Date opens old wounds in Sarajevo
Hero or villain? 100 years after his shot, Gavrilo Princip is still a divisive figure
Hero or terrorist? Exactly 100 years after Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that remains an emotive question in the Balkans and especially in Sarajevo.
The debate about how to characterize the motives and actions of Princip, a Bosnian-Serb radical, during what was became known as the July Crisis, obscures larger questions about the staggering scope of a global war that caused the deaths of more than 15 million soldiers and civilians. From the Battle of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles Campaign — where Newfoundlanders fought and died alongside Indians, Australians and New Zealanders — to the Balkans, the killing fields of the Western Front, the waters off Argentina, and in the Pacific where the Imperial Japanese Navy fought on the same side as Britain and France, grabbing German colonies and outposts in China and Micronesia.
The Japanese sent warships to the Mediterranean and off the coast of South Africa, and were involved with Canadian, Czech and British troops in the Siberian Intervention against Communist Russia, during the last days of war and for several months thereafter.
For Canadians the Great War — as it was called until the Second World War came along — was mostly about the horrors of Ypres and the Somme, and the bloody victories on Vimy Ridge, at Passchendaele, and during the Hundred Days Offensive that finally punctured the Hindenburg Line, hastening the end of the conflict.
It was also a coming of age for the Australians and New Zealanders who, like Canada, saw a way forward that no longer included such smothering ties to Mother England.
After the War to End All Wars ended on Nov. 11, 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in ruins, the czar of Russia had been overthrown and his family murdered; Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II was disgraced and forced into exile; Poland and the Baltic republics briefly tasted freedom; the Ottoman Turks were finished as a regional power; Ukraine was caught, like today, in the middle of a vicious struggle between Russia and the West. Also, the borders of the Middle East were fixed by French and British diplomats with virtually no consideration of what the Arabs and the minorities in countries such as Syria and Iraq wanted, and the U.S for the first time flexed its global muscles, emerging reluctantly as a new kind of imperial power.
It is disputed today by some historians whether Gavrilo Princip was working to create a Greater Serbia with Belgrade’s secretive Black Hand or, as he testified at his trial, wanted Austria out of the Balkans. His intense hatred of Austro-Hungarian rule in the Balkans was certainly obvious when he wrote in his cell that “our ghosts will wander through the courts of Vienna, scaring the gentlemen.”
These words, written before Princip’s death from tuberculosis in a Czech prison in 1918, are inscribed along with his impassive image on a mural on the wall of a Serbian bar in East Sarajevo. A waiter there, Vukovich Vladenko, called Princip “a great Serbian patriot” and said the owner admired him even more than he did.
Whatever motivated him, Princip clearly had no idea that on June 28, 1914, the havoc he was about to unleash when he set out with
“Our ghosts will wander through the courts of Vienna” GAVRILO PRINCIP
five accomplices to murder Archduke Ferdinand and also, inadvertently, kill his pregnant wife, Sophie. Princip found himself standing only a few metres away from the royal couple when the driver of their car inadvertently turned into a street named after his uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph. Seizing his chance, Princip began shooting. Because he was 27 days shy of his 20th birthday, he could not be executed and was instead sentenced to 20 years in jail.
Sarajevo’s Muslim majority has a very different view of their city’s most infamous son. While still denouncing him, they have turned Princip’s heinous crime into a small but thriving industry, building a museum in front of the spot where the assassination took place.
Historian Dzenan Brigic said that to understand Princip’s actions in Sarajevo, it is necessary to understand the complicated weave of 19th century politics in Europe, Serbian and Bosnian tensions with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and how this was regarded by countries such as Turkey, Russia, Germany, France and Britain.
Princip was “considered a hero because he did something for Serbia that was right at the moment,” Brigic said. “Serbia had pretensions to take Bosnia and to connect Bosnia with Serbia,” the historian said, and these plans had been thwarted by the Austro-Hungarian presence in Sarajevo.
“That is why he said when he did it that ‘I have exterminated an evil,’ ” Brigic said.
The Bosnian Muslim view is different. Princip is regarded as a terrorist because he had committed a political murder.
What is beyond dispute, however, is that the centenary of “the shot heard round the world” has attracted a crush of tourists and journalists, providing a welcome jolt to one of Europe’s most feeble economies. Among the many special events planned is a historical re-enactment of the events of the morning of June 28, 2014. There has also been a slew of historical symposiums about the assassination and the slaughterhouse that it triggered. While such questions have been lost on most of the visitors, they have inevitably opened old wounds in Sarajevo about whether Princip should be remembered as a hero or a terrorist.