It’s not every day I can open the column from such an exotic location as Sarajevo. I am sitting in a small cafe opposite the very bridge where Gavrilo Princip, the young Serb radical, assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, triggering a sequence of events leading to World War I.
This year is the hundredth anniversary of that war which involved more Irish soldiers than any war before or since. Over 80,000 Irish soldiers were killed and many thousands more were injured.
Here on this tiny bridge, the Latin Bridge, is where it all started.
But yet it could all have been so different.
The archduke had actually survived an assassination attempt earlier in the day when some of Princip’s cohorts had thrown a bomb at the imperial cortege which detonated but didn’t harm Franz Ferdinand.
Princip thought his chance has gone. Disappointed and hungry (as it was after lunch and he had been up early) he went for a sandwich at the cafe opposite the Latin Bridge, the Moritz Schiller cafe.
Unbeknownst to him, Franz Ferdinand told his driver to restart the cavalcade when the dust had settled but the Viennese driver didn’t know Sarajevo well and went up a one-way street.
In the confusion, the cortege got stuck between the bridge and a narrow street. Princip was sitting in the window of the cafe on a baking hot June afternoon, munching on his sandwich ruing his missed opportunity.
He couldn’t believe his luck as he looked out the window. There was his prey, five feet away from him, stuck in traffic. He calmly put down his sandwich, walked over from the terrace and shot the archduke.
Imagine that Princip had decided to go into another cafe? There would have been no sandwich and without the sandwich, there would have been no shooting and without the shooting, could 50,000 southern Irish soldiers and 36,000 Northern Irish soldiers been saved?
We don’t know. But the “what if” approach to history is always intriguing.
We are regularly taught that the war came almost out of nowhere.
However, that version doesn’t really tell the full story. The Serbs – driven by their recurring dream of a Greater Serbia – had been goading the Austrians for some time. I have just finished a wonderful book on the era, ‘The Sleepwalkers’ by Christopher Clarke, which documents the rise of extreme Serb nationalists who operated almost on licence from Belgrade.
Serbia calculated that it could coax the Austrians into another “limited” Balkan War. It proved to be a fatal gamble. Once the Germans decided to give the Austrians a “blank cheque” in terms of supporting whatever action Austria took in retaliation, the dominos were set to fall.
And so shots in Sarajevo, not five metres from where I am sitting now, led my relations in 1914 to board a ship from Dublin to fight in the muck and the filth of Flanders.
Sarajevo has remained a tinder box for decades. It erupted again in 1992, as Yugoslavia disintegrated. Once again, Serb nationalists took up arms, this time against a largely unarmed Muslim population, following a democratic vote for Bosnian independence from Yugoslavia in 1992.
The horrific memories of the last war are never far away, from the bullet holes still in the buildings, to the harrowing memorial to the 1,700 children murdered in the siege of Sarajevo. The scars of the 1992-1995 war and the attempted genocide of the Muslim people of Bosnia are everywhere.
Like many emerging post-socialist European states, today Bosnia also suffers from very high levels of youth unemployment, income is falling and the political class is widely seen as siphoning off the goodies for themselves.
As a result of the war, everything is still seen through the ethnic prism. My friends here are a hotch- potch of everything: half-Serb, half- Muslim, with a Croat grandmother is not untypical. But my friends are the product of Yugoslavia – and those days are long gone.
However, the one bright shining star this year for Bosnia is its ethnically mixed and very brilliant football team who have qualified for the World Cup and will take their place amongst the greats in Brazil this June. For those of us who like the beautiful game, there was no better exponent of it in Europe than the brilliant Yugoslav teams of the 1980s and early 1990s. They were known as “the Brazilians of Europe”. Had they not been ejected from the 1992 European Championship, most people believe they would have won the competition in a canter.
Under the eye of the great former Yugoslav player Safet Susic, the Bosnian team play this exciting attacking football which is based on the notion that “if you score four, we will score five”. It is a joy to watch, but is a rollercoaster for the fans because the brilliant attacking in front of goal can be negated by an attitude to defence which could be described as “leaky” at best.
The football team has unified the country and is wholeheartedly supported by Muslims in Sarajevo, Croats in Mostar and Serbs in Banja Luka.
During the break-up of Yugoslavia, political tensions were often played out on the football pitch as fans (and players) of Dynamo Zagreb ran running battles with fans of Red Star Belgrade. It is lovely to see a team do the opposite.
We know in Ireland what impact a successful national team can have on the psyche. Imagine what a successful unified Bosnian team can do.
As a neutral in the World Cup, I for one will be supporting Bosnia, not only because they play the beautiful game but because of what it would symbolise for Zvjezdan Misimovic (an ethnic Serb and Bosnia’s most capped player) to put Man City’s Edin Dzeko (an ethnic Muslim and Bosnia’s record goal scorer) through to score in the opening game of the Brazil World Cup.
David McWilliams writes daily on international economics and finance at www.globalmacro360.com
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Can anyone explain why the amount of comments here has fallen off a cliff recently? The last article generated only 20 comments. Is it Bonbon? Curious.
‘Southern’ Irish?? As a Dún na nGall man Im sick of this geographic idiocy of being called a southerner. Also the concept is solely a British one alone and any Irish man or woman should know better then to use it.
Also the concept was unknown at the time of ww1. Very poor David.
Me too. Be thinking about who to follow ever since we were knocked out (midway through group stages) Bosnia were the outstanding candidate in an Irish “underdog’, “punch above your weight” kind of way. You’ve convinced me further.
Come on Bosnia.
Personally I always watch out for the debutants in the World Cup tournament every four years.
Bosnia and Herzegovina are the only debutants this year (unfortunately) so they will definitely have my support.
For me the fall off in comments was inevitable after the “housekeeping” entry of a couple of weeks ago. Told you then the blog would be empty! As for another football and sports analogy based article. BORING!!! A good article on how your money has been wasted in the latest “bugging” debacle would have been more in line or how about an audit and report on enterprise Ireland and if they are doing anything valuable with the huge budget, and just how many companies have produced any profits? Id like to know about that one. Or if you want to… Read more »
continued…………How about when you are not allowed to have a
Christmas play and will be forced to observe Ramadan in your schools.
Open your eyes, stop watching boring football and look at where you country is headed, its not too late, yet.
…..their sex changes,,,,,,,
49,500 Irishmen were killed in WWI (not 80,000).
206,000 are recorded as having joined up, in large part serving in the 10th 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions.
A website was recently created by the Irish government listing the names of the fallen: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/records-of-49-000-irish-wwi-dead-in-new-digital-archive-1.1651010
May I Beg Steal & Borrow Your Time There is a very very serious event arriving in April .We saw what happened from my predictions on Dec 9th on this site. What has yet to arrive is extremely rare and and has only occurred four times in past 2000 years . So please NOTE Now. Beginning around the 8th April the surge of the next Moon Wobble ascends and peaks on the 15 th April . What is rare about this date ( 15th) is : It is also a Full Moon ; and more importantly It falls on the… Read more »
David McW, I am not sure the good fortune of Princip or the misfortune of Franz Ferdinand, whichever way you look at it, had so much of a bareing on events as is made out. Tensions were building up before 1914 as all sides saw themselves as the only righteous civilized party in the period leading up to WW1. Add a lot of nasty new weaponry and huge military industrial complexes to that and you had what turned out to be an awful lot of trouble. I think WW1 was even termed by both sides as the “Great War For… Read more »
One interesting aspect of WW1 was how long it went on for and the amount of suffering and death it caused not just to Irish people but even more so to all Euro countries and even the Aussies suffered terribly. The main reason for this is that all the participants abandoned the classical gold standard as soon as the war started and simply started to print massive amounts of unbacked paper to fund their war machines. It is no coincidence that the last century was both the century of central banking and the century of massive wars. If the participants… Read more »
Somewhere Only We Know ( song ) – from Limerick Panto 2014
Emma O’Driscoll and Sarah ALLEN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVp232_v_wk&feature=c4-overview&list=UUKvztzw2UYoJdsSeDDDEVPw
Where have all the people that wanted censorship imposed gone – is there no one to hate anymore.
It’ Putin’s fault that me milk went sour – what will the anti democracy Ukrainians do now Viktor F. Yanukovych is gone.
Censorship is always wrong – always was and always will be – it stifles debate and that is evident here
I remember visiting Trieste in Italy some years back and was surprised by the architecture of the place. It wasn’t what I was expecting as it was all very “grand” to say the least. Someone told me later that the Austrians were responsible for the great building programme as Trieste was to be their port onto the Mediterranean, but as a result of the war, that development fell apart…..it never ceases to amaze me how resources can be found to develop infrastructure when its in the strategic interest of some well healed decision makers…. Ireland seems to be suffering the… Read more »
Yugoslavia was not a fairy-tale land Yugo-nostalgics today portray it to have had been and it’s ‘Bosniaks’, not ‘Muslims’, otherwise a brilliant text, thank you David. Greetings from Sarajevo.