DAY 104 - THE STRANGE CASE OF GAVRILO PRINCIP

2^nd August, 2011

Sarajevo

Total: 955.2 miles–1,843,491 step

“While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.” Stephen Covey

Who was Gavrilo Pricip? Well without him, the world might never have cause to remember; Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Charles De Gaulle. Almost certainly, he is the most significant figure in the history of the twentieth century. Bold claims; well on a rainy day in Sarajevo, grounded by a malfunctioning wireless antennae on my laptop, I set off to find out more about this man:

Gavrilo Pricip was born into an extremely poor family in Bosnia in 1894. His family was so poor that they could not afford to look after Gavrilo and sent him to live with a relative in Zagreb. A sickly child, at the age of 18 he moved to Belgrade, but failed an entrance exam for the First Belgrade Gymnasium. With the start of the First Balkan War in 1912, he tried to join Serbian guerrilla forces who were fighting for independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but was rejected for being “too small and too weak”. Undeterred, he joined a secret society called ‘Black Hand’, which undertook to carry out the most dangerous and daring missions to secure independence for the South Slavic peoples.

On the 28^th June, 1914, he got his chance: he was part of a six man team sent to Sarajevo to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was visiting the city to open a hospital. The six members of the team were spaced at different sections of the possible route—the first assassin threw a grenade at the Archduke’s car, but the ten second fuse meant it actually exploded under a following car. The last assassin was Pricip who hearing of the failed grenade attack, was seeking to make an escape when the driver of the Archduke’s car took a wrong turn by the Latin Bridge and stopped the car directly in front of Pricip who produced a pistol and fired two shots into the car, the first killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the second, his wife, Countess Sophie.

Now this is where it gets complicated, so stick with me: Clearly the Austro-Hungarians were angry and out for revenge, even though the Archduke was not the head of state, but a nephew of the Emperor Franz Josef, indeed a nephew whom the Emperor had cut off from the royal family because he had married a ‘mere’ countess. Anyway, The Austro-Hungarians were out to use the assassination to expand their empire and set Serbia in their sights. They carried out a quick investigation and established that Pricip was in fact a Serb nationalist, whereas he was actually a Bosnian who had been raised in Croatia—confused? You will be. So were the great powers, who sought to tell the Austro-Hungarians to ‘calm down’. They didn’t. They presented Serbia with a list of demands, most of which, under pressure from Great Britain, Germany and France, they agreed to, but not all. Dissatisfied by the Serb response, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on the Serbs.

This presented a problem for the rest of Europe because the Germans, Italians and Ottoman Empire had a pact, a bit like NATO, where an attack on one was deemed an attack on all. Okay? Well not really, because the Serbs had a pact too. Who with? The Russians. So? Well you see the Russians had a pact also. Who with? France. Anyone else? Err, Great Britain. Oh #$@*! Well at least it was restricted to Europe? Well not quite, you see Britain had a pact. With the Americans? No, with the Japanese. The Japanese! Yes.  And so:

• June 28, 1914: assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.
• July 28: Austria-Hungary, declares war on Serbia.
• August 1: Germany declares war against Russia.
• August 4: Britain declares war on Germany.
• August 6: Austria-Hungary declares war on Russia.
• August 23: Japan declares war on Germany.

It’s not over yet: In 1917 the United States was having its neutrality tested by repeated attacks by German submarines on American merchant vessels carrying goods across the Atlantic, but it was not until the Germans tried to make an alliance with Mexico, yes Mexico, in which the Germans would give the Mexicans substantial cash to help them reclaim the territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, that American patience finally broke and they declared war on Germany.

Okay, so we now have all out war resulting directly in the deaths of 38 million military forces; it couldn’t get any worse. Could it? Well with the entry of the Ottoman Turks onto the side of the Austro-Hungarians and Germans in 1914, the Russians had their major trade route through the Black Sea and the Bosporus blocked and the Russian economy waging a war against Germany in the north and unable to trade and bring in supplies through the south, was facing and economic and social meltdown. The Russians had lost five million men on the Eastern Front. Sensing the growing dissatisfaction with the war and the leadership of Tsar Nicholas, the Germans funded revolutionary propaganda. The result was the February and October Revolutions of 1917, which saw the rise to power of Vladimir Lenin and months later, Russia was plunged to a bloody civil war between the Bolsheviks, the Red Army and the White Russian counter-revolutionaries, who were supported by Britain, America, Japan and France . . . and millions more lost their lives.

Good news: The Germans surrender on 11 November, 1918 and there followed six months of peace negotiations in Paris, resulting in the Treaty of Versailles,  which was signed on June 28, 1919—five years to the day since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  The victorious allied powers were determined that Germany, in particular, should pay a heavy price for the war.  They were required to make war reparations, which were so enormous, the German government didn’t make its final repayment until October, 2010—last year! At the time, it was viewed by many that the territorial concessions and financial payments were so severe, that they would not only bankrupt Germany, they would humiliate it. Needless to say Germany played no part in the negotiations of the treaty and yet, was left with no alternative but to implement its harsh provisions.

In his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, economist John Maynard Keynes referred to the Treaty of Versailles as a “Carthaginian peace”, a misguided attempt to destroy Germany on behalf of French revanchism, rather than to follow the fairer principles for a lasting peace set out in President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which Germany had accepted at the armistice. He stated: “I believe that the campaign for securing out of Germany the general costs of the war was one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible.” He believed the sums being asked of Germany in reparations, were many times more than it was possible for Germany to pay, and that these would produce drastic instability. Keynes had been the principal representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference. On this point he was proved right.

The ‘injustice’ and ‘national humiliation’ of the Treaty of Versailles, became the principle rallying point for the Nazi propaganda along with the pledge to restore ‘national pride’. As the new German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, began to try and extract Germany from the provisions of the Treaty, initially the attitude of Britain and France was that his rise could be useful in providing a barrier against the expansionist Soviet Communism. So the policy of Appeasement entered the dictionary and when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, in breach of the Munich Agreement, the British prime minister described it famously as “..a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” But he did enter into a pact with Poland. Guess where Hitler invaded next, you guessed, and so Britain declared war on Germany.

By the end of that war, another 60 million people had died and  a new weapon had been discovered and used—the nuclear bomb. The stage was set, the dividing lines in place and the weapons chosen for the Third World War—a nuclear war—which could have finished off the rest of us—Einstein declared: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” But we pulled back from that in the nick of time—didn’t we?

Meanwhile, let’s go back to a Sarajevo court room and conclude the story of Gavrilo Pricip: following the assassination he tried to commit suicide, but was wrestled to the ground and severely beaten by police and passers-by. However, he and his conspirators were not killed and instead stood trial. At their trial in December, 1914, despite being aware at that point of the horrific results of their actions being acted out in the killing fields of northern France, because Pricip was twenty seven days short of his twentieth birthday when the crime was committed, he could not receive the death penalty for his crimes and instead was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He died in prison in April 1918, before the first world war had ended and long before the full consequences of his actions had become known.

At the end of my afternoon of museum visiting and book browsing about this young man, a few things came to light which I share:

The first is walking where Pricip walked and standing where he stood, I began to see a terrified and frightened young man who wasn’t motivated by political objectives of an independent homeland, or hatred for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but from a unsatisfied desire to be loved after a lifetime of being rejected. How the world might have been different if his parents had cared for him; if he had been accepted for a place in college. Easy in hindsight I know.

The second, we are responsible for our actions and the consequences of those actions, but Pricip’s actions were to kill two innocent people, it was others who squared up for the fight and issued the declarations of war in a mad unleashing of national ‘blood feuds’. I have often wondered why it is that all our heroes are military men at heart and not diplomats, statesmen and politicians. Perhaps it is because we have always deployed our greatest resources and best people in the conduct of war, rather than in its prevention. I have always been impressed by Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary in 1914, not just because he is a great son of Northumberland or that his family gave their name to a particularly fine blend of tea, but because of his determined efforts, summits, conferences and secret meetings, all at great personal risk aimed at pulling the Great Powers (including his own), back from the brink of Armageddon and who following the British declaration of war famously lamented from the window of the Foreign Office: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.” Of course, in this final respect he was wrong and that leads me to my final point.

You see, if it is possible for one weak young man fuelled with the wrong motives and prepared to sacrifice his (and sadly this is a major bloke/testosterone problem) life to unleash, fear, hate and death to try and grab some fleeting respect, then scientifically, the equal and opposite must also be true: and a man or women, any man or women, young or old, weak or strong, but filled with the right motives and prepared to give their lives in the service of others, can spread life, love and hope to a world desperately in need, and through it, know true and lasting significance. The choice is ours.