The Trigger (35 page)

At the end of the boulevard I came to the remains of the old town hall, where the royal party was photographed arriving that sunny Sunday morning, its steps then lined by serious-faced dignitaries, some wearing fezzes, others with top hats doffed – yet to receive the imperial dressing-down from the royal visitor so enraged by the grenade attack. A photographer was on hand to capture the departure from the same steps half an hour later, the limousine pointing this time back down the Appel Quay, the gallant count taking up his position on the running board facing the river, the plumes on the Archduke’s stulphut momentarily flattened by a gust of wind.

By the time the Bosnian War broke out in 1992 this monumental building was no longer the town hall, converted instead into the National Library, a building of such prominence it drew fire from Bosnian Serb gunners. In the summer of 1994 I had walked up its steps and taken photographs of what remained, a roofless hulk, the stone columns lining the atrium blistered by the blaze ignited in the bombardment. The striped pink, pseudo-Moorish façade that Rebecca West had derided prompted a more sympathetic response from me, its stonework smudged with soot where the fire had vented through the windows. Almost two decades on, when I visited in 2012, the building was yet to be put right, muffled by scaffolding as it underwent slow reconstruction.

It took me just minutes to walk back down the river past the same domes and minaret captured in the remarkable photograph of the Archduke’s car approaching the turn where Princip was waiting. I passed the spot where the man raised his hat at the royal party and the little boy looked on in wonder, the masonry walls lining the river bank unchanged. The sky above me was as cloudless as on the day of the assassination and, when I arrived at the turning, I rested just opposite on an old stone seat prominent at the end of the Latin Bridge. It was built by the Austro-Hungarians as part of an elaborate memorial to the Archduke, one that was pulled down shortly after the end of the First World War when the occupier was finally driven out of Bosnia. The seat had somehow been spared from destruction, its stencilled Latin legend – ‘siste viator’ or ‘stop traveller’ – allowed to fade with the years.

The riverside road was busy with trams, cars and other city traffic, but from the seat I had a clear view of the spot, just thirty feet away, where the assassination took place. Sarajevans bustled past what was, for them, just another busy street corner; a traffic warden ticketed an illegally parked car, and an elderly woman, doubled over with age, sat crumpled on the old flagstones of the bridge begging for money, quietly yet insistently.

There was little to tell passers-by of the significance of the street corner opposite me, just a modest plaque set in the wall at ground level with a message that read: ‘From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia.’ The neutrality of the wording jarred as I set off on the last leg of my trip.

I knew exactly where I was going. I started along what used to be Franz Joseph Street, the road that begins at the corner where the Moritz Schiller café once stood and is today called Green Berets Street, in honour of fighters who protected Sarajevo during the war of the 1990s. My route then took me across Ferhadija, the pedestrian avenue linking old Ottoman Sarajevo to the new city shaped by Austria–Hungary. It was a street Princip used as a schoolboy on his daily walk to the Merchants’ School. Today it bears scars still livid from the siege, memorial stones to Sarajevans killed by Bosnian Serb shells.

On I walked, nearing the end of a journey that had rumbled over the frets of history. It had taken me from Obljaj through parts so wild they are still roamed by wolves; into archives in Sarajevo missed by observers for whom Princip remained only a half-formed, incidental figure; through a land where the twentieth century’s most influential political force – nationalism – had shown its power both to unite and to divide. Through the course of the journey, and with the help of Arnie, Mile, Džile and many others, I had been able to strip away the filters of history that can obscure the outsider’s view of the Balkans, bringing into focus my mental picture of the young man whose actions led to the First World War. And the journey had gone far beyond the story of an individual, touching a region that cast more than one shadow over world history. I had passed through the same mountains where Tito wooed the West, trapping the south Slavs for decades on the communist side of the Iron Curtain, and had trudged through the killing fields of Srebrenica that brought about NATO’s coming of age and drove others to jihad.

As I walked purposefully through the back streets of Sarajevo for one last time, the dominant impression I was left with was one of distortion. Ever since those Edwardian statesmen and diplomats in the summer of 1914 accepted the misrepresentation that Princip was acting solely for Serbia when he fired the pistol, his story has been twisted. From the moment Austria–Hungary, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, wilfully misconstrued Princip’s motives in order to justify its attack on Serbia, distortion was inserted into the founding narrative of the First World War. For their own reasons of strategic ambition and hubristic self-confidence, the other Great Powers acted without challenging the misrepresentation, too focused on finger-pointing, mobilisation and retaliation to properly explore what lay at the very beginning.

Princip’s real story – his dream of all south Slavs living together – was left behind, overwhelmed by the scale of the events he had brought about. I felt that therein lay the cause of the unsettling feeling that still dogs the First World War, the unease over the senselessness of the sacrifice. My great-uncle, Captain Alyn Reginald James, had died along with millions of others in a war started after the motives of a young Balkan assassin were distorted. From this instance of original sin ran all the attendant feelings of futility that still weigh down the calamities of the Great War.

The twisting meant that the story of Princip was no longer tethered in reality, but was free-floating and bendable to the vision of any beholder. The plaque that today marks so blandly the site of the assassination replaced earlier versions, each worded according to the political authority of the day. When Austria–Hungary was still in control of Sarajevo, a plaque was installed at the site of the shooting that denounced Princip as a ‘murderer’. The next plaque went up in the 1930s when Bosnia was part of royalist Yugoslavia, a country founded for all south Slavs. This time the plaque referred to Princip as a ‘herald of freedom’, pointedly dating the shooting as having taken place on St Vitus’s Day, the day kept sacred for the Serbian heroes of the battle of Kosovo. When Nazi troops swept into Sarajevo in 1941 one of the first things they did was to tear down the plaque and present it as a birthday gift to Adolf Hitler in Berlin. A powerful photograph exists of the moment it was handed to the Führer, a man who – like Princip – was born a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and who was also driven by notions of nationalism.

After the Second World War a third plaque was erected at the street corner in Sarajevo, this time by the Titoist communist authorities. The wording on this occasion was more heroic, describing Princip’s actions as expressing ‘the people’s protest against tyranny and the age-old longing of our peoples for freedom’. So by the time the war of the 1990s broke out, Princip himself cast more than one shadow: a scapegoat for all seasons, who could be described in turn as a murderer, a liberator, a socialist hero of the people.

After twenty minutes of walking I approached the spot I was looking for, recognising the red-roofed building I had first seen that summer’s day during the siege in 1994. The chapel in the Archangels George and Gabriel cemetery had been restored in the years since the war ended, the damaged door repaired, the broken roof tiles replaced and the filth cleaned up. But the same black plaque I remembered being so unnerved by all those years ago was still there, Princip’s name etched prominently in Cyrillic: .

A member of the burial party that dumped Princip’s body in an unmarked grave at Theresienstadt came forward after the First World War. With his help the remains were exhumed, on the orders of the authorities in nascent Yugoslavia, and the identity of the skeleton confirmed because, following the amputation, the remains had no right arm. The bones were brought back to Sarajevo in 1920 for a ceremonial funeral in this graveyard. In 1939 Princip made the very last stage of his journey, dug up one final time and moved to this chapel, where he was interred alongside the remains of his friend from school, Trifko Grabež, his room-mate, Danilo Ilić, and other conspirators involved in the assassination of 28 June 1914. The bones of their role model, Bogdan Žerajić, the would-be assassin from 1910 whose example they sought to follow, were also brought here to lie among those he had inspired.

Inside the small chapel the air was still, the sound of the city outside muffled by thick, bare walls lined with fragments of old gravestones. Once again the chapel was a sombre, dusty site of quiet remembrance.

Through my journey I had heard Princip referred to by some as a hero, by others as a terrorist, yet I had come to see him as an everyman for the anger felt by millions who were downtrodden far beyond the Balkans. He was a dreamer whose short life had exposed him to the same political streams that inspired so many others fighting for freedom from unelected, reactionary structures. Empire had had its day and, like so many others at the start of the twentieth century, Princip was struggling to shape a new reality to take its place. The essential idea he stood for, the dream of liberation, was shared not just across the Balkans but across the wider world, whether by Irish nationalists struggling for Home Rule or Russian revolutionaries plotting against the Tsar, and it reached far beyond Europe through India, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. The violence to which he resorted was no different from that employed by freedom fighters the world over.

But as the events of the twentieth century showed, through the rise of extremism and fascism, the nationalism he espoused had the potential to be toxic. His goal of all south Slavs living together was ultimately not strong enough to defeat chauvinism from within his own community. The concept of nationalism carries with it a reductionist edge – the sense that in seeking to define those who belong to a nation, others who do not belong can become a threat, an enemy to be confronted. This dangerous potential was what those I had met on the trip had helped me better understand, a corruption so strong it was able to distort the utopian dream of Princip, a young Bosnian Serb who had come to trust those Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims who shared his vision of south Slavs in union.

I felt the Princip I had got to know would have been appalled by the war that first drew me to Bosnia. He was a Bosnian Serb who was brave enough to stand up to those from his own community who accused him of betrayal by aligning himself with Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. And yet I could now see why some in Sarajevo during the worst days of the siege might regard him with so much contempt that they could desecrate his grave. By that time the south-Slav nationalism he championed had failed and his message had been so distorted that he could be vilified, not just because he was a Bosnian Serb like the gunners firing their shells into the city, but because the Yugoslavia he had worked for had failed so completely to protect one of its component parts, Bosnia.

As my time in the chapel came to an end, I watched the caretaker as he carefully locked the door to Gavrilo Princip’s tomb. For me, the time had come to let him rest in peace.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps by Paul Simmons

All photographs are the author’s own, unless stated

xviii

Gavrilo Princip’s war-damaged tomb in Sarajevo, July 1994

1

Alyn Reginald James, the author’s great-uncle

2

No 62 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, on deployment to the Western Front, courtesy of University of Texas at Dallas

21

The author as a reporter during the Bosnian War, October 1993

22

Map showing minefields from the Bosnian War of the 1990s contaminating the Bugojno area two decades later, courtesy of Bosnia and Herzegovina Mine Action Centre

39

Princip’s father, Petar, and mother, Marija, outside the family homestead in Obljaj, circa 1930, courtesy of the Serbian edition of Vladimir Dedijer’s The Road to Sarajevo

40

Graffiti left by Gavrilo Princip in the garden of his home in 1909

71

Arnie Hećimović, the author’s guide, beginning the ascent of Mount Šator, leaving behind the plain of Pasić where Obljaj is located

72

Arnie Hećimović, the author’s guide, next to the first sign warning of minefields encountered on the trek, in a forest west of Kupres

99

Muzafer Latić and Kemal Tokmić fishing for trout in a mountain stream tributary of the Vrbas River

100

Memo from British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, authorising Fitzroy Maclean’s mission to Tito, leader of Yugoslavia’s partisans, July 1943, Sir Fitzroy Maclean Papers, 1827–1996, Accession # 11487, Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.

131

British band Franz Ferdinand concert in the Bosnian Serb city of Banja Luka, July 2012

132

The author staying with Drago and Marija Taraba near the town of Vitez, central Bosnia, while covering the Bosnian War as a reporter, Christmas 1993

The author visiting Drago and Marija Taraba, at the same family farm, July 2012

161

School report for Princip’s first year at the Merchants’ School in Sarajevo, 1907-08. Listed as student Number 32, his first name is shortened to Gavro, courtesy of the Sarajevo Historical Archives

162

Tourist postcards showing scenes from central Sarajevo, circa 1910

183

Princip poses with a book for a studio photograph, with his brothers Jovo and Nikola, circa 1910, courtesy of Belgrade City Museum