Monday, March 17, 2014

An assassin still divides 100 years on

(Reuters) - The woman paused before a photograph of a young man with dark eyes and a tightly trimmed moustache.

"That's that Serb terrorist those Chetniks (Serb nationalists) are praising," she said to a journalist inspecting the image. "He started that war. They started all the wars."

Gavrilo Princip stared down from the outer wall of a museum at the riverside spot in Sarajevo where on a summer's morning in 1914 he opened fire on the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

The killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, lit the fuse for World War One, turning out the lights on an age of European peace and progress.

Empires crumbled and more than 10 million soldiers died. The world order was rewritten. Yet 100 years on, in Princip's native Bosnia, time, in many ways, has stood still.

A hero to some, a harbinger of destruction to others, the assassin is being fought over anew as Sarajevo prepares to mark the June 28 centenary of his act.
Read the rest here.

1 comment:

Stephen said...

If demographics is destiny, Europe is dead, gone, and European man and civilization relegated to that of the Hittites. And you can point to this fellow's action as THE downward inflection point on the trajectory.