SARAJEVO Sarajevo (dpa) – Sarajevo may soon put up a monument to the archduke whose assassination in 1914 triggered the First World War, but a few Serb-Moslem disagreements have to be settled first.
There was briefly a memorial at the site where the late heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie were killed. But the Yugoslavs removed it and put up a monument to the assassin instead.The Serb, Gavrilo Princip, who shot the archducal couple in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 was hailed as a patriot, since Bosnia as well as Croatia and Slovenia were ruled by the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time.For the third anniversary of the tragedy, Hungarian sculptor Eugen Bori made a bronze statue of Ferdinand and Sophie with angels above their heads. At the end of the First World War, this monument was moved to the Bosnian National Museum.The communist authorities that ran the country after World War II built a monument at the same place representing Princip’s footprints, with a marker on the spot and a short explanation of his heroic act.The end of the communist regime and the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia- Herzegovina raised again the issue of whether Princip was a hero or a terrorist in the 1914 murder.Bosnian Serb aggression supported by the regime of former Yugoslav President Milosevic and the former Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) roused such anti-Serb feeling that many city residents decided Princip was just another Serb extremist.In 1995 the Sarajevo city authorities decided to remove the marker at the spot at which Princip was thought to have stood before firing.“Princip killed an innocent man and his wife who was in advanced pregnancy at the time. Was that a heroic act?” said Emin Svrakic, deputy chairman of the Sarajevo City Council.Svrakic moved for the old monument to Ferdinand and Sophie to be brought out of the museum and put back on the street.That initiative provoked anger among Sarajevo’s Serbs, who stood up to defend the memory of Princip as a freedom fighter.Svrakic in turn has even suggested Bosnia did quite well out of being conquered Austrian territory.“Austria has always been a good friend of Bosnia-Herzegovina. As soon as Austro-Hungarian government was established in Bosnia, this country blossomed, with railways, roads and the most beautiful palaces,” he maintains.He would like a marker at the spot simply stating that Princip killed Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sophie.“Then it will be up to people to judge for themselves who was a hero and who was a terrorist there,” said Svrakic.So far the city council has held off discussing this hot potato. Austria, according to Svrakic, is very interested. Restoration of the monument would cost 100,000 Deutschmarks. “We have already been offered the address of Austrian restorers in Vienna,” said Svrakic.Currently the only marker to the Sarajevo event that shook the world is a metal post bearing the message “May Peace Prevail on Earth”, erected four years ago at the bridge near the assassination site.It was presented during the first visit of a member of the former Austrian imperial family since the 1914 assassination. In April 1997 Otto von Habsburg laid a wreath of flowers at the place where his uncle Archduke Ferdinand was killed.
