[pepsi_junkie]

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was so absurdly realized that were it to appear in a movie you'd probably laugh at the silliness of the plot. A couple of nuts who wanted freedom for Bosnia planned to lob bombs and shoot at his car but all of them chickened out except one, whose bomb was thrown but bounced off and injured bystanders and some army officers in the car behind the Dukes. The Duke himself was left unharmed.

The guy who threw the bomb was arrested but the ringleader wasn't. He was hanging around at a coffee house moaning about his lost opportunity when the Duke, who'd decided to visit the wounded from the grenade attack, came driving by and the car stopped to turn around because it had taken a wrong turn. It was stopped right in front of where the ringleader was sitting. The assassin couldn't believe his luck and while the car was stopped he ran up and shot the Duke. The Duke was wounded and he couldn't be attended to quickly enough to stop the bleeding on scene because he'd been sewn into his clothes so they'd be a perfect fit. Nobody had scissors or a knife to cut them open and he bled out en route to the hospital.

And after this absurd scenario, too ridiculous for fiction, the world saw years of perhaps the most senseless and brutal fighting it's ever seen.

[Vigilanteman]

A couple of other little details. The nuts were actually Serbians, not Bosnians. However, the Serbs in Bosnia were closely aligned and brought their Russian cousins into the war.

Following the breakup of Yugoslavia, some 70 odd years and two world wars later, Serbia was careful to only declare independence in the area where there were few ROPers (3%). . . which is why they mostly avoided the bloody civil war in which Bosnia and Herzegovina (51% ROPers) became entangled thereafter.

They suffered mostly from Clinton's high altitude bombing rather than the mass genocide of their neighbor.