Please write to the Toronto Star [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jul. 31, 2005. 08:08 AM http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Arti cle_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1122673811017&DPL=JvsODSH7A w0u%2bwoRO%2bYKDSblFxAk%2bwoVO%2bYODSbhFxAg%2bwkRO%2bUPDSXiFxMh%2bwkZO%2bUCD STnFxIm%2bwgTO%2bQIDSPnFxUm%2bw8TO%2bMIDSPjFxUi%2bw8XO%2bMMDSPvFxUu%2bw4RO%2 bIIDSLhOw%3d%3d&tacodalogin=yes Jul. 31, 2005. 08:08 AM TIME LIFE PICTURES Gavrilo Princip in jail awaiting his trial: not a weakling. Following the assassin In 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot an archduke and started a war Nearly 100 years later, his legacy is still disputed in his troubled homeland TONY FABIJANCIC SPECIAL TO THE STAR On the morning of June 28, 1914, a 19-year-old Serb from a village in northwestern Bosnia-Herzegovina stood waiting on a street corner in Sarajevo, intent on striking a decisive blow against the Habsburg Empire. Armed with a pistol, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The assassination was the catalyst for World War I. Princip's infamy, in the world's opinion, is incontrovertible. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, however, he has always been a more complex figure. Since 1914, he has been regarded as an anti-Austrian revolutionary hero, a naive adolescent with noble ideals, a martyr for Yugoslav nationalism, a Serb nationalist, and a Serb terrorist. Perhaps most importantly, Princip has become a lightning rod for ethnic tensions that have surrounded Serb irredentist hopes since the beginning of the 20th century, tensions that lie unresolved, restive. The nationalist hopes of Serbs were at the heart of the war that devastated the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and set Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) at each other's throats. In 1990, Serbs of the Krajina district set up roadblocks to protest what they deemed to be their increasingly precarious position in a nationalist Croatia. Mockingly dubbed the "log revolution" by Croats, this event in Knin began a process of secession that resulted in the founding of a self-proclaimed Serbian statelet within Croatia, the Serbian Republic of Krajina. Aided by the Milosevic regime in Serbia proper, which controlled the Yugoslav National Army and supported the notion of a greater Serbia, the Krajina Serbs killed and drove out thousands of Croats. They held onto the Krajina until 1995, when the Croatian army reclaimed it. The war brought about the greatest slaughter in Europe since World War II. All three sides committed atrocities, the most notorious being the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosniaks at the hands of Serbs. The Dayton Accord in 1995 brought an end to the war. Bosnia-Herzegovina is currently under the control of EUFOR, an international military force under the auspices of the United Nations. It was in the course of these events that Princip's identity hardened into that of a Serb terrorist (at least for Croats and Muslims). In search of a more truthful image of Gavrilo Princip, I travelled this summer from his birthplace to Sarajevo, site of the assassination. The ghost of Princip and the Bosnia-Herzegovina of 1914, I hoped, would not only emerge more clearly from my journey across the country but would also be a lens through which relationships between Bosnians today could be seen. DAY ONE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- I drive south from Croatia's capital, Zagreb, and into the Krajina, populated mainly by Serbs since the 16th century when they served the Austrians as border guards against the Turks. The road between Karlovac and the Bosnian border at Maljevac winds through hilly farming country now virtually abandoned. Almost every house has been destroyed or damaged. This lonely place is the legacy of the Krajina Serbs. To my surprise, on the Bosnian side there is life new houses and new businesses. In Velika Kladusa, hundreds of school kids out for lunch crowd the streets. A woman in spandex leotards and black stilettos sways her pink haunches in front of me. Coming the other way, like a contrary position in an argument, are two teenage girls in black hijabs. >From the speaker on the white minaret of the mosque floats the hodja's call to prayer. A gas attendant at a garage outside town, Sejat Mohammedabdic, says, "Those girls in hijabs probably belonged to one of the sects that showed up after the war. Mostly outsiders, from other Muslim states." Before the war, Bosniaks were not, by and large, orthodox; they were Slavs first. The Serb media in the 1990s, according to Mohammedabdic, a Muslim, produced this new fundamentalism by spreading propaganda about the dangers of Muslim extremism in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This had the ironic effect of intensifying rather than eradicating Muslim fundamentalism. Later, in Caplinja, when I recounted the story to a Croat woman, she would tell me she suspects the girls were being paid a monthly stipend to wear hijabs. I drive on, along the turquoise Una River, through the city of Bihac, the capital of the so-called Bihac pocket where internecine dissension between Muslims turned into outright war, and into the Lipo valley. This long, broad valley, bordered by the low wooded spurs of the Dinaric Alps, which thunder southwards to Albania, gives me a foretaste of Gavrilo Princip's birthplace. There's space here, forlorn, empty houses backed up against the hills, and abundant pastureland. Off the main road, at the end of a dusty trail past an abandoned farmhouse, I meet a young Croat shepherd tending his flock. Damir Persen is 18, has a wide, vaguely Russian-looking face with high cheekbones, and wears a greasy ski jacket and rubber boots (even though it is afternoon and a sunny 25C). I ask him if he gets any company out here. He smiles a little ruefully and answers, "No, just the company of wolves. I saw two yesterday morning. They came out of the mountains." "I hope you have a gun." "My gun is my best friend," he laughs. Persen tells me that the empty and destroyed houses in Lipo belonged to Serbs. None remain here, except for two old women who live alone in the woods nearby. Perhaps they are the only visitors to the Serb cemetery nowadays. Many of the expensive, grey, granite headstones are engraved with portraits and names of the dead (in Cyrillic). All died before 1995, when the Croats retook the Krajina. As I listen to the receding bells of Persen's sheep, I reflect on the special character of death here; with no one left to mourn, this tangible place of memory has lost meaning. In Lipo, the final fate of the dead to be forgotten by the living is already taking place. DAY TWO ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- The hamlet of Gornji Obljaj lies on the northern side of a long, wide valley called Grahovo Polje. When I enter Grahovo from the northwest, I see the triangular shape of Mt. Dinara in the distance. Gavrilo Princip must have gazed at this mountain countless times during the first 13 years of his life and imagined what lay beyond (before he left for Sarajevo to study in the Merchant's School). As in Lipo, there's space and soil to sustain life. But a hard and meagre life it must have been. The Princips didn't own enough land to survive year round on farming, and Gavrilo's father, Petar, had to work other jobs (including that of mailman) to support his family. Poverty, exacerbated by profligate taxes on Christian kmets (serfs), which continued even after the demise of the Turkish empire in the Balkans, was an important factor in Princip's decision to assassinate Ferdinand. At his trial he stated, "The people have been impoverished; they are treated like cattle. I am the son of a kmet, and I know what life is like in the villages." And yet Princip was an outsider among peasants, an intellectual and lover of books who dreamed of going to school as he tended his cows. When I drive into Gornji Obljaj, past a brown horse that wheels powerfully on its tether, the road narrows into an alley between very old, mostly destroyed stone houses. When I step out of the car, the smell of urine greets me. The first person I meet, a tall man around 75 years of age with dark, droopy eyes and a U.N. ball cap aslant his head, turns out to be Mihajlo Princip, the very last Princip in the entire area, he tells me, though he doesn't say what the relationship is. "This," he says with an impressive wave of his hand, "is Gavrilo Princip's house." I'm looking at a gutted, roofless house, made of clean-cut white stone blocks with a low door and two windows. "This house was burned in the last war. My own place was destroyed. I almost didn't make it to Banja Luka. My horse got me there. He saved my life." He's referring to the animal I saw earlier. "It's the only horse in the entire area," he adds proudly. Of his three sons, only one has returned to Gornji Obljaj since 1995. The other two are on the move, with no fixed address, somewhere in Serbia. For anyone familiar with the former Yugoslavia, their uncertain whereabouts is code for criminal behaviour during the war. It's possible his sons haven't returned because they are wanted. Although Mihajlo generously offers me a glass of travarica (herb brandy) on the concrete deck of his partially reconstructed house, and while he says the war was a disaster ordinary people didn't want, I get the impression he's holding back on his real thoughts. He knows from my name and my accent that I'm a Croat, so he is perhaps just being polite. We are both "ordinary people," so why risk the amicability of our brief relationship? After leaving him, I take a room in a destroyed town nearby called Bosansko Grahovo. In the middle of the night, a detail I recall about Princip's house disturbs my sleep. According to Princip's school friend and biographer, Bozidar Tomic, the house had no windows at all. The only source of light other than the door was a gap in the ceiling where smoke from the open fire escaped. The house I saw couldn't be Princip's. It's possible, I realize then, for Mihajlo Princip both to believe his words and to be absolutely wrong at the same time. If one can encapsulate Bosnians' interpretations of their own history, it might lie exactly in this duality of perfect self-assurance and total error. Later, when I return to Zagreb, I come across a book that explains the mystery. The stone shell I saw beside Mihajlo Princip's house is likely the remnant of a reconstructed building, a museum, that was built upon the original, itself destroyed by the Croats, but this time in World War II. DAY THREE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- The next morning, I drive south into Herzegovina, a mainly Croat-populated region of the country. The Croat I meet at the cemetery near Livno is scything his family plot. A squat man with grey hair plastered across his sweaty forehead, Ivan Dulundjiak energetically explains how in 1995 Croatian units of the Bosnia army came in from the east and the Croatian army came from the west and drove the militant Serbs out. "They started this business, so they had it coming," he says. "What about the Serb people themselves?" I ask. "If the good ones come back, no problem. The most important thing is for them not to hate us." Dulundjiak tells me about his trips as a young man across the Velebit Mountains to the Dalmatian coast in the 1950s, where he sought work cutting hay. This memory reminds me of Petar Princip a half century earlier, forced to eke out a living. While the remnants of feudalism were gone by the time of Tito's rule (the Communist dictator who led Yugoslavia from 1945 to his death in 1980), life in this part of the world has always been unforgiving. Dulundjiak's memory also reminds me of the peripatetic tradition in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Princip's generation, for example, hiked vast distances in search of work and education. Many travelled to Serbia to join the Serb irregular forces in the Turkish Wars. These travels took their toll; long days, poor meals and nights outdoors in variable weather cost many their health. Princip himself may have contracted tuberculosis before his imprisonment in Bohemia's Terezin (Theresienstadt) prison, where he died of the disease in 1918. After having driven numerous lonely stretches over waves of mountains and barren limestone-pocked hills, I better appreciate the endurance and tenacity of these wanderers. When I get on the road through Ljubuski and Caplinja, I feel as though I've returned to civilization. Houses on both sides of the road are well-tended, with large gardens, courtyards covered by grapes, and fruit stands. The city of Caplinja, though, feels dead. The afternoon heat off the streets and Soviet-style block apartments is suffocating. The saleswoman in a boutique feels that her life has been suffocated, too. This isn't just because the economy has gone to hell, but because she hates the new Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her nation is Croatia. "When Croatia plays football, I watch the game. When Bosnia plays, I couldn't care less. "Look," she goes on, "I'm not interested much in politics, but I can tell you that my granddad was Ustasha, my dad was Ustasha, and I'm Ustasha. We need an Ustasha army now, isn't that right?" She smiles, a pretty smile, trying to draw me in. The Ustasha were the Croatian fascists who, during World War II, headed a brutal Nazi puppet dictatorship that slaughtered opponents of their ethno-nationalist regime (mainly Serbs). This woman's extremism resulted in some of the worst fighting in the most recent war, but this time between Croats and Muslims around Mostar. Many Croats in Herzegovina wanted to rid the region of Muslims, to establish a mini state (like the Serbs in the Krajina) and ultimately to join Croatia. Named for its old Turkish bridge (stari most), Mostar was decimated by the war. The last time I was there, in 1999, the bridge had been destroyed by Croatian forces and lay in pieces on the riverbank. Today, a new stone bridge stands in its place. There is a long tradition of diving and jumping from the Mostar bridge into the turquoise Neretva River. A young Muslim in a black Speedo is poised to leap into the water 20 metres below. When I try to snap a picture, he stops me. "The tradition here is that you pay." I reach into my pocket and fish out a Bosnian converted mark (the post-war currency, worth around 90 cents). He waves it away and replies, "20 euros for a picture." So much foreign money has been pumped into Mostar that he can be forgiven for expecting more. I take a photo of him plummeting through the air. I walk back through the cobblestoned Turkish quarter, past the shops that sell the usual Turkish pots, but also pepper grinders welded out of old shells, and T-shirts with Tito's image. At the Koski Mehmed Pasha mosque, the guide takes me and a German couple on a tour. In answer to the couple's question, the guide says life in Mostar between ordinary people was always good, and still is. "I'm a Muslim, my wife is a Croat. We have three children. She helps here selling items to visitors, and I go to Medjugorje [a Catholic pilgrim site] to help her." But in private he paints a different picture. After our visit to a Turkish house, and once the Germans leave, he whispers to me in the street, looking left and right as people go by. "I tell visitors such things so they leave with a good impression of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But really relations between people here are not so good. How can they be good, I ask you? Everyone lost someone in the war, and they know which side did it. It would be better if we could live as we did in Yugoslavia. But it will take many years before life returns to what it was." In the garden of the mosque, the Muslim caretaker joins us for a talk about Bosnian history. When I ask him what springs to mind when he thinks of Gavrilo Princip, he pauses for a second, then answers categorically, "Bin Laden!" DAY FOUR ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- After a night on the Croatian coast, I drive to Sarajevo through central Bosnia-Herzegovina. This is the same route young Princip followed on the way to the Merchant's School. It took three days on horseback across karst-limestone mountains and then forested hills for him and his father to arrive in Bugojno, where they took the train the rest of the way. It was a journey Petar Princip probably wished his son had never taken, because no sooner was the boy in Sarajevo than he roomed with a young revolutionary named Danilo Ilic, who introduced him to anarchist literature. When I arrive in Sarajevo, I'm amazed by the fresh look of the city. I come to the narrow avenue down which Ferdinand drove that fateful morning (formerly called the Appel Quay) and where he narrowly escaped a percussion bomb thrown by a co-conspirator of Princip's, Nedeljko Cabrinovic. After that failed assassination attempt, Ferdinand decided to drive at high speed back down the Appel Quay in order to visit wounded members of his entourage at the hospital. But no one informed the driver of the change in plan, and he took a wrong turn into Sarajevo's warren of streets. The governor of Bosnia, riding with the Archduke, recognized the wrong turn and ordered the drivers to reverse, which they did, slowly and directly in front of a surprised Gavrilo Princip. Princip stepped forward with a Browning pistol and killed the Archduke and his wife, Sophia. The site of the assassination is still marked by a plaque, but the more partisan fresco of stylized figures, vaguely communist in appearance, with the words Mlada Bosna ("Young Bosnia," a term created after the fact to describe the revolutionaries of Princip's generation) engraved in Cyrillic, has been removed. This is a clear sign that some Sarajevans now equate the young anti-Habsburg revolutionaries with the Serb nationalists who bombed the city for three years. Similarly, in 1914, many Croats and Muslims misconstrued Princip's pan-Yugoslav motivations for Serb nationalism and went through the streets looting and burning Serb property. What strikes me most about this corner is how little room there is, how easy it was physically for Princip to step off this sidewalk and to shoot Ferdinand in his open car. The intimacy of the moment must have affected Princip, because he hesitated at the last second when he saw the white hat of the Archduke's wife. But he was determined to prove himself after having been rejected by the Serb guerrillas in the Turkish wars because of his small build. At the interrogation shortly after the assassination, he said, "Wherever I went, people took me for a weakling indeed, for a man who would be completely ruined by immoderate study of literature. And I pretended that I was a weak person, even though I was not." DAY FIVE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- There is a gathering at Sarajevo's Lav Cemetery on June 28 to commemorate the young Bosnian conspirators of 1914, some of whom are buried in a mausoleum. An older Serb I talk to, who is in a black suit and grey felt fedora, assures me that Princip's generation of young Bosnians was the best the country ever saw. "They believed in something, had ideals. They wanted a Yugoslavia free of the Austrians. Women should be liberated, they thought." He thought for a moment, and went on. "The Milosevic regime and this idea of a greater Serbia was a bad imitation." "Not all Serbs or all Bosnians would agree with you," I say. "So let them disagree. I'm just saying that Princip's generation had honour." Gavrilo Princip, I decide, is one of many subjects about which Bosnians will always disagree. Although the historical specifics of his life have been forgotten by most, he lives on as an abstraction that suits various interests, determined by ethnicity. I leave Sarajevo, and as I drive southward to Croatia, I speculate about the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina. More pessimistic than when I arrived, I suspect that there will be trouble should the U.N. pull out. While many Bosnians speak of multi-ethnic harmony between ordinary people, it is clear to me that ages-old animosities continue. A Croat I met captured the reality of social relations in this country when he said that the Muslim he works with will never know that he hates Muslims, that he will never insult him to his face because they have to work together. This superficial politeness, which hides deeper feelings of mistrust and even hatred, often passionate and irrational, has been part of Bosnian life for centuries. When I reach the Adriatic coast, I dive into the pristine water and feel as though I'm washing something off. Tony Fabijancic is the author of Croatia: Travels in Undiscovered Country (University of Alberta Press, 2003), and an associate professor of English at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland. He travelled to Bosnia-Herzegovina earlier this summer. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Serbian News Network - SNN [email protected] http://www.antic.org/
