It also warned of "the more serious danger of a Russian attack" on Austria in defence of its Slavic ally.
The Guardian opposed British intervention right up to the declaration of war. "We care as little for Belgrade as Belgrade for Manchester," it told its readers on 30 July. On 1 August, CP Scott argued that intervention would "violate dozens of promises made to our own people, promises to seek peace, to protect the poor, to husband the resources of the country, to promote peaceful progress".
Four days later, after Britain declared war on Germany, the Guardian said: "All controversy therefore is now at an end. Our front is united."
But, the newspaper added: "A little more knowledge, a little more time on this side, more patience, and a sounder political principle on the other side would have saved us from the greatest calamity that anyone living has known.
"It will be a war in which we risk almost everything of which we are proud, and in which we stand to gain nothing."
5 PEOPLE, 5 COMMENTS
Astrochelonian
27 June 2014 4:04pm
Try Barbara Tuchman too - August 1914 - also known as The Guns of August.
Kikinaskald Astrochelonian
27 June 2014 6:29pm
I would reccomend highly Sean McMeekin's "July 1914: Countdown to War". It's "almost impossible to put down" as Richard Evans wrote.
veryangrycanuck Astrochelonian
27 June 2014 6:57pm
How about Margaret MacMillan,s "The War that ended Peace?"
That is the North American title, it might be different in the UK.
Her post- 1918 book "The Peace Seekers" was published in North America as "Paris 1919."
Kaitain veryangrycanuck
27 June 2014 10:08pm
Peacemakers, I think.
Oskar Jaeger
27 June 2014 4:10pm
As so often, The Guardian got it right. It was an unnecessary war and a great tragedy for Europe.
Beckow Oskar Jaeger
27 June 2014 8:49pm
Tens of millions in Central and Eastern Europe suffered under heavy oppression of Habsburgs, Romanovs, Prussians and Ottomans. WWI liberated them. Was that "unnecessary"?
cambridgefergal Beckow
27 June 2014 10:33pm
Tens of millions in Central and Eastern Europe suffered under heavy oppression of Habsburgs, Romanovs, Prussians and Ottomans.
Britain, of course, being Allied to the Romanovs.
Yes, the war in defence of the liberal values of Tsarism, and Serbian state-sponsored terrorism, was entirely necessary, just and laudable.
Beckow cambridgefergal
28 June 2014 3:21am
Habsburgs were an order of magnitude more brutal, illiberal, and state-sponsors of terrorism than their victims among the oppressed nationalities of Central Europe and the Balkans.
It is fashionable among the uninformed Western losers to smirk over the German, Ottoman and Habsburg oppression. They would prefer that those empires stayed in charge in Central-Eastern Europe. It is really a form of racism or at least ethnic dislike. Well, good for the 9 million who died for our freedom. I know you are having second thoughts, but that will not enslave us or bring them back....
27 June 2014 4:56pm
Nice that his parents were a fan of Scottish indie rock though.
Kaitain LoopyTunes
27 June 2014 10:08pm
New wave revival, surely?
Feindbild Kaitain
28 June 2014 8:18am
Hi Kaitain,
I've been working on my UK football English (no, that's not a contradiction in terms), so let me give this a try:
"The Archduke Franz Ferdinand will not have been pleased with his security team's performance at the halfway point of his visit to the Bosnian capital."
"The German and Austro-Hungarian Empires agreed terms..."
"The mobilizing Tsarist army looked the business but, as the German Teamchef 'Hindi' Hindenburg and his crafty tactics advisor 'Jogi' Ludendorff demonstrated at Rusten-, er, Tannenberg, the Russians of Rennenkampf, as they would later do under Advocaat, Hiddink, and Capello, flattered to deceive.
But as we've seen with 'Nobby' Putin, Russia are flat-track bullies."
Sorry, feeling a bit bloody-minded today. Have a good weekend!
mwdar
27 June 2014 5:02pm
It was not the killing of one man, whom ever he was, that caused the "great war" but the economics of Europe and the major changes that occurred in the banking structure of Europe. This is true for the next great war as well which will be caused by the derivative markets.
Brian Apple mwdar
28 June 2014 1:03am
You are talking about the circumstances for war, not the cause.
Treflesg
27 June 2014 5:44pm
Perhaps, unlike the Guardian with its attempts to cause issues between Spain and the UK and Argentina and the UK when RN ships do routine visits to Gib and Falk, in those days the press tried not to build up conflict?
cambridgefergal Treflesg
27 June 2014 10:36pm
In those days the press did try to build up conflict.
"We want eight and we won't wait"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invasion_of_1910
Serialised in...and you'll never, ever guess the newspaper, of course...the Daily Mail!
gasman77
27 June 2014 6:01pm
I wonder if the guardian printed a correction in 1914.
DavidwPolsce
27 June 2014 7:16pm
Don't forget that German belligerence undeniably caused the war. Even the German ambassador to the UK at the time said so in his memoirs. They encouraged the Austrians to be as aggressive as they liked. But loads of historic nonsense was invented by Marxists in the 1930s to suit their own ends.
JimNolan DavidwPolsce
27 June 2014 8:46pm
But loads of historic nonsense was invented by Marxists in the 1930s to suit their own ends.
Care to name three Marxists who "invented historic nonsense" about the Great War during the nineteen-thirties?
cambridgefergal DavidwPolsce
27 June 2014 10:34pm
Suggest you read Christopher Clark's "Sleepwalkers" before you post such arrant nonsense again...
Felipe1st
27 June 2014 7:48pm
Obviously an inside job!
The photo clearly shows the body guards who should have been standing on the rear bumper had been ordered off.
JimNolan
27 June 2014 8:17pm
the young radical Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip
Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian-Serb nationalist
Can we ever stop this? The man said at his trial, "I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be freed from Austria" and he was working alongside a bloke called Muhammed Mehmedbašić.
It was a century ago, and nationalisms were different then.
Oskar Jaeger JimNolan
28 June 2014 3:38am
Princip may have thought of himself as a "Yugoslav" nationalist but he was armed and trained by Serbian secret police.
AlekNevski Oskar Jaeger
28 June 2014 7:43am
Rogue elements of it. Major DD Apis led the Black Hand org. and was sentenced and executed by the Serbian army for treason in 1917.
SouthernStar1010 AlekNevski
28 June 2014 1:04pm
Some more info. about the man known as "APIS" the Bull, ...."Dragutin Dimitrijević (17 August 1876 – 24 June 1917), also known as Apis, was a Serbian colonel. He was a leading member of a military group that organized the overthrow of the Serbian government in 1903. He personally organized and participated in the coup against King Alexander and his wife Queen Draga that resulted in their murders".
He was the contact man for Princip and his fellow amateur assassins. He supplied them with the weapons to assassinate the Archduke and cyanide pills for them to use in case of capture. He supplied them also with safe passage from Serbia to Bosnia. The rest is history...
hazar denli
27 June 2014 8:18pm
what about J.F. Kennedy
spadetownboy
27 June 2014 8:41pm
Almost on a par with your vote for Nick endorsement in 2010.
cambridgefergal
27 June 2014 10:37pm
Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers" is the best book written on 1914 in a long time. Strongly recommended.
Richard857 cambridgefergal
28 June 2014 1:55pm
The first half of the book is indeed excellent, but I found the second half sloppy, with highly controversial statements without any supporting argument.
A classic example is "historians have attached great importance to the blank cheque" given by Germany to Austria-Hungary. Clark implies that that alone us enough to discount its importance.
He also assumes the Schlieffen plan as a given in Germany's war plans, but most historians would regard the fact that the Germans had no plans other than an invasion of France via Belgium as a major component in German responsibility for the war.
RexTarsus
27 June 2014 11:03pm
Apart from killing half of my great uncles this war effectively bought down the Empire. The Empire would have dissolved eventually. Perhaps the "pointless" slaughter of the war let the dissolution proceed relatively painlessly? ( At least for Britain, if not for the African and Asian populations.)
PeterlooSunset
27 June 2014 11:44pm
Getting it wrong seems to be the raison d'etre for most of the press.
HowardBeale
27 June 2014 11:53pm
The complexity of the situation is overstated. Humans are basically Ape; one tribe wanted in on the 'living room' is security impulse that creates an Empire. And the other tribes wanted to defend their territory, just like chimps. A very primitive species dreaming up imaginative excuses, unable to escape their base impulses.
gullibletraveller
28 June 2014 12:16am
If only his chauffeur had learned to do a proper bootleg turn ...
DBuck12 gullibletraveller
28 June 2014 12:40am
Exactly -- per "Sleepwalkers" if the idiot driver had not bollixed the route, the car would not have passed the waiting Gavrilo Princip. Plus, the bodyguard as I recall was on the wrong side of the car. Let's not even begin to discuss why after a bomb was tossed at the archduke's vehicle his visit was not cancelled altogether. Result: 16 million dead. Black Adder does not even begin to conjure up the absurdity of it all. Dan
Brian Apple gullibletraveller
28 June 2014 1:02am
The Archduke's driver was simply following the car in front. Therefore, it was the car in front that made the first wrong turn.
Richard857
28 June 2014 12:45am
It does seem a spectacularly dumb statement. Surely something along the lines of: no one can foretell the consequences, as the Telegraph wrote, would have been smarter?
Most historians would agree that, whatever the various causes of WWI, it would not have occurred without the assassination.
TamVejjaj Richard857
28 June 2014 2:49am
World War One did not start in 1914 in Sarajevo and certainly didn’t finish in 1918. Preparations for the war had been set in motion years earlier, involving the nations that would fight it out on the battle fields in Europe, Africa, Asia and by the bankers and industrialists that would reap the rewards that death and misery would bring to millions of humans. Imperial Germany was beefing up her Navy (Marine) to challenge British supremacy, the British Empire restructuring her colonial armies to enable them to fight in a modern land war and the French increasing their forces to wait for the time to put right the wrongs they felt were inflicted on them by the humiliating defeat in 1871 at the might of German armies. In Europe alliances emerged, supported by treaties, that ensured that when the first round was fired, the powder keg Europe was sitting on would ignite. The German Reich, the Habsburg Austrian Empire and the Ottoman Empire on one side were facing Britain, France and Russia at the start, with more and more countries drawn into the conflict after the fatal shots fell in Sarajevo; the secret hostilities became an open conflict.
NYorkie Richard857
28 June 2014 11:47am
it would not have occurred without the assassination.
He was a trigger not the cause.
In Austro -German politics any excuse would have done regarding Serbia, though assassination of an Austrian Royal was a pretty good one.
The Kaiser wanted a strong response from the Austrian Hapsburgs, deemed to be a pretty weak and in terminal decline by the Kaiser.
Austria dawdled, Russia as a proclaimed protector of Serbia, got drawn in, as the rhetoric and machinations moved on France was drawn in given a potential invasion of Russia by Germany ( France and Russia had a joint security pact) Britain got drawn into supporting the French ( via secret treaty between Britain and France over defence of the Channel should the German Fleet move - not to mention the invasion of Belgium of course.
Princip was the first pawn to move on the board, how the game progressed and was ultimately played, was down to the actions/ in-actions and rivalries of the great powers..
Richard857 TamVejjaj
28 June 2014 2:01pm
A few points in the argument: certainly the UK had no Great War preparations but a tiny army, there had been several previous crisis which almost, but didn't, lead to war; Russia and France were increasing in power relative to Germany and certainly didn't want a war in 1914; the crisis of 1914 took some time to ignite and could have ended with all armies mobilized and on the borders but no actual fighting.
The general consensus of historians is that whilst the peace was unstable, it took a major shock, which the assassination was, to destroy it.
The idea that the war was inevitable, or even planned by some parties, is not now accepted by most historians.
RBHoughton
28 June 2014 1:30am
A timely reminder that we never admit to preferring war but often neglect to take those steps that might prevent it.
Look at the provocation NATO is causing in Ukraine and amongst the Baltic States and ask yourself 'is it worth it?'
For a few dollars more of tribute into our black-hole economic model we are quite happy to risk everything and commentators here seem not to care.
Oskar Jaeger RBHoughton
28 June 2014 3:42am
NATO is a voluntary defensive alliance.
Without it, we might have had USSR/Russian armies on the Atlantic coast.
rodmclaughlin
28 June 2014 4:51am
"It is not to be supposed," wrote a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian "that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe".
The Guardian was right. The assassination didn't cause the war. It was used as an excuse for the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war on Serbia, which were in turn used as an excuse by Germany to attack France according to the Schlieffen plan, which looked like a reasonable gamble at the time.
malamulele rodmclaughlin
28 June 2014 5:43am
Right, that's called cause and effect. Even an 'excuse' can be a cause, direct or otherwise.
malamulele malamulele
28 June 2014 5:46am
...though TamVejjaj's point is more accurate concerning the overall context of the war.
malamulele malamulele
28 June 2014 5:46am
...though TamVejjaj's point is more accurate concerning the overall context of the war.
Niall_Bradley
28 June 2014 7:50am
Clearly then it wasn't the real cause for the war. It was merely the 'WMD entrée'...
The First World War, F. William Engdahl explains in A Century of War,
began when British Intelligence learned in 1885 that a German inventor, Gottleib Daimler, built and patented the first internal combustion engine burning petroleum fuel and using oil for mechanical lubrication. British Intelligence understood the staggering energy potential of this invention. If the Germans found a secure petroleum supply, they would be unstoppable.
There were no oil fields in Germany but there were two major sources of oil. One was in Russia on the Caspian near the Black Sea and the other source of oil was in the Ottoman Empire close to Mosul in present day Iraq. The British controlled the seas so the Germans decided to build a railway system from Berlin to Baghdad. The British challenge became how to stop the railroad. The Germans made no secret of their plans and actually went to Britain seeking their financial backing and participation. In return for Germany's honesty, the British secretly plotted wars in the small nation of Serbia through which the Berlin to Baghdad Railroad would necessarily pass.
Richard857 Niall_Bradley
28 June 2014 2:06pm
Sounds rather far fetched. You might as well blame the Englush doctor who misdiagnosed Wilhelm's father's throat cancer.
ShinjiLovesKaworu
28 June 2014 7:50am
They seem to have form being wrong on major wars. I fear we will have to wait for 2103 before the Guardian will apologize for supporting the Iraq war in 2003...
Saltycroc
28 June 2014 9:21am
Had Britain not become involved, this would have remained a European Conflict, rather than a, 'World War'.
It was soley Britain's involvement that was the precursor to World War.
Manche
28 June 2014 1:31pm
Four days later, after Britain declared war..., the Guardian said: "All controversy therefore is now at an end. Our front is united."
Plus ca change....
Villain or hero? Sarajevo is split on archduke's assassin Gavrilo Princip
100 years after the Bosnian-Serb radical murdered Austria's Franz Ferdinand the city is still divided on his actions....
For one half of the city, he was the national hero who fought against imperial oppression and fully deserves a new park in his name. For the other half he is a villain who killed a pregnant woman and brought a flourishing epoque to an end.
Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian-Serb radical who set in train a chain of events that led to the outbreak of the first world war will be the central figure in Sarajevo this weekend as the city marks 100 years since he assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.
The anniversary is being marked by concerts, conferences and exhibitions, as the city projects itself as a beacon of peace following a century in which it has been associated with war. But stark divisions remain, both from the most recent war between 1992-1995, in which 100,000 people died and Sarajevo suffered a 1,425-day siege by Serb forces, and events 100 years ago. Princip remains a polarising figure, revered by many of Bosnia's Serbs, but derided as a murderer by the country's Muslims and Croats.
"For the past 100 years, the information that the world has received from here was about war and atrocities," says Ivo Komsic, Sarajevo's mayor. "Now we're sending a different message of peace, love and understanding."
This is Sarajevo's biggest international moment since the end of the Bosnian war almost 20 years ago. A range of international figures are attending ceremonies on Saturday, including a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra at the newly restored city hall, where Franz Ferdinand attended a reception shortly before the assassination, and which housed the city's library, destroyed by Serb artillery during the war. The presidents of several European countries are expected. The UK is sending Baroness Warsi. Just before midnight, a choir will sing on the Latin Bridge, beside which Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sophie were killed by Princip.
However, the ceremonies are being boycotted by the president and prime minister of Serbia, who claim that a plaque on the city hall commemorating the 1992 bombardment and the loss of almost 2m books denigrates the Serb people.
Despite his message of goodwill, Komsic presides over only a part of an ethnically divided city. Nineteen years after the war ended, Bosnia operates as two "entities", the predominantly Muslim and Croat Federation, and the overwhelmingly Serb-dominated Serb Republic (RS). The highly autonomous RS was recognised by the peace settlement. Many Muslims regard it as the product of ethnic cleansing, while for Serbs its existence is a guarantor of peace.
Swaths of the capital lie in the RS, where the administration of Istocno (east) Sarajevo operates separately, the two not even joined by public transport. In emergency cases, citizens of Istocno Sarajevo cannot be treated in the city centre's general hospital, Komsic notes, instead having to be taken 120 miles to Banja Luka, the capital of the RS.
In Istocno Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip is still lauded by many as a national hero who fought against Austrian oppression. Milorad Dodik, the republic's strongman prime minister, is expected to open a new park and name it after the assassin. In the Communist Yugoslav era, Princip was regarded as a revolutionary hero who fought for the freedom of all southern Slavs, but now Bosnia is independent it is largely Serbs who cling to this view.
In a chic Italian restaurant on a Sarajevo boulevard still named after Communist dictator Tito, Asim Sarajlic, a senior MP of the Muslim-nationalist SDA party, says that for Muslims and Croats, Princip brought to an end a golden era of history under Austrian rule.
"When the Austrians first occupied in 1878, Bosnians refused to accept the empire, but in nearly 40 years, they did more for Bosnia than all the other rulers did in centuries – building railways, cities and institutions. The Austrians gave us a lot – modern systems of government, education and healthcare. For normal citizens of Sarajevo, it was a crime for Princip to kill an innocent pregnant lady and her husband who came to celebrate the accomplishments of Austria. We are strongly against the mythology of Princip as a fighter for freedom."
But sitting in the house he is building in Istocno Sarajevo amid meadows poignantly dotted with poppies, Nebojsa Grubac, who fought in the Serb army in the early 1990s, is incensed about the change in how Princip's actions are interpreted.
"They're trying to change history," he says. "I learned in school that he was a hero, and now they're trying to paint him as an aggressor – fuck that!"
He sees Princip, and Bosnia, as the innocent victim of Great Power politics that have led to repeated conflicts.
Despite differences over history – and having fought against Muslims less than two decades ago – Grubac feels no ill-will towards the other ethnic groups in Bosnia. He says that 80% of the work on his house was done by Muslims. He grew up in what is now the Muslim-dominated part of the city, and is still good friends with a Muslim he used to play with as a child, who fought for the Bosnian side during the war. Only one of his Muslim acquaintances refuses to greet him. But he adds there is still fear that prevents the united Bosnia he would like to see – and that another war is a real possibility, due to the machinations of nationalist politicians.
One of the few bright spots in recent years has been the Bosnian national football team's first World Cup, even though the team was eliminated in the group stages. In a bar in Sarajevo's Grbavica district, yards from what was the front line during the siege, young Bosnians decked out in the country's colours cheer on the side during its last match, an emphatic victory over Iran.
"To be honest, I don't really care about the anniversary," says Tarik, a 29-year-old web designer who works for a British company. "I think Princip was a coward who killed a pregnant woman." For him, there are more pressing concerns. Frustrated with a lack of opportunities in Bosnia, he is looking for work in Germany, where he fled with his family as refugees during the war.
Oskar Jaeger
27 June 2014 11:49am
Murder is murder. Calling it an assassination does not make it right. This particular murder was particularly deplorable as it helped set off WW1, leading to millions more deaths.
Those who think this particular murderer was a hero must be rather short of real heroes.
s0nica Oskar Jaeger
27 June 2014 1:03pm
What a ridiculous piece of logic. To use your reasoning, if someone had assassinated Hitler just prior to the outbreak of WW2, you would have said "murder is murder" and nothing can justify it such a deplorable act, right?
The "millions more deaths" in WW1 were not caused by Gavrilo Princip. He did not play any of the power games that led to the war, he was simply trying to kick out the empire that was occupying his country. In fact the ruthlessness, brutality and ambitions of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his family have an incomparably larger responsibility in causing WW1 than Gavrilo Princip.
Stevo3 s0nica
27 June 2014 1:28pm
Princip fired the first shots, so whatever he intended he started the chain of events, at least in 1914. And indeed the Archduke was against war with Serbia, he was the main brake on the belligerent Conrad, and in favour of giving the Slavs within the empire greater rights, as the third major ethnicity, one reason he was targeted, as had he been successful, the Yugoslav/Serb nationalist aims would have been made harder to achieve.
deadsparrow
27 June 2014 12:18pm
Princip can't be blamed for the deaths that followed his action - the 'statesmen' and generals of the time simply took the opportunity he gave them to engage in mass murder. He can and should be blamed for the murder of two relatively inoffensive people who didn't deserve what they got. Princip is not a hero.
Brian Apple
27 June 2014 12:39pm
Gavrilo Princip is one of the most divisive figures in history. On the one hand, he killed the royal couple from the Austro-Hungarian empire, an empire which was liked by the Moslems and Croats of Bosnia. On the other, he symbolises the "everyman", the downtrodden peasant of folklore who strikes out like David against the Goliath of imperialism.
At heart, he was a sensitive bookworm who hated the imperial invader from the north. Determined to kill the Archduke, he was handed luck on a plate by some very shoddy security.
whathappenednext Brian Apple
27 June 2014 2:20pm
Determined to kill the Archduke, he was handed luck on a plate by some very shoddy security
Shoddy to the extent that some believe it was deliberately so. The wrong turning by the driver, the jammed gears on the car, awfully convenient for a bloke looking to get a clear shot in
SheStoopsToFeist whathappenednext
27 June 2014 3:55pm
Shoddy to the extent that some believe it was deliberately so. The wrong turning by the driver, the jammed gears on the car
...the grassy knoll...
CroatianRoger whathappenednext
27 June 2014 8:11pm
When ever i walk past that bridge i think of all the deaths 1914- 1995.
Or even Balkan war 1912 to Kosovo 2000.
The great suicidal European war.
TommyCockles1
27 June 2014 12:48pm
Princip was just a tool in the hands of a bunch of thoroughly unpleasant Serbian nationalists
Stevo3 TommyCockles1
27 June 2014 1:32pm
But a quite willing tool.
CarefulReader TommyCockles1
27 June 2014 4:38pm
It's quite easy to check from historical sources that this is not true. Princip was an anarchist and a Yugoslab nationalist, driven by his own ideology and his own goals, and they were not the same as those of Serbian royalist nationalists who supplied his weapons.
Stevo3 CarefulReader
27 June 2014 5:06pm
There is evidence he was also in an extremist group, beyond just "Young Bosnia".
NIXXXX
27 June 2014 12:53pm
Sorry, he murdered a pregnant women. Who give s a flying fuck whether he was a book worm or a freedom fighter.
If he is your 'hero' then you must have some very weird ideas spinning around in your head. Something on the lines of, "Genocide is ok, we got what we wanted and they are only muslims at the end of the day"
But set aside the history of it, murdering a pregnant women in cold blood is pretty shitty.
s0nica NIXXXX
27 June 2014 1:14pm
Many "national heroes" of many countries - the UK included - have killed people or caused people to be killed, yet we are (presumable) a rational people. Boudica burned down an entire city in revolt against the Romans - does the fact that she caused the deaths of innocents therefore make all her actions worthless? Sir Francis Drake killed, pillaged and was involved in the slave trade, yet he also helped fight off a Spanish invasion of England and is therefore seen as an English national hero - does this make all English people "weird" for idolising a man who helped save the English nation state?
History is not black and white and you will not go far in being able to understand the past with that mentality.
CarefulReader NIXXXX
27 June 2014 4:36pm
I'm sure no woman was pregnant in Dresden.
AlekDeu NIXXXX
28 June 2014 11:29am
Duchess of Hohenberg was not pregnant.
ByYove
27 June 2014 12:54pm
Why does this remind one of "Name one thing the Romans have done for us ..."
Oskar Jaeger ByYove
27 June 2014 4:22pm
Much like Romans in their time, Austrians built roads, railways, schools and hospitals in Bosnia. It was their "model colony".
barfiller2 ByYove
28 June 2014 11:21am
More like: "The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front." (Or the Popular Front of Judea?)
inkyblob Oskar Jaeger
28 June 2014 2:51pm
I'm sure that's how they would like it to be remembered but they also kept in place and reinforced many of the socially damaging aspects of Bosnian society - such as land rights for (relatively) rich Bosnian muslim begs, which kept mostly Orthodox (and, hence, subsequently Serbian) peasants in near serfdom. In Western Bosnia, the Catholic (and, hence, subsequently Croatian) population was slowly lifted out of poverty, while the same was not true for the largely Orthodox peasant population in Eastern Bosnia. One of the reasons Princip and others supported escape from the Hapsburg Empire was that they could see some people getting rich (especially in Sarajevo) while the rest of the population suffered crippling poverty.
The Hapsburgs, for their part, were - perhaps rightly - terrified of national feelings and pan-Slavic sentiment spreading through their multi-national Empire. They were particularly worried about recently independent and economically relatively successful Serbia, which represented an alternative model to, in particular, Croats and Serbs inside the Empire. Furthermore, with territorial ambition centred on the Balkans (it had nowhere else to go) there were many hardliners in the Aurstian court who saw Bosnia as a successful model of expansion that could be applied to Serbia, which with its tiny army exhausted by two Balkan wars was seen as a push-over that could be occupied and pacified in a couple of weeks.
It's fun to remember the Hapsburgs as friendly rulers but that does not reflect the reality of the time. They were more modern, certainly, than those who ruled Yugoslavia subsequently but modernity does not necessarily result in less cruelty. Ultimately, in my view, what took them to war was a mix of paranoia (about nationalism - 1848 was still fresh in everybody's minds and this time the Russians were unlikely to come to the rescue) and expansionism (popular for European empires of the time... just look at how eager the Germans were to become a colonial power).
spontaneityrox
27 June 2014 12:59pm
WWI was happening anyway.
But yeah the guy is a murderer no matter how you cut it.
LlivracNhoJ
27 June 2014 1:00pm
However, the ceremonies are being boycotted by the president and prime minister of Serbia, who claim that a plaque on the city hall commemorating the 1992 bombardment and the loss of almost 2m books denigrates the Serb people.
Right, because the Serbs don't like the truth.
Stevo3 LlivracNhoJ
27 June 2014 1:31pm
Some Serbs, not all.
LlivracNhoJ Stevo3
27 June 2014 1:45pm
OK, not all. Just the sort who besiege a city for nearly 4 years then feel insulted when anyone mentions it.
The Serbs, in general, need to face up to what they did (i.e. genocide), apologise for it, and begin emerging from their coccoon of eternal victimhood. Only then will they be able to make peace with themselves.
East LlivracNhoJ
27 June 2014 5:22pm
Not entirely, they've got an alternative bash elsewhere which is likely to be a politically far more rewarding exercise.
The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, along with Milorad Dodik, Patriarch Irinej and the rest of the Serb nationalist top drawer will be hanging out with various other pals of the renowned film director Emir Kusturica at the grand opening of Andricgrad, Kustirica's Serb nationalist theme park in Visegrad, eastern Bosnia. (The Kusturica No Smoking Orchestra will be providing musical accompaniment, hopefully not their anthem in honour of Karadzic). To celebrate awareness of a century of Serb history Aleksandar Vucic will unveil a mosaic in honour of Princip.
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/...troversies
I don't suppose in the preparations today they'll be worrying about a more recent historical anniversary - marking 22 years ssince the Bikavac massacre took place during the ethic cleansing of Visegrad in 1992. The Bikavac "living pyre" on 27 June 1992 was one of the worst single crimes against civilians during the entire Bosnian war (in the latter half of the 20th century according to Judge Patrick Robinson of the ICTY).
Andricgrad is built on a site illegally confiscated from a member of the town's Bosniak community that was used to detain prisoners during the mass expulsion of the majority Bosniak population. It stands almost alongside the town's famous Ottoman bridge over the River Drina on which men, women and children were slaughtered en masse in the early summer of 1992. As the dignitaries mark a hundred years since Serb nationalism toppled the house of cards of Old Europe, I suspect there's little thought going to be given to the memory of the defunct non-Serbs no longer around to join in the celebration. The business of awkward historical reminders was got out of the way by the Visegrad authorities earlier this year when they brought in a hundred armed police and a man with an angle grinder to remove the word "genocide" from the marble monument to the victims in Visegrad's Straziste Cemetery.
ArthurTheCat
27 June 2014 1:05pm
The presidents of several European countries are expected. The UK is sending Baroness Warsi
I take it we're not friends with Bosnia for some reason.
earthboy ArthurTheCat
27 June 2014 1:37pm
the british govpress did rather portray the serbs as neo nazis in the early nineteen nineties. people don't forget these things, but Warsi can say she wasn't around at that time and isn't a white male Home Office aristocrat and so she shouldn't be blamed for the views of her controllers.
Silgen ArthurTheCat
27 June 2014 1:38pm
Indeed. Let's hope the bugger don't send her back.
East earthboy
27 June 2014 5:27pm
I've no doubt that she remembers as well as they do the massacres and murder and rape camps for ehch the Bosnian Serb nationalists were responsible.
ErnestoG
27 June 2014 1:16pm
If you follow the concept of hereditary power, then the only way to get change (given the lack of a voting system) is to remove the power by other means - in the middle ages (when monarchy had some form of relevence) this was accomplished by killing the king - why should that change if these people do not defer to a regular and popular vote.
We could do with a Gavrilo Princip hanging aroung Sandrgingham during the summer!!
huzar30 ErnestoG
27 June 2014 1:26pm
You think that will bring about change?
spontaneityrox ErnestoG
27 June 2014 2:01pm
I can't help but think your comment sits right on the edge of some kind of line...
CroatianRoger ErnestoG
27 June 2014 7:51pm
You commit a crime by writing that, expect SO19 to visit at dawn.
Omoshiro
27 June 2014 1:31pm
I blame the driver. If he had known how to drive, we souldn't have been having this argument right now.
CroatianRoger Omoshiro
27 June 2014 7:54pm
A coachman with very little automobile experience, they should have had Ferdinand Porsche driving ( he drove the uncle, the Emperor).
28 June 2014 5:53pm
Yes but then the horses would have been pushing the coach...:-)
unaszplodrmann
27 June 2014 1:39pm
One hundred years later and Europe is again in a rather similar place. Princip was just a murderous pawn, but Brussels must know there are plenty more like him, and not just in Serbia. It boggles me how a society can violently rupture along ethnic and/or class-based lines, but then quickly return to a state of ostensibly peaceful cohabitation. It certainly adds credence to Freud's view that humankind bears an immutable, aggressive primal nature.
Thank you for this piece.
Brian Apple
27 June 2014 2:04pm
One of the fascinating things about the Archduke Ferdinand is that he killed over 250,000 animals during his lifetime. He was a keen hunter, and travelled the entire world (including India and Australia) in the late 1800's when he was in his 20's and 30's.
Was his death at the hands of Gavrilo Princip a form of karma? Was the ensuing Great War a form of karma by the animal kingdom against the human kingdom? One wonders. It is truly something to think about.
dontshootme Brian Apple
27 June 2014 2:54pm
250k ???
Assuming that he started killing the moment he was born and hunted non-stop until the moment he died then that means he killed 13.5 animals per day.
Are you including insects in that number?
Brian Apple dontshootme
27 June 2014 3:00pm
They were all counted and catalogued. The Archduke apparently hunted almost every day on his estate. Deer etc were frequently shot. He was a prolific shooter. You can find all the information if you google it.
royaldocks Brian Apple
27 June 2014 4:03pm
It is truly something to think about.
Not really, no...
Hallucinogen
27 June 2014 2:06pm
Can we just admit that responsibility for millions of deaths is divided? Divided between the individuals of Princip, the members of the ruling class of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and the idea of nationalism itself? Why do we have to blame one person? Surely we can blame multiple people and individual thoughts such as nationalist thoughts, the idea of nationalism.
Oskar Jaeger Hallucinogen
27 June 2014 3:46pm
The ruling classes of Russia, France and England are equally to blame.
Read "Sleepwalkers" by C Clark.
Hallucinogen Oskar Jaeger
27 June 2014 4:21pm
But France was under attack by Germany so how can you blame France? And Britain and Russia were just defending their allies, Austria and Germany fired the first shot was my impression.
Oskar Jaeger Hallucinogen
27 June 2014 4:33pm
It is too complicated to summarise in a paragraph or two. I recommend that book.
Brian Apple
27 June 2014 2:08pm
If the Archduke had not been assassinated, he would have left Sarajevo within a few hours after his killing. It was his last day in Sarajevo, don't forget. He would have returned to Austria and assumed the throne in 1916, the year that Franz Josef, his predecessor, passed away.
If not for the assassination, Gavrilo Princip would have faded into complete and utter obscurity. It is possible, however, that he would have passed away at an early age because he was thought to have contracted TB in 1913 or thereabouts.
East Brian Apple
27 June 2014 5:35pm
He died from TB in 1918, in the fortress prison of Terezin. It's said that one of the reasons he was chosen by Dimitrijevic (Apis), the mastermind of the plot, along with the two others of the six in the group who also had TB, was because the knowledge of their limited life expectancy would mean they were less likely to have seconbd thoughts about their involvement. They were all under twenty-one because that was the minimum age for the death penalty in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
CroatianRoger East
27 June 2014 7:59pm
The Austrians prefer to call Terezin (slav name ) Theresienstadt, an infamous prison.
royaldocks CroatianRoger
27 June 2014 8:19pm
It only became infamous 30 years later.
Here's the guy who killed the heir to the dynasty and his pregnant wife. But he's sentenced to 20 years, and kept in prison - he didn't have it easy, he was often hungry but it was war and many Austrians often went hungry, and he got medical attention up to a successful amputation of his arm when the TB had spread to his bones.
Wonder what others would have done with him.
Brian Apple
27 June 2014 2:10pm
In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler refers to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip as "a lightning bolt that struck the Earth". Hitler was probably the best qualified person to judge it as such. It's in Chapter 5 of the book, if anybody is interested.
Marrrttty Brian Apple
27 June 2014 4:00pm
Adolf Hitler also had a particular distaste for Princip and Serbs as such. Upon the invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia he first requested that the plaque commemorating the assassination be brought to him personally. He treasured it greatly and relished the extermination of Yugoslavia's Serbs and Jews as a sort of revenge
East Marrrttty
27 June 2014 5:39pm
It was the war that Princip's action started that resulted in Hitler becoming a prisoner of war and having the time to reflect on his own and Germany's humiliation.
Marrrttty East
27 June 2014 6:12pm
I was waiting for the token Serbophobe to appear on this thread and start the outlandish recriminations. So far you have not only blames the First World War on Serbia , but the Second World War as well!!! My goodness .!??? I am shocked! Apparently Osama Bin Laden was trained by Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbian church as well. Also, I hear that the Serbs took MH370 as well. They're planning to start WW3.
Thank you for your presence here. You've managed to destroy any semblance of a reasonable discussion.
Marrrttty
27 June 2014 2:18pm
I can't recall a concerted of an effort of revisionist history as this in my lifetime. The debate over whether Princip was a terrorist or not is completely irrelevant. He was an idealistic kid who became a byproduct of historical machinations too big for him to understand. It seems to me that everything we learned in history class has been thrown out of the window in favour of the "Fox News" version; "terrorist kills pretty lady and archduke and war begins!"
There are two key points that our media seems to be conveniently forget.
1) The major powers of Europe were in a catastrophically short-sighted arms race that was to lead to war , regardless of Gavrilo Princip or those dastardly Serbs. The European Empires were either teetering and ready to stake their claims or expansionist in thought and action.
2) The repeated notion that Princip was a "Serb Nationalist" is both false and inflammatory. I'm sure it works quite well for journalists to repeat this tired cliche as it brings about plenty of emotion in the west, especially vis a vis Sarajevo and the conflicts of the 90's, but the fact of the matter is that Princip and the Young Bosnia group he belonged to were pan-slavists. Read any of the young mans quotes or simply look at the group that was part of the assassination plot. It included both Serbs and Bosnian Muslims ....surprise.
I understand the Guardian and other British media revert to their favourite punching bag (Serbia) whenever they can , but revisionist history is pushing it a bit too far.
dontshootme Marrrttty
27 June 2014 2:50pm
War was not inevitable. Princip was aware that the world was on a knife edge and he still carried out the assassination. If a
Pakistani national were to assassinate Narendra Modi or a Ukrainian national were to kill Putin, precipitating all out war, would you be so forgiving?
His actions were calculated and the results were predictable.
Brian Apple Marrrttty
27 June 2014 2:58pm
I think Princip inadvertently brought the world to a historic intersection, and it was the foolish behaviour of politicians and kings that turned the tornado into the hurricane.
Marrrttty dontshootme
27 June 2014 3:00pm
Your comparisons are ridiculous. The world we live in today is vastly different to that of the early 20th century.
You are also forgetting that the Austro-Hungarians had plenty of options available to them, short of attacking Serbia and murdering 1/5th of it's entire population. You also forget that Serbia accepted every demand that the Austrian's put forth, less de-facto annexation. Your logic states that each individual act (assassination, defiance etc.) justifies a large scale retaliation. This is both outrageous and dangerous.
Drachen7fels
27 June 2014 2:31pm
Villain - if ever there was on. What a shame to have a monument for him.
wjelly
27 June 2014 2:41pm
We were told at school about as 'accident' the year before where the Archduke's loader accidentally nearly hit him with a shotgun blast.
Was from someone who'd done lots of research but I've never seen it mentioned anywhere else.
Brian Apple wjelly
27 June 2014 2:55pm
I heard about that too. I can't remember where I read it but it's somewhere.
dontshootme
27 June 2014 2:43pm
He should be remembered as a murderer. He cannot be directly blamed for starting WW1 but he chose a path that led to the largest loss of life in history.
His actions are not to be celebrated.
East dontshootme
27 June 2014 5:57pm
His childhood was one of poverty and discrimination. That doesn't excuse his actions but it helps explain why Dimitrijevic/Apis was able to take advantage of his and the other Young Bosnians' anger and resentment for his own more calculating political purposes.
East East
27 June 2014 11:09pm
Sorry, "take advantage of his [ie Princip's] and the other Young Bosnians' anger and resentment for his [ie Dimitrijevic's] own more calculating political purposes.
Brian Apple
27 June 2014 2:55pm
There's something very eerie about the Archduke's death at the hands of Princip. Apart from the eerie nature of the wrong turn and the Archduke's car stopping right in front of Princip (I mean, how odd is that?) in order to reverse course, there is the number plate on the Archduke's car that is incredible.
It was AIII 118. Think about it. It predicted the date of the Armistice. A is for armistice, and the rest (II I1 18) can be seen as the 11th day of the 11 month in the year '18. I don't know for sure if there is a divine being guiding everything but this makes you think twice.
Silgen Brian Apple
28 June 2014 11:44am
Oskar Jaeger
27 June 2014 3:54pm
Those of you who think the Hapsburgs caused or even wanted a war should read "The Sleepwalkers", a recent book by a British historian, Christopher Clark.
It was Serbia that was bent on expansion.
Like in the 1990s, Serbia wanted Bosnia as part of "Greater Serbia".
Marrrttty Oskar Jaeger
27 June 2014 4:18pm
This is exactly the simplistic narrative that dominates modern discourse. Yes , Serbia, a tiny impoverished European nation was expansionist in nature. It wanted to achieve it's goals by attacking one of the most powerful Empires of the time. Said empire was by no means occupying lands to which it was not native eh? I guess we're required to think like a
![[Слика: traktor.gif]](http://poljoinfo.com/images/smilies/traktor.gif)
It only shows that you already have a prejudice against Serbs, and as such you are extremely biased. I mean, you not worthy of discussion.
има још