Humans against killing: that's like a junkie against dope

In 1995, The Help album was released to raise funds for the War Child charity which provided aid to war stricken places such as Bosnia Herzegovina. The album was recorded in one day and featured the works of Paul McCartney, Paul Weller, Radiohead, Oasis, Sinead O'Connor, Blur and Manic Street Preachers amongst others. The most played song on the album was The Magnificent by the One World Orchestra, an alias for the notorious British dance group KLF. The Magnificent featured the sampled voice of Serbian DJ, Fleka, pronouncing 'Humans against killing; that's like a junkie against dope.' Fleka was offering his perspective from living under the Milošević regime that humans cannot control their urge to kill.
With that insight in mind, we started the day with a visit to the site of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Ferdinand had become heir to the Austro Hungarian throne via circumstance rather than direct lineage. In fact it's often said that he didn't really want to be emperor. Ferdinand was an obsessive traveller and an even more obsessive hunter. It's been estimated that he slaughtered over 250 000 animals in the course of his life. He married a German commoner, Sophie Chotek, which didn't go down too well with the folks at home nor with his Uncle, the emperor Franz Josef. It's claimed that every time Franz Josef became seriously ill, his advisors would come to him and remind him that Ferdinand would become emperor if the old man died. Supposedly this brought about his miracle recovery from death's door on more than one occasion.
On 28th June 1914, Ferdinand and Sophie made a state visit to Sarajevo. A 'crack' team of six young assassins assembled on Appel Quay as the royal couple made their way to city hall. The group were part of an organisation known as Young Bosnia who were determined to drive the Austrians out of Bosnia Herzegovina. Young and militant they may have been, but their performance on the day left much to be desired. The first two wannabe assassins failed to act as the motorcade passed. Nedeljko Čabrinović, the third assassin, threw a bomb from the crowd which bounced off the royal vehicle and wounded as many as 20 people. Like all good suicide bombers Čabrinović had a plan, he swallowed a cyanide tablet and jumped into the river. The cyanide failed to work and the river was about 10cm deep so the suicide attempt failed just like the assassination. He was beaten by the crowd, arrested by police and taken into custody. Ferdinand and Sophie attended the town hall function and then decided to visit the wounded victims of the assassination attempt in hospital. On the way back the car took a wrong turn and 19 year Gavrilo Princip stepped out from the crowd and shot the Archduke and Sophie. His actions ultimately led to a chain of events that brought about the outbreak of World War One.
Gavrilo Princip shot Ferdinand whilst standing in front of Moritz Schiller's Delicatessen. The shop is now a wing of the Museum of Sarajevo. It contains lots of good information about Austro Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and a pair of pants that belonged to Princip. The pistol on display is only a replica of the weapon that was used to kill the royal couple. There's models of the Archduke and Sophie, which are so bad they are good!
There's some irony that the rather amateurish assassination of an unpopular member of the Austrian royal family was the trigger for a global conflict. However the museum provides some background which demonstrates that trouble had been brewing in the province for 50 years before Princip fired his fatal shots.

After you've been to the museum, walk down to city hall, the same place the Archduke and Sophie visited before they were assassinated. The plaque on the front tells you that many of the tensions of 1914, albeit involving different players, were still alive and well 80 years later.

With that sobering note, we decided to catch the Trebevic cable car. The history of the car dates back to 1959, but the whole apparatus had to be rebuilt after being destroyed in the 1990s war. Take the car to the top of the mountain and you'll have a superb view over the city. There's a heap of tracks that will bring you back down to Sarajevo if you want to walk, which in my opinion is the best option. The path we took brings you back via the luge track which was built for the 1984 winter Olympics. If you keep your eyes open and follow Google Maps carefully, you'll also find two ruined astronomical observatories. One dates back to the days of Austro Hungarian occupation and the other is a brutalist construction from the Tito era. It seems to be pretty safe to walk inside the buildings, just watch your step and don't sue me if it all goes wrong. Needless to say, the luge track and the observatories were badly damaged in the 1990s war. Both are covered in bullet holes and the observatories have been hit by significant shell fire. On a more positive note, there's some great graffiti on the luge track. You don't have to be a professional photographer to get some good shots.

As a sidenote to the assassination, Vaso Čubrilović a Bosnian Serb, who was part of the conspiracy to assassinate Ferdinand, was eventually charged with treason for his involvement in the plot. On the day of the assassination he was just 16 years old. Čubrilović was sentenced to sixteen years in jail for his role in the plot. Upon release from prison, he studied history at university. In 1937, Čubrilović delivered a lecture to a Serbian cultural club in which he argued for the expulsion of all Albanians from Yugoslavia. In particular he argued that the present climate represented a good opportunity to remove Albanians from Kosovo "At a time when Germany can expel tens of thousands of Jews and Russia can shift millions of people from one part of the continent to another, the shifting of a few Albanians will not lead to the outbreak of a world war."
By the beginning of World War Two, Čubrilović was a Professor of History at the University of Belgrade. In 1941, he was arrested by the Germans and placed in a concentration camp. After release from the camp towards the end of the war, Čubrilović became an advisor to Tito, and called for the government to expel all German, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian and Albanian ethnic minorities from Yugoslavia. In 1945, Čubrilović became a minister in Tito's government.
In later years, Čubrilović distanced himself from many of his earlier militant nationalist ideologies. Of his involvement in the 1914 assassination he said, "We destroyed a beautiful world that was lost forever due to the war that followed." In 1986 he argued against nationalist members of the Yugoslav government who claimed that Serbs were being discriminated against in post Tito Yugoslavia. Čubrilović died in 1990 at the age of 93 and was the last surviving member of the assassination conspirators.
At the time of Čubrilović's death the nationalistic ideas that he had renounced were re emerging in an uglier and more destructive form than ever.