A History with No Winner
- By Aleksandar Brezar
The event in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 set the course for the twentieth century, yet its story reads like a political thriller straight out of Hollywood. Under the guise of national interest, a brilliant intelligence officer plans to create an international incident. He assembles, arms, and trains a team of outsiders and political dissidents to assassinate a high official from another country. Unsurprisingly, the perfect plan goes terribly wrong—the first bomb misses its intended target in the dignitary's motorcade and the cyanide pill the assassin then swallows fails to work. Distracted and dismayed, the rest of the assassins fail to act. But then the leader of the group heroically tries again. He runs through the bewildered masses and fires two shots at the dignitary and his wife, killing them both. The homeland is finally free, he thinks, as he is led away to solitary confinement.
It’s no wonder that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand created such a media frenzy. This “shot heard ‘round the world” led to the long and bloody international stalemate of World War I, and in lockstep after that, the atrocities of World War II. But although the shot was heard across the globe, it echoed most loudly in the Balkans.
The events leading to the Archduke's assassination were relatively straightforward: a group of six men who were part of the separatist nationalist group known as “Young Bosnia” were approached by the head of the Serbian Intelligence Department, Dragutin Dimitrijević, a.k.a. Apis. Apis was a captain in the Serbian Army and was already notorious for his involvement in the assassination of the Serbian King Aleksandar Obrenović and his wife, Queen Draga Mašić. After a failed attempt to assassinate the aging Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, Apis found out about Archduke Ferdinand's plans to visit Sarajevo, which provided him with a fresh opportunity and a new target. The Archduke was the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and although his plan was to allow the Balkan states a greater amount of freedom, he was also the perfect target for the post-Obrenović political elites in Serbia. The idea was that if the Russian-backed Serbia could show its teeth to the Austro-Hungarian empire by effectively removing its next head of state, it could easily claim back the territories annexed under the 1878 Treaty of Berlin.
Apis and his right hand man, Major Tomislav Tankosić, chose their assassins carefully: the first conspirator was a Bosnian Serb journalist living in Belgrade, Danilo Ilić. Ilić went back to Sarajevo under the guise of becoming the new editor of a local Serb newspaper. His true mission was to find disgruntled, idealistic young men, and soon he had recruited Nedeljko Čabrinović, Vaso Čubrilović, Trifko Grabež, Cvjetko Popović—all Bosnian Serbs—and one Bosnian Muslim, Muhamed Mehmedbašić. His recruitment of his closest friend, one Gavrilo Princip, would prove to be the final piece of the puzzle.
The plan was set in motion. Even the day itself carried significance and played right into Apis's hand: in the Serbian Orthodox Church, June 28 (or June 15 according to the Julian calendar) marks the feast of St. Vitus. This date is of the utmost importance to the Serbian national myth, as it marks the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, which is widely—but wrongly—believed to have been the key event in the five-century-long Ottoman conquest of the Serb lands. On the eve of the assassination, the weapons smuggled from Serbia were handed out and all the assassins met for the first and the last time. In their minds, things must have repeated the circumstances at the battlefield in Kosovo: the time had come for a new group of Serb heroes to assassinate the leader of the colonial power occupying their lands, thus carrying out the same deed the famed Miloš Obilić accomplished when he assassinated the Ottoman commander, Sultan Bayezid.
On the morning of June 28, 1914, Franz Ferdinand and other Austro-Hungarian dignitaries arrived in Sarajevo by train. The motorcade had six cars and the Archduke got into the third car—a convertible sports car with its roof folded down. His wife, Sophie, the Governor of Bosnia, Oskar Potiorek, and Lieutenant Colonel Count Franz von Harrach accompanied him in the car. The motorcade was following a route through the city center along the Miljacka River. The assassins spread along the route, waiting for the opportune moment to attack. But as the motorcade passed, the first assassin, Mehmedbašić, froze and didn't act. It also passed Čubrilović, who failed to act as well. It was only Čabrinović, standing on the opposite side of the street who ended up throwing a bomb at Franz Ferdinand's vehicle. As luck would have it, the bomb bounced off the folded roof and exploded under the next car in the motorcade. Between 16 and 20 people were wounded.
The motorcade proceeded to the Town Hall. The Archduke, though shaken, still managed to give his speech. After a long debate between the officials and the security officers, the decision was made to change the route through the city. Somehow the driver of the Archduke's car, Leopold Lojka, misunderstood the new plan and still proceeded along the original route. Meanwhile, after hearing that the first attempt had failed, Gavrilo Princip decided to change his position to the vicinity of the Latin Bridge. Soon after, the motorcade appeared. As it approached the Latin Bridge, the Archduke's vehicle stalled and Princip used this opportunity to step forward and fire two shots. The first one went through the Archduke's jugular. The second ended up in the Duchess's abdomen.
Princip was arrested on the spot, and all the other assassins and their aides were soon apprehended, except for Mehmedbašić, who fled to Montenegro. Their trial took place in October 1914. The court handed out five death penalties to those tried as adults, of which two were later commuted to prison sentences by Kaiser Franz-Josef, as well as 11 other incarcerations, while nine defendants were acquitted. Gavrilo Princip was given 20 years in prison. He died of tuberculosis in 1918.
The trial had almost no bearing on the escalation of hostilities between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia, which soon became a full-blown war. However, Princip’s role was widely contested in the decades that followed, and ever since his portrayal by the different regimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina has ranged from terrorist to hero and back. In the aftermath of World War I, the newly-founded Kingdom of Yugoslavia elevated him to the position of martyr, and he was widely celebrated as a hero of the Yugoslav nation. During Bosnia's annexation by the Independent State of Croatia, a World War II Fascist puppet-state, he was again vilified, to the point where the regime ordered the destruction of his house. Post-World War II Yugoslavia once again rebranded him as a resistance fighter, and his home was rebuilt and turned into the Museum of Yugoslavia. This lasted until the most recent Bosnian war, when his house was once again torn down. As the most recent conflict had no clear winner, the different ethnicities than comprise the now-independent Bosnia and Herzegovina continue to have separate and conflicting views on Princip: most Bosniaks and Croats consider him to be a terrorist, while the Serbs laud him as a true patriot and, once again, a martyr. The rest of the world seems to have moved on. Only now, at the centenary of the assassination, does everyone again remember the young Bosnian who died an unceremonious death, locked up in solitary, and whose actions were the catalyst for a cataclysmic chain of events that were, by all accounts, inevitable.
Today, as I walk down the streets of Sarajevo, in the days after Bosnia’s first-ever participation in soccer’s World Cup, I can't help but remember the cruelest of Sarajevan jokes during the most recent war, a conflict that left hundreds of thousands dead and millions without their homes. In the midst of the pleas for international intervention that divided the UN Security Council, we joked, "The current score is Sarajevo 1, Danzig 1: maybe it's time for us to take the lead." Winston Churchill famously quipped that "the Balkans produce more history than they can consume." As I think about Princip, though, I can't help but think that Churchill was wrong: the people of the Balkans can easily consume—and make light of—their history; it's just that they sometimes also get consumed by it, just like everyone else.
