SUNDAY, JUNE 29, 2014
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Sarajevo marks WW1 spark
100 years have passed since shots that triggered Great War
SARAJEVO: Bosnia marked 100 years since the assassination
of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that sparked
World War I, but the divisive legacy of the gunman Gavrilo
Princip meant Serbs were shunning the event. It was on a
Sarajevo street corner on June 28, 1914, that the 19-year-old
Bosnian Serb nationalist shot dead the archduke and his wife
with a Browning revolver, setting off a chain of events that
sucked Europe’s great powers into four years of unprecedented violence that redrew the world map.
Many of those competing powers commemorated the cen-
tenary on the sidelines of an EU summit on Thursday with a
low-key ceremony at Belgium’s Ypres, where German forces
used mustard gas for the first time in 1915. But in the Balkans,
the legacy of the Great War continues to stir up ethnic divisions between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, preventing heads of
state from coming together to mark the event at the site of
the assassination in Bosnia’s capital. “It would have been
impossible to bring everyone together on June 28 in Sarajevo,”
said Bosnian Serb historian and diplomat Slobodan Soja.
There are wildly differing interpretations of 20th century
SARAJEVO: Members of the Central-European monarchists’ delegation hold a banner representing Austrian
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia yesterday on the sidelines of ceremonies commemorating the
100th anniversary of their assassination on June 28, 1914. — AFP
history in the region where the scars of sectarian wars in the
1990s are still fresh. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, is among
the most divisive figures in that history - either a fervent Serb
nationalist who sought to liberate Slavs from the AustroHungarian occupier, or a terrorist who unleashed horrific
bloodshed on the world, depending on who you ask. Serbian
and Bosnian Serb leaders refused to take part in the main
commemorations in Sarajevo on Saturday that were set to
feature a performance by the Vienna Philharmonic in the late
afternoon - a highly symbolic envoy from the capital of a
once-loathed empire.
The Serbs instead unveiled a two-metre-high bronze statue of Princip in eastern Sarajevo on Friday and held their own
ceremonies on Saturday in eastern Bosnia. Top leaders,
including Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic and
Bosnian Serb president Milorad Dodik were to join the ceremony in the eastern town of Visegrad, where a street was
named after Princip’s revolutionary movement “Young
Bosnia”.
“We are here to pay homage to Gavrilo Princip, a key historic figure of last century,” said 58-year old Ljubisa
Simonovic, who had traveled from Serbia for the ceremony
along with hundreds of others. “The divisions are regrettable
but so are attempts to change the facts, particularly if they
are motivated by recent history.”
Until the Bosnia war in the 1990s, Princip was Sarajevo’s
favourite son. Two years after he died in prison in 1920 his
bones were dug up and brought to be buried in the city,
where a bridge was named after him and plaques put up in
his honour. During the 1990s conflict, he was worshipped as
an icon of Serb nationalism by Bosnian Serb forces as they
besieged Sarajevo in one of the war’s most brutal episodes.
“For the army bombing Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip was a cult
figure,” said Bosnian Muslim historian Husnija Kamberovic.
That ensured Princip was even more loathed by Muslim
and Croat civilians trapped in the city, who wasted no time in
tearing down his plaques and renaming his bridge after the
war ended. Princip’s brazen attack 100 years ago dragged
almost half the world’s population into a cycle of violence of
unprecedented scale and intensity. What became known as
the Great War lasted more than 52 months and left some 10
million dead and 20 million injured and maimed on its battlefields. Millions more perished under occupation through disease, hunger or deportation.
Four of the world’s most powerful empires - Russian,
German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman - collapsed in the
aftermath. The ruin of Europe cleared the way for the rise of a
new superpower, the United States. World War I fanned the
emergence of many of the ideologies that fashioned the 20th
century and its conflicts, including anti-colonialism,
Communism, Fascism and Nazism. — AFP