Sarajevo
Page 22
the Serbian Government of the crime known in private
life as " compounding a felony " — in other words, of
failure to give due warning of a danger rendered possible
by the criminal connivance of their own officials, or even
to punish those guilty of it.
The crime of Sarajevo is an indelible blot upon the
movement for Jugoslav Unity. But, unless we are to
lose all sense of proportion, we must assign the main
guilt to Austria-Hungary, who, by a policy of repression
at home and aggression abroad, had antagonised all
sections of the Jugoslav race. Murder or no murder,
the seething pot would have continued to boil until
Austria-Hungary could evolve a policy compatible with
Jugoslav interests, or, alternatively, until the Jugoslavs
could shake off her yoke.
APPENDIX.
THE "REVELATIONS" OF MR. LJUBA JOVANOVIC.
MR. JOVANOVIC'S essay in Krv Slovenstva [Blood of Slavdom) passed almost
unnoticed at the time, even in Jugoslavia; for it was hurriedly edited and
poorly produced (by Mr. Ksjunjin, a Russian emigrant journalist in
Belgrade). In England it first aroused attention early in December 1924,
when Miss Edith Durham gave very full quotations from it in an address
delivered before the British Institute of International Affairs, and then
commented upon the incident with varying degrees of violence in Foreign
Affairs (the late Mr. Morel's organ) for December 1924, in the Contem-
porary Review of January 1925, and in Die Kriegsschuldfrage. The British
institute of International Affairs was sufficiently impressed by the
importance of the matter to reprint a complete translation of Mr.
Jovanovic's article in the March number of its Journal, and this was also
Published by Mr. Leo Maxse in the April number of the National Review.
reat prominence was also given to Mr. Jovanovic's admissions by
rofessor Sidney B. Fay (a recognised American authority on the question
war guilt) in an address delivered by him before the annual Confer-
rence of the American Historical Association at Richmond (Va.) on
7 December, 1924, before an audience of several hundred historians
from all Parts of America. He has since written two articles on the
subject in Current History for October and November, 1925.
156
I had myself taken part in the discussion following both Miss Durham's
and Professor Fay's addresses, and had from the first felt that the matter
could not be left without full investigation. This became still clearer when
Die Kriegsschuldfrage (the German monthly which exists for the purpose
of thrusting Germany's responsibility on to other shoulders and thus
preparing the way for treaty revision) placed Mr. Jovanovic in the fore-
front of its campaign, and proceeded to argue, month by month with
growing energy, that his revelations render necessary a complete revision
of the prevailing verdict as to war guilt. No reasonable person can blame
the Germans for availing themselves to the full of such a weapon as Mr.
Jovanovic's folly had placed in their hands; for the bearings of the in-
cident upon the famous Covering Note to the Treaty of Versailles, and
even upon the problem of reparations, are sufficiently obvious.
In face of such a campaign it was quite impossible for the friends of
Serbia in this country to remain silent, and on 16 February I published a
letter in the Times, expressing the hope that " Mr. Jovanovió himself,
and his chief, Mr. Paáic — now, as then, Serbian Premier — will issue a
statement sufficiently clear to exculpate them and their colleagues from
the charge now being levelled against them by their enemies in England
and Germany, of foreknowledge of, and deliberate connivance at, the
crime of Sarajevo. Having throughout the war been especially active in
advocating the view of official Serbia's complete innocence, I feel all the
more bound to give equal publicity to contrary statements when they come
from so serious a quarter, and to emphasise the need for an explanation."
I ended as follows: " Even if Mr. Jovanovic's statements should prove
incapable of refutation, this would not in any way alter two fundamental
facts: i. That a central aim of Austro-Hungarian policy in the years
before the war was the isolation and overthrow of Serbia; and 2. That
political discontent, of a semi-revolutionary kind, was widespread through-
out the Southern Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary, as the result of
Magyar racial policy, and quite irrespective of Serbia's action. But it is
necessary to add that failure on the part of Belgrade to provide an adequate
explanation would not merely affect our verdict on the events immediately
preceding the war, but, above all, our attitude to the official Jugoslavia
of to-day, whose destinies are controlled by the same party-leaders who
were in power in June 1914."
Soon after this it was announced in the Belgrade Press, but not by the
official Press Bureau, that the Jugoslav Government had decided to publish
a new Blue Book on the origins of the war. In view of this I wrote a second
letter to the Times some five weeks later, begging its readers to suspend
judgment until these documents could appear. But eight months have
passed, and nothing more has been heard of the Blue Booh; and it se ms
probable that the announcement was merely tactical, intended to appease
the critics until the whole agitation should die down. Unfortunately the
Jugoslav Government, instead of demonstrating its innocence by a detailed
statement of the facts, shrouded itself in mystery. Worse still, the official
organs of the Radical Party proceeded to exploit the incident for party
ends. In 1924 Mr. Ljuba Jovanovic had led the more moderate and
conciliatory wing of the Radicals, had at one moment been invited by
the King to form a Cabinet, and seemed in a fair way towards superseding
157
the more intransigent Mr. Pasic as leader of the party. The publicity
civen abroad to his article provided an excuse for most violent attacks
non him in the Belgrade Press, and by April he found himself completely
insolated in his own party and in danger of political ostracism. He took
the field at great length against his critics in a series of articles in Novi
Zivot, but, while ranging over thirty years of Serbian history, he entirely
evaded the real issue — namely, whether the Serbian Government had
foreknowledge of the plot and failed to warn Vienna.
The plain fact is that his statements in the original article are so
extremely explicit as to leave us only two alternatives. Either the Serbian
Government of the day, having got wind of the plot and having genuinely
tried to arrest the would-be criminals but having failed to do so, deliberately
refrained from warning the Austro-Hungarian authorities, and thus became
guilty of conniving at a crime which they certainly had not prompted.
Or Mr. Jovanovió, for reasons of his own, has misrepresented the true facts,
and his former colleagues, for reasons of their own, have refrained from
giving him the lie publicly.
The reader will find in chapters iii. and iv. of the present volume a
considerable amount of evidence which it is scarcely possible to reconcile
with the first alternative; and haviug, after repeated attempts, failed to
extract any statement whatever from official Belgrade, I feel bound, in
the interests of the truth, to state quite frankly my grounds for accepting
the second alternative.
Mr. Ljuba Jovanovic, like his chief Mr. Pasic, is a politician of the old
Balkan school, and has himself a revolutionary past. He is a native of
Southern Dalmatia, and originally fled to Serbia after the abortive rising
of 1881. He has ever since taken a quite natural and legitimate interest
in the fate of young Serbs and Croats who came to Serbia for their studies,
and, thanks to his origin, has often shown a fuller comprehension of the
Jugoslav problem as a whole than many of his colleagues in the Radical
party, whose vision did not extend much beyond the first narrow limits
of modern Serbia. He is, however, one of those politicians who like to
exaggerate their own importance, and in the post-war period, when it is
the fashion for everyone to parade on the housetops sentiments which
before the war he carefully concealed in the cellars, Mr. Jovanovió seems
anxious not to remain behindhand. I have the authority of one of the
most distinguished Serbian writers and historians for the statement that
on the day after the murder of King Alexander and Queen Draga in 1903
he himself met Mr. Jovanovió in the streets of Belgrade, and in reply to
his anxious enquiry for news was given to understand that he had known
what was brewing for some time past. Now credulous writers like Miss
Durham, with whom hostility to everything Serb has become a positive
obsession will doubt accept this little anecdote as a proof positive
that Mr Ljuba had Jovanovic was in the earlier plot also. But to anyone
who knows anything of that sinister affair it is notorious that Mr Jovanovic
had nothing whatever to do with it; and I trust that the reader will accept
this assurance from me, (it is one of the very few statements in the book
for which I do not give documentary evidence) without forcing me to
enter upon a long digression.
I believe that Mr. Jovanovic was as ignorant of the plot 1914 as he
158
was of the plot of 1903, and that he suffers from a complaint which the
Germans
admirably
describe
as
Wichtigtuerei.
There
are,
however,
other motives which serve to explain his famous article. Those acquainted
with the present Jugoslav situation are well aware that since 1918 the
Radical party has conducted a desperate struggle for the political control
of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that for a number of reasons that control
has been slowly slipping from its grasp. They are also aware that the
younger generation in Bosnia (this only applies in a much lesser degree
to the other Jugoslav provinces) regards the revolutionary movement
of 1913-14 with feelings of admiration, and Princip and his fellow-assassins
as national martyrs. If we put these two facts together we shall find
the second explanation of Mr. Jovanovic's statements. He was making
a bid for the support of the Bosnian youth by showing that the Belgrade
Government had sympathised with the revolutionary movement, though
it is quite notorious that it did not do so (see, e.g., p. 151). Incidentally,
he probably hoped to strengthen his own position in the Radical party,
as against those whose outlook is more narrowly identified with the old
Serbian Kingdom.
It is necessary to allude to a third motive. The Sarajevo crime and
the rôle
of
Colonel
Dimitrijevió is inextricably entangled with the
Salonica Trial of 1917, which resulted in the execution of Dimitrijevió
and two other officers for an alleged plot to murder the Prince Regent at
the Serbian front, the execution of Malobabic (formerly a victim of the
Zagreb Treason Trial of 1909) as their accomplice, and the condemnation
to twenty years of Mehmedbasic (the only one of the assassins of Sarajevo
who succeeded in flying across the frontier) as a further accomplice. A
somewhat mysterious rôle was also played at the trial by Milan Ciganovié,
the railway official who supplied Princip and his friends with the revolvers,
and who was now denounced as an informer by some of the accused
officers. This is not the place to deal with the details of the Salonica
affair; a special chapter will be devoted to it in the larger book which I
am preparing on the origins of the Jugoslav state. But it is necessary
for the reader to understand that Mr. Ljuba Jovanovic was one of the
two statesmen who insisted upon the Salonica Trial being conducted to
the bitter end, strongly opposed the reprieve of the prisoners, and ex-
ploited the incident to purge the army of numerous officers who were
obnoxious to the Radical party. Ever since then the Salonica Trial has
remained
an
unsolved
problem
in
Serbian
internal
politics.
Many
opposition circles hold that a gross miscarriage of justice took place, and
demands for a re-examination of the facts are made at intervals. In
this question, then, Mr. Jovanovic is on the defensive, and this may
have contributed towards his attitude, though it may suggest a tendency
to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.
The attitude of Mr. Paäic is somewhat different. As has already been
explained in the text, he has always shown an astonishing indifference to
public opinion, especially to foreign public opinion. Yet this is not
sufficient to account for his silence on this occasion; for, as one of Jugo-
slavia's most enthusiastic friends recently wrote to me, " there would
seem to be no other example in history of a Government which is accused
of grave offences remaining obstinately silent for eleven years, despite all
159
ppeals from friend and foe, and simply snapping its fingers at the opinion
of the civilised world." But to-day, as ever, party politics are the decisive
4 ctor with Mr. Pa§ié. He disapproves Mr. Ljuba Jovanovic's statements,
nd utterly denies their accuracy — as I know from more than one of his
own colleagues in office. But he seems more anxious to use the incident
to isolate a dangerous competitor for the party leadeiship than to clear
the honour of his country; and he is apparently reluctant to stand up
before his countrymen and to produce the proofs (which I have reason to
believe him to possess) that he, as leader of the nation in 1914, was ignorant,
and even disapproved, of an underground movement which some admire
as having led directly to national unity.
The more reputable and thoughtful sections of the nation, while recog-
nising
that
pre-war
conditions
were
a
veritable
<
br /> breeding-ground
for
revolutionary acts, deplore the part played by assassination in the great
movement for liberation and unity. But there are others who insist upon
glorifying the assassins, and it is this section oi opinion — naturally most
vocal in Bosnia itself — which is responsible for the removal of the memorial
shrine erected at the scene of the crime, and for the reinterment of the
assassins themselves in a special grave of honour at Sarajevo. The latter
incident is doubtless a matter of taste (the celebrations of Armistice Day
in Western countries might well suggest a day of national atonement as
more suitable than an annual celebration of the crime), but the former
can only be described as an act of wanton indecency, which the authorities
of the new State ought not to have tolerated. It is proper and necessary
that this should be said frankly by the friends as well as the enemies of
Serbia. It is also greatly to be regretted that the " Orjuna " — a patriotic
organisation of semi-Fascist tendencies — should have associated itself
with this policy of glorification, and should at present be agitating for a
monument in honour of the criminals of Sarajevo. It is to be hoped that
responsible statesmen in Jugoslavia will have the courage to make a stand
against these immoral tendencies. It is one thing to preach the doctrine
that misgovernment (especially if it be alien) inevitably breeds a contempt
for law and a tendency to reprisals and outrages (this is one of the main
lessons to be drawn from the present volume); it is quite another thing
to condone, or even to glorify, those outrages when they occur.
CHAPTER VII
COUNT BERCHTOLD'S PREPARATIONS FOR WAR
" We [Austria-Hungary] shall have to place Serbia before the choice
of political disarmament or military overthrow. In that case we must
not let ourselves be restrained by the fact that Russia would make
the destruction of the Serbian state a casus belli. "
—
Berthold
Molden, in Drängende Fragen (1913).1
IN the preceding chapters an attempt has been made to
summarise the conflict of political ideas which had
steadily developed between Austria-Hungary and Serbia