Conflicts Unchanged in Birthplace of WWI

Spiegel.de ^ | By Walter Mayr

[DeaconBenjamin]

Freedom Fighter or Nationalist Murderer?

Croats and Muslims view Gavrilo Princip as a Greater Serbian nationalist and murderer, and finds no reason to celebrate him in an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosnian Serbs venerate Princip as a freedom fighter with national and anti-imperialist ideals.

Unlike the Catholic Croats and the Bosnian Muslims, most of whom were loyal to the emperor in 1914, the militant Serbs were viewed with suspicion in the Habsburg empire as Serbia's fifth column. The divides between ethnic groups and religions in Bosnia are deeper than ever today. In the 1990s war, another 100,000 people, mainly Muslims, died on the region's already blood-soaked soil.

What Serbs did to fellow Yugoslavians in Bosnia in the 1990s has roots in events that occurred at the beginning of the century. Some 550,000 Serb soldiers and civilians, close to a fifth of the entire population, died between 1914 and 1918. In relative terms, no other people suffered comparable losses in World War I.

The Serb-dominated Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a precursor to the later Yugoslavia, was conceived as compensation for the horrific Serbian death toll of World War I.

The bloodiest battles in World War II and later in the 1990s occurred in precisely the same spots where the winners and losers of World War I continued to live together in close quarters: in the Bosnian Krajina region and along the Drina River.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is not only an intersection of East and West, Rome and Byzantium, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and Islam, Latin and Cyrillic, but also of traditional regions of interest to the Ottomans, the czars and the Habsburgs. Their bitter struggle for power in the region was the prelude to the tragedy of Sarajevo in 1914.

[onedoug]

muslims view him as a murderer? Now, that’s rich.

[Verginius Rufus]

A small error in the 1914 map. It shows Montenegro as including the Bay of Kotor area. In 1914 Herceg Novi belonged to Bosnia and Hercegovina and the rest of the Bay of Kotor was part of Dalmatia (part of the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). The Bay of Kotor was attached to Montenegro after WWII by the Tito regime, maybe because most of the population belonged to the Serbian Orthodox Church.

[Monterrosa-24]

“...In the 1990s war, another 100,000 people, mainly Muslims, died on the region’s already blood-soaked soil...”

According to the Hague maybe but that is not non-partisan. The Serbian death toll was shocking.