Franz Ferdinand Assassination Centenary

John Burns has been in Sarajevo the last couple of days reporting on the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort by Serbian nationalist teenager Gavrilo Princip. The assassination is the event that led to World War I.  The Central Powers (Austria-Hungary & Germany) declared war on the recently independent nation of Serbia. And the Allied Powers (France, United Kingdom, Russia), who backed Serbia, declared war on the Central Powers. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performed yesterday.

I tried to find the concert online and was unsuccessful. It was made available for broadcast by EUROVISION. The 100th anniversary commemoration was underwritten by the European Union. Here is the Vienna Philharmonic program:

Dušan Šestić
National Anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Joseph Haydn
Joseph Haydn: String Quartet, op. 76/3 (Hob. III:77), "Emperor Quartet", 2nd Movement

Franz Schubert
Symphony No. 7 in B minor, D 759 (“Unfinished Symphony”)

Alban Berg
Three Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6

Johannes Brahms
Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny) for Choir and Orchestra op. 54 (Hölderlin)

Maurice Ravel
La Valse, Poème choréographique pour orchestre

Ludwig van Beethoven
European Anthem (Arrangement: Herbert von Karajan)

Burns published two stories: "In Sarajevo, Divisions That Drove an Assassin Have Only Begun to Heal" yesterday, and "Revelry in Sarajevo, Where Shots Started a World War" today. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a mess, undergoing a "Bosnian Spring" earlier this year when there were massive riots over privatization and unpaid salaries and pensions. As Burns describes in his Saturday story,

Despite the boycott by hard-line Serbs, the hope is that the centenary can be used to move sectarian groups toward a new sense of the benefits of a shared political life, and away from the political paralysis that has characterized Bosnia since the Dayton agreement.

That accord, which ended the 1990s blood bath, gave Bosnia a multilayered political structure, with more than a dozen governmental and parliamentary bodies — all elected on sectarian lines, and all now tottering under the weight of endemic corruption and fierce personal rivalries. 

Nearly two decades later, Bosnia remains one of the poorest nations in Europe. It has an official youth unemployment rate nearing 50 percent and an economy that is still 20 percent smaller than it was when the fighting broke out here in 1992. Hundreds of thousands of refugees remain scattered across Europe, wide areas of the country are virtually depopulated, and tens of thousands of homes are still abandoned and in ruins. Seething popular discontent led to days of protests and rioting this year, including the firebombing of government buildings in Sarajevo and other cities.

After those upheavals, Mayor Ivo Komsic of Sarajevo, a Bosnian Croat, appealed to the country’s 3.8 million people to make the 1914 centenary an occasion to renounce sectarian animosities in favor of a new beginning that could carry Bosnia to membership in the European Union — a status Croatia has already achieved and Serbia is nearing. “The eyes of the world will be focused on Sarajevo once more,” Mr. Komsic said, “and it is important that we send messages completely different from the messages of war we sent in 1914 and 1992.”

The Dayton Agreement is normally trumpeted as a great foreign policy achievement of the Clinton administration. But reading a broadside by Ron Jacobs, a writer I trust, against Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, I stumbled across this nugget:

Two years later, spring of 1999. Bill Clinton was under fire in Congress for his misguided and manipulative dalliances with Monica Lewinsky. The Dayton Accords concerning the growing civil war in Yugoslavia had created the intended scenario, leading Belgrade to insist on its historical right to keep Kosovo under its governance. In response, Washington and other NATO governments began an intensive bombing campaign. Bill Clinton and his war cabinet began an around-the-clock assault on the Serbian people. Liberals and progressives drank the kool-aid and offered their whole hearted support. Bernie Sanders made it clear he was completely on board with the action. Indeed, after antiwar activists in Burlington, Vermont marched through downtown Burlington stopping at the offices of each Senator and ending at Sanders’ office where they staged a sit-in, Bernie instructed his office staff via telephone to call the police and clear the office. A week later at an emergency town meeting on the bombing in Montpelier, Vermont Sanders showed up with a couple staff members and a panel of pro and antiwar speakers. Bernie vehemently defended the bombing and actually told at least two members of the audience to leave if they didn’t like what he was saying.

Bosnian Serbs ended up holding their own non-EU sanctioned commemoration for Princip. In today's story Burns describes how Dayton has failed to alleviate tensions between Croats, Serbs and Muslims:

An academic conference to debate the causes and consequences of the war became eerily anodyne when scholars from France, Germany, Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia and other European nations fell into a dispute ahead of the gathering about the topics to be discussed and the speakers who would address them. In the end, the program for the conference, held at the Hotel Hollywood in the mainly Serbian town of Ilidza, where the archduke and his wife spent their last night before taking a brief train ride into Sarajevo, was devised to avoid any open disputes about the role of Princip or other issues touching on war guilt. 

The compromise was guided by the European Union and its diplomatic mission here, which tries to draw rival Bosnian sectarian groups into a less wary and abrasive posture on Bosnia’s future than the main protagonists among the Serbs, Croats and Muslims have shown since the United States-sponsored Dayton agreement that ended the sectarian killing of the 1990s. Peter Sorensen, a Danish diplomat who is the European special representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina, describes his role as that of a referee overseeing a “fierce fight, on a daily basis, over maintaining the political space” allotted to the groups under the Dayton pact. 

But Mr. Sorensen and other European diplomats failed to persuade the Bosnian Serb political leaders to join in shared commemorations of the centenary of the Sarajevo assassinations. Instead, Milorad Dodik, the most militant of the Bosnian Serb leaders, led his followers on Friday in erecting a seven-foot statue to Princip in a hardscrabble park in Lukavica, a suburb of Sarajevo and a Serbian military stronghold during the fighting of the 1990s. On Saturday, Bosnian Serbs held more celebrations of Princip and his fellow conspirators in Visegrad, 70 miles southeast of Sarajevo, where they also re-enacted the assassination.