

Buy earrings, hear music, pray for peace on the 100th anniversary of an assassination

Sarajevo June 28, 2014 — World War 1 and continued violence after such as the world has never known were all set into motion 100 years ago today, and Sarajevo partied to mark the occasion.

Little kids posed for photos and clamored into a car just like the one that carried Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sophie to their deaths. People sported masks of the assassin, Bosnian Serb teenager Gavrilo Princip, and bought newly minted souvenirs featuring his likeness – purses, tote bags, tasteful earrings with a picture of the killer for one ear and the victim for the other. All day long people took selfies alongside life-size statues of  Franz and Sophie in a city museum. Sarajevo was packed, the mood festive, especially around the Latin Bridge, site of the crime, and the Old City Hall, where the heir to the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire heard a boring speech in his honor before getting into that death car.

Gavrilo Princip, assassin of Archduke Franz Fe...

Gavrilo Princip, assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria with the goal to unify the South Slavs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 2014, the Austrians again sent royalty into its former occupied territory.  The Viennese Philharmonic played a highly symbolic program that began with the Bosnian National Anthem, concluded with the Austrian anthem, and in between included pieces by Berg, Brahms, Schubert and Ravel full of conflict, clash, yearning and discord.

The music was meant to mirror the 100 years that came between the two visits: two World Wars, the Cold War, deadly regional conflicts set off by nationalism including the horrific Balkans wars that engulfed Bosnia and lay siege to Sarajevo.

The setting for the concert was highly inconvenient — too small, never meant as concert hall — but symbolically fitting. Bosnian Serbs did in the structure as thoroughly as they did in the Archduke during the 1990s war among Serbs, Croats and Muslims. The old municipal building, by then converted into a national library, was bombed and burned to ruins and remained so for 20 years until it opened a month ago. Electrical plugs and towel dispensers are still missing, though the soaring arches and stained glass ceiling are stunningly restored.

The concert and some 2 million Euro’s worth of lectures, exhibits, writing and ceremonies about June 28 are really about trying to make sense of the bloodshed, looking for meaning in the past, and hope it won’t happen again. Europeans plainly want for reassurance it can’t all go on as it has. Upbeat banners strung over the streets here declare “A Century of Peace after a Century of War.” On the Latin Bridge where world war began, at a quarter to midnight  (a not very subtle hint about the start of a new day)  singers and performers gathered up from across Europe sang ballads in their own language about the hell of war and joy of peace.

But happy endings are rare in the Balkans, and nothing is clear-cut.

While many were celebratory and welcoming, some Serbs boycotted the EU events and gathered among themselves to remember Princip, not so much as the liberator of Bosnia, as a hero of Serb self-determination. A televised show tonight from Visegrad, a Bosnian town on the Serbian border, could not have been more at odds with the Sarajevo production. Princip appears as the archangel Gavrilo and an Uncle Sam on stilts directs his gunfire. Then the Russian military bank sings as hanged men labeled “Serb” are lit up in the windows of a nearby building.

That shows the mixed messages coming from a divided Bosnian population that does not all want the same thing. Each side used Princip to advance their own ideals, much as the 19-year-old student may have been used by Serb intelligence which armed him and his idealistic friends in 1914.


School children in Yugoslavia, much like the kids in the Archduke’s auto, traveled to the Latin Bridge to stand on a piece of sidewalk imprinted with footsteps showing where the shooter did the deed. The steps disappeared during the siege amidst virulent anti-Serb feelings. “We want Princip’s steps back,” whined one protest sign today.


The bit of sidewalk was not the only Princip memorabilia to disappear. Aida Cerkez, the AP Bureau chief here, had me meet her by a plaque near the red carpeted entrance to the old City Hall because it’s an important symbol too. ,After WWI, the Serbian Kingdom that ruled over Bosnia put one a plaque hailing Princip as hero. The Germans ripped it down when they marched into Sarajevo in 1941, and sent it to Adolf Hitler as a birthday present. We found a photo of him with it. When WWII ended, Communist Yugoslavia put up a plaque saying Princip’s shots demonstrated the people’s protest against tyranny. The came down when Serb bombs fell on Sarajevo in 1992.Most recently Sarajevo authorities put a politically correct plaque that just says who killed whom when. Serbs are irritated because the neutral wording detracts from their heroic past.

It seems that far from moving forward, there’s still disagreement about the past.

Protestors  at the concert site complained, “We are occupied again. By EU and International Community.  By Fascism. By Nationialism. By IMF.” Journalists pondering in print what might have happened if Ferdinand lived decided mostly nothing different. In a world spoiling for a fight  any spark – real or invented – starts war.  George W. Bush demonstrated so  in Iraq.The New York Times sent decorated correspondent John Burns back to Sarajevo for the first time since the war to assess the centenary events. He was moved to site Bosnian writer Ivo Andric’s 1920 letter about why he was leaving his homeland. Bosnia is a land of hatred, Andric, wrote:  “Hatred which sets man against man and casts both alike into misery and misfortune… hatred like a cancer in an organism, consuming and eating up everything around it, only to die itself at the last…”

Historians talking about WWI at lectures this week might have been talking current events:  surging nationalism splintering once united countries, more powerful nations angling for clients among the weaker nations, annexing territory, occupying by force, dangerous disputes aimed at controlling valuable national resources.

So far, at least this century doesn’t seem more peaceable.








Rosemary Armao