Sun 15 Aug 2004
Serbs paid dearly for their freedom
GERALD Warner better go back to school and study history before he freely revises it to suit his own agenda.
In his column ‘Did Britain really have to be in the war to end all wars’ last week he makes several hideous mistakes. Or worse, deliberate omissions.
The truly injured party was the Serbs, not the Austrians. Missing from his article is any mention about the assassination of the Serbian king three years prior to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.
It is apparent by this racist slur at the Serbs that the writer believes it appalling to kill an archduke but acceptable to liquidate a Serbian king as Austria and their Croatian vassals were highly implicated in the murder of the Serbian king, especially Ante Pavelich, who headed the first independent state of Croatia (1941), a Nazi puppet state.
Also missing from the facts is that Serbia was internationally recognised at the Congress of Berlin (1876) as an international nation with one exception. Austria would be the protectorate of Bosnia for 44 years. When it came time to return Bosnia to the Serbs, Austria and the archduke refused.
As though this was not insulting enough, the archduke went to Sarajevo on the most sacred holy holiday of the Serbian people, Vidovdan, the commemoration of the Battle of Kosovo when the Serbs lost 77,000 victims and the loss of their nation to Ottoman slavery for 412 years.
If I were alive then I would have assassinated the archduke myself.
It is also insulting that Gerald. Warner makes no mention of the fact that the Serbs lost 52% of their adult male population in the [First] World War and 22 years later lost 1.4 million of their citizens to the Nazi hordes.
The Serbs have paid dearly for their freedom from the Austrian Empire - a corrupt government that deserved to be destroyed.
William Dorich, Los Angeles
Since you seem to be unable to tell the difference between an act of war and an act of terrorism, this is probably pointless, but here goes...
Anyone who has studied this period knows that the Black Hand terrorists targeted Archduke Francis Ferdinand precisely *because* he was not an enemy to the Slavic people, but their friend. He was an open advocate for "trialism", of making the southern Slavs equal partners with the Magyars of Hungary and the Germans of Austria. The Black Hand however, were Serbian ultra-nationalists (nationalism being pure poison for a multi-ethnic empire like Austria) who wanted to build a massive "Greater Serbia".
The problem they had with the Archduke is that, if he lived to become Emperor and made the Slavs partners with the Austrians and Hungarians, they might (gasp) be content and not wish to revolt in favor of joining their grand Serbian nation-state. Therefore, by assassinating the Archduke, the Austrians would come down hard on the Slavs and thus drive them into the arms of the Serbian nationalists who were planning war, safe in their knowledge that big brother Russia would come to their aid.