100 years ago last Saturday, a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, fired shots that were heard around the world, the reverberations of which are still being felt today. By assassinating the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, in Sarajevo, Mr Princip set fire to the tinderbox that was the Balkans and set in train the events that led to Europe’s Great Powers declaring war on each other and four years of carnage.
This year, the centenary of the start of World War I, is accordingly one of commemoration and reflection on the legacy of the Great War, mainly in Europe it has to be said. The thrust of most commemorative events is principally to broaden people’s understanding of the war, to pay tribute to those who died and to extol the virtues of peace. Inevitably, the politicians will also be involved.
Last Thursday, 28 European Union leaders gathered in Ypres, Belgium, to mark the anniversary. They and all who look back would do well to consider that, after the end of the war in 1918, it was felt that this was the war to end all wars, such was the scale of the slaughter, unprecedented in the history of warfare and of humankind. But violence is, regrettably, an inherent part of the human condition and the threat of conflict, an inescapable reality confronting most nation states at one time or another in their existence.
Today, 100 years later, Europe, apart from the crisis in Ukraine, is at peace. But that peace is still fragile in the Balkans, in part a legacy of the unfinished business of the First World War and the subsequent turmoil and instability of World War II, the Cold War and the savage, internecine wars of the 1990s arising from the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
Indeed, the fledgling nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia are still trying to come to terms with their collective and individual existential challenges, going back to the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through the post-WWI Kingdom and the post-WWII communist state of Yugoslavia held together by Josip Broz Tito, and more recently, the horrors and the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s that gave rise to the redrawing of the map of the region.
Perhaps nothing illustrates better the ongoing divisions and tensions in the Balkans so much as the erection of a statue to Gavrilo Princip by Serbs in eastern Sarajevo who regard Mr Princip as a national hero for his opposition to Austro-Hungarian rule. But Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, is itself a divided city in an ethnically diverse and divided country, and the Bosniak Muslims and Catholic Croats who also make up Sarajevo’s population prefer to see Mr Princip as a terrorist.
Worse, memories are still raw regarding the atrocities committed by Bosnian Serbs, under Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, encouraged by Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia – all three, war criminals – against Bosnian Muslims in Sarajevo and Srebrenica. It will take time to heal these wounds but 100 years may not be enough.
The lessons of history are often painful and the story of the Balkans is a prime example of this. Now, even 100 years later, the wounds opened by extremism, hatred and violence still run deep.
If there is a lesson here for countries far removed from this troubled part of the world, it is to harbour a deep suspicion of the motives of extremists and of politicians who preach divisiveness, to bear in mind that violence not only begets violence but more often than not has a ripple effect of unintended consequences – with the suffering and bitter recrimination lasting for decades.
