Sarajevo: Sarajevo marked 100 years since the assassination that triggered World War I, plunging Europe into the bloodiest conflict it had ever seen and redrawing the world map.
With the people of the Balkans still deeply divided over the legacy of that fateful day, separate commemorations were to be held to mark the occasion.
It was in on a Sarajevo street corner on June 28, 1914, that a Bosnian Serb nationalist shot dead the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, setting off a chain of events that sucked Europe’s great powers into four years of violence unprecedented in its scale and intensity.
Many of the former foes marked the centenary on the sidelines of an EU summit on Thursday with a low-key ceremony at Belgium’s Ypres, where German forces used mustard gas for the first time in 1915.
But the Balkan divisions stirred up by the anniversary have made it impossible for heads of state and government to come together at the site of the assassination in the Bosnian capital. “It would have been impossible to bring everyone (Serbs, Muslims and Croats) together on June 28 in Sarajevo,” said the Bosnian Serb historian Slobodan Soja.
Wildly differing interpretations of 20th-century history endure in a region where the scars of the wars that marked the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, unleashing centuries of resentment and divisions, are still fresh.
And a particularly divisive figure is the archduke's assassin, the 19-year-old Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip. While the Muslim majority in Sarajevo sees Princip as a terrorist who unleashed calamity, the Serbs regard him as a hero seeking to liberate the Slavs from the Austro-Hungarians. His mural was put up to mark the occasion in the Bosnian Serb area.
