A Century Later the Ghosts of Sarajevo Live On

One hundred years ago today the spark that ignited World War I was lighted when Gavrilo Princip fired the shots that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo.  Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire which at the time included far flung and very different ethnic and religious groups including parts of the Balkans which have been a powder keg for wars and sectarian violence over the centuries.  I am currently reading a book on Franz Ferdinand and his wife and the irony is that had he lived, Franz Ferdinand might have brought the reforms that Austria Hungry desperately needed but which his elderly, out of touch uncle, Emperor Franz Josef, refused to permit.  The other irony is that Sophie, who ended up dying with her husband, had been treated like dirt by much of the Court in Vienna for not being "sufficiently royal" to marry a Hapsburg even though she was from the aristocracy and had relatives in other royal houses in Europe.  Their murder was prompted in some ways by Serbian nationalism, but also involved was that always perverse factor: religion.  The empire included Catholics, Orthodox and Muslim citizens and, as seems always to be true of religion, hate and animosity were the results.  (Dislosure: my father's parents came to America from Austria-Hungry in 1913) A piece in the New York Times looks at the still smoldering divisions.  Here are excerpts:

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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  . . .

When shells and mortars were falling in the 1990s and Serb artillery batteries were targeting bread and water lines, hospitals and schools

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. 

You get the drift: Orthodox versus Catholics and Muslims.  Hate, murder, violence and atrocities spurred on by religion.  Religion is one of the foulest forces in the world.  As for the "narrow minded, sectarian politicians," here in Virginia the phrase could describe the Virginia GOP.   Some defend religion and claim it is a force of good, but if one reviews history, its main fruits are wars, death and violence.  Trying to pretend otherwise doesn't change the true facts.