Sarajevo—From 1914 to 1994
BY AWAKE! CORRESPONDENT IN SWEDEN
Eighty years have passed since those ill-fated shots on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo. The shots killed Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife, Archduchess Sophie, and then the enmity between Austria-Hungary and Serbia escalated into World War I. Of the 65 million young men who were sent out to the battlefields, some 9 million never returned. Including civilian casualties, a total of 21 million persons were killed. Some still talk about the outbreak of that war in August 1914 as the time when “the world went mad.”
ONCE again shots have been echoing throughout Sarajevo. And not only in Sarajevo but also in several of the six republics of the former federation of Yugoslavia.a The book Jugoslavien—Ett land i upplösning (Yugoslavia—A Land in Disintegration) states: “It is a civil war where neighbor fights neighbor. Long-standing grudges and suspicious attitudes have grown into hate. This hate has led to fighting and the fighting to more killing and more destruction. It is like a vicious circle or, rather, a spiral of growing hate, suspicion, and killing.”
When battles broke out in Yugoslavia in June 1991, it was not surprising that many people remembered the shots fired in Sarajevo in June 1914. Would this new conflict lead to the same devastating results? Would peace in Europe be threatened? Could the “ethnic cleansing” (deliberate killing and expulsion of a racial, political, or cultural group) program spread to other parts of the world? International pressure has been exerted to try to put an end to the fighting. But what really lies behind the troubles in the former Yugoslavia? Do recent events in Sarajevo have anything to do with the assassination in 1914?
Yugoslavia and World War I
The conflicts are not new. At the very start of this century, the Balkan Peninsula was spoken of as “the restless corner of Europe.” Jugoslavien—Ett land i upplösning says: “It is a question of the disintegration of a union where tension has been growing for a very long time. In actual fact, the conflicts were already there when the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia [Yugoslavia’s former name] was created at the end of World War I.” Some historical background will help us to see how present-day conflicts go back to World War I.
History tells us that at the time of the assassination of Francis Ferdinand in 1914, the South Slavic countries of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were provinces in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Serbia, on the other hand, was an independent kingdom and had been so since 1878, powerfully supported by Russia. Many Serbs, however, lived in the provinces dominated by Austria-Hungary, and Serbia therefore wanted Austria-Hungary to give up all occupied areas on the Balkan Peninsula. Even though conflicts existed between Croatia and Serbia, they were united in one wish: to rid themselves of the detested foreign masters. Nationalists dreamed of uniting all South Slavs into one kingdom. The Serbs were the strongest driving force in the formation of such an independent state.
At that time the reigning emperor, Francis Joseph, was 84 years old. Soon Archduke Francis Ferdinand was to become the new emperor. The Serbian nationalists saw Francis Ferdinand as an obstacle to their realizing the dream of a South Slavic kingdom.
Some young students in Serbia were obsessed with the idea of a free South Slavic state and were willing to die for their cause. Several youths were chosen to carry out an assassination of the Archduke. They were given weapons and trained by a secret Serbian nationalist group called the Black Hand. Two of these youths made an assassination attempt, and one of them succeeded. His name was Gavrilo Princip. He was 19 years old.
This assassination served the intended purpose of the perpetrators. When the first world war was over, the monarchy of Austria-Hungary had been dissolved, and Serbia could take the lead in uniting the Slavs to form a kingdom. In 1918 that kingdom came to be known as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The name was changed to Yugoslavia in 1929. However, when the different groups no longer needed to unite in their common enmity toward Austria-Hungary, it became evident that there were differences among the groups themselves. There are almost 20 different population groups, four official languages and several lesser ones, two different alphabets (Roman and Cyrillic), and three major religions—Catholic, Muslim, and Serbian Orthodox. Religion continues to be a major divisive factor. There were, in other words, many long-standing divisive factors in the new State.
Yugoslavia and World War II
During World War II, Germany invaded Yugoslavia, and, according to the book The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, “more than 200,000 people, mostly Orthodox Serbs, were systematically murdered” by Catholic Croatians who were cooperating with the Nazis. However, Croatian Josip Tito, together with his Communist partisans and in cooperation with the British and the Americans, was able to drive back the Germans. When the war was over, he stood out as the obvious leader of the country and proceeded to govern it with an iron hand. He was an independent man. Not even Stalin could coerce him into bringing Yugoslavia into line with the rest of the Communist bloc.
Many from the former Yugoslavia have said: ‘If it hadn’t been for Tito, the union would have fallen apart much earlier. He alone had the willpower and the necessary authority to hold it together.’ This has proved true. It was after Tito’s death in 1980 that conflicts once again flared up, intensifying until civil war broke out in 1991.
The Bullets That Changed the World
In his book Thunder at Twilight—Vienna 1913/1914, author Frederic Morton wrote about the murder of Francis Ferdinand: “The bullet that tore into his jugular sounded the initial shot in the most devastating slaughter mankind had known so far. It set off the dynamics leading to World War II. . . . Many of the threads of the scene all around us were first spun along the Danube in the year and a half preceding the thrust of that pistol at the Archduke’s head.”—Italics ours.
The recent events in the former Yugoslavia are not the only “threads of the scene all around us” that can be traced back to 1914. Historian Edmond Taylor expresses something that many historians agree on: “The outbreak of World War I ushered in a twentieth-century ‘Time of Troubles’ . . . Directly or indirectly all the convulsions of the last half century stem back to 1914.”
Efforts have been made to explain why the shots in Sarajevo had such dire consequences. How could two shots from a “schoolboy” set the whole world afire and usher in a period of violence, confusion, and disillusionment that has continued right down to our day?
Attempts at Explaining 1914
In his book Thunder at Twilight—Vienna 1913/1914, the author endeavors to explain what happened by pointing to what he calls “the new power” that influenced the nations in 1914. This “power,” he says, was really several factors all working together. The few sober-minded voices that were raised were drowned in the constantly growing cry for war. The mobilization of one country accelerated the mobilization of all the others. Authority was transferred from the ruling class to the generals. Many people also saw in the war a welcome opportunity to experience a “grand national adventure” and thereby get away from the dreariness of everyday life. Later, an official wrote: “Like men longing for a thunderstorm to relieve them of the summer’s sultriness, so the generation of 1914 believed in the relief that war might bring.” German author Hermann Hesse said that it would do a lot of people good to be jolted out of “a dull capitalistic peace.” The expression that war is “a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope” has been attributed to the German Nobel-prize-winning author Thomas Mann. Even Winston Churchill, intoxicated by the thought of war, wrote: “War preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity.”
It was because of this “new power” that lively scenes were enacted throughout Europe as the soldiers marched out to war. Green twigs were fastened to their caps, roses were hung in garlands around the canons, orchestras played, housewives waved with handkerchiefs from their windows, and joyful children ran alongside the soldiers. It was as if people were celebrating and cheering the arrival of the war. World war came disguised as a festival.
This is a résumé of some of what Morton, quoted earlier, called the “new power” that is supposed to help us to understand the cause of the first world war. But where did this “power” come from? Historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that the industrial society had given man new powers and new pressures. In fact, “society . . . was . . . bursting with new tensions and accumulated energies.” Stefan Zweig, a young intellectual from Vienna at that time, wrote: “I cannot explain it otherwise than by this surplus force, a tragic consequence of the internal dynamism that had accumulated in forty years of peace and now sought violent release.” The expression “I cannot explain it otherwise” suggests that he himself finds it hard to explain. In the foreword to his book Thunder at Twilight, Morton writes: “Why did that happen just then and just there? And how? . . . Is there a pattern to the maze?”
Yes, many who endeavor to explain 1914 feel that the deep-lying reasons are really not easy to understand. Why was the war not restricted to those parties directly involved? Why did it escalate into a world war? Why was it so drawn out and devastating? What really was this strange power that got a grip on humankind in the autumn of 1914? Our next article, page 10, will discuss the Biblical answer to these questions.
[Footnotes]
a Yugoslavia means “Land of the South Slavs.” The republics are Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
[Blurb on page 6]
“Like men longing for a thunderstorm to relieve them of the summer’s sultriness, so the generation of 1914 believed in the relief that war might bring.”—Ernest U. Cormons, Austrian diplomat
[Box/Pictures on page 8, 9]
1914
The Bible prophesied the disastrous events that have occurred since 1914
“Another came forth, a fiery-colored horse; and to the one seated upon it there was granted to take peace away from the earth so that they should slaughter one another; and a great sword was given him. And when he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say: ‘Come!’ And I saw, and, look! a black horse; and the one seated upon it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard a voice as if in the midst of the four living creatures say: ‘A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not harm the olive oil and the wine.’ And when he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say: ‘Come!’ And I saw, and, look! a pale horse; and the one seated upon it had the name Death. And Hades was closely following him. And authority was given them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with a long sword and with food shortage and with deadly plague and by the wild beasts of the earth.”—Revelation 6:4-8 (See also Luke 21:10-24; 2 Timothy 3:1-5.)
“The Great War of 1914-18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours. In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs.”—The foreword to The Proud Tower, by Barbara W. Tuchman.
“The four years that followed [1914] were, as Graham Wallas wrote, ‘four years of the most intense and heroic effort the human race has ever made.’ When the effort was over, illusions and enthusiasms possible up to 1914 slowly sank beneath a sea of massive disillusionment. For the price it had paid, humanity’s major gain was a painful view of its own limitations.”—The afterword in the same work.
[Credit Lines]
The Bettmann Archive
The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London
National Archives of Canada, P.A. 40136
[Map on page 7]
(For fully formatted text, see publication)
Europe as It Was—August 1914
1. Great Britain and Ireland 2. France 3. Spain 4. German Empire 5. Switzerland 6. Italy 7. Russia 8. Austria-Hungary 9. Romania 10. Bulgaria 11. Serbia 12. Montenegro 13. Albania 14. Greece
[Picture on page 5]
Gavrilo Princip
[Picture on page 6]
Germans receiving flowers on their way to war
[Credit Line]
The Bettmann Archive
[Picture Credit Line on page 3]
Culver Pictures