ASSASSINS RECALL JUBILEE OF WAR

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30477, 26 June 1964, Page 11

ASSASSINS RECALL JUBILEE OF WAR

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright.)

SARAJEVO (Jugoslavia), June 25.

Memorial tablets will be unveiled and wreaths laid on tombs in Sarajevo on Sunday to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand which precipitated World War I.

Two of the three survivors who, as young men, plotted the assassination are expected to attend the ceremonies.

They are Dr. Vaso Cubrilovic, 67-year-old professor of history at Belgrade University, and Professor Cvetko Popovic, now aged 68 and curator of a Sarajevo museum.

The third survivor of the 16 conspirators who were tried and sentenced, Mr Ivo Kranjcevic, now a retired railway official, is too ill to attend. In the old cemetery on a green hillside above Sarajevo is a black marble tablet set in the white stone wall of a red-roofed chapel. It bears the names of 10 of the “heroes of St. Vitus Day” (June 28) who were tried and condemned for their parts in the assassination.

Today, the murder is regarded in Jugoslavia as a patriotic protest by young Bosnian nationalists against alien Austrian rule. Chief among those commemorated on the chapel tablet was Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old student who shot both the Archduke and his wife, Duchess Sophie, as they drove through Sarajevo on a

State visit on June 28, 1914. The others include peasants and tradesmen who helped to smuggle some of the plotters and their arms across the border into Bosnia from neighbouring Serbia, then an independent kingdom adjoining the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Later on Sunday morning, a memorial tablet will be unveiled on a house where lived one of the conspirators, Danilo Ilic, a 24-year-old schoolmaster and journalist. Another plaque will be ceremonially displayed on the wall of an embankment from which 19-year-old Nedeljko Cabrinovic jumped into the river Miljacka after an unsuccessful bomb attack on the Archduke earlier on the day of the assassination.

A third tablet on a nearby bridge will mark the spot where, four years earlier, another young nationalist, Bogdan Zerajic, a law student, tried to shoot down the Governor of Bosnia, General Vareshanin, but missed with five shots and killed himself with the sixth.

Princip took Zerajic as his inspiration. On Sunday afternoon there will be a second wreathlaying ceremony at the grave in Butmir, a village near Sarajevo, of Muhamed Mehmedbasic, another young conspirator.

He escaped to the kingdom of Montenegro, was subsequently gaoled in Salonika for a plot against Prince Alexander of Serbia, later returned home and died in his native village in 1943. Professor Popovic who, at the age of 18, was one of six youths with bombs and revolvers ranged along the tree-lined embankment of the Miljacka river in a vain bid to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he drove into the city, recently described the fateful day to a reporter of the Belgrade newspaper, “Borba”. Asked how he had felt after agreeing to take part in the attack, the professor said: “1 thought 1 would live only until St. Vitus’s Day. Therefore 1 was completely calm.” He put a phial of prussic acid in his mouth to swallow after the assassination if he were caught. “Under my cape I held a bomb in my right hand and a revolver in my left,” he said. Another conspirator, Cabrinovic threw a bomb. It missed the Archduke but wounded an escorting officer. But within an hour the Archduke was dead, shot by Princip as he drove back along the embankment from a town hall reception. Popovic and his friend,

Cubrilovic, did not use their weapons.

Popovic hid his bomb and revolver while Cubrilovic gave his arms to Kranjcevic to hide.

All three were arrested, sentenced to imprisonment— Kranjcevic 10 years, Cubrilovic 16 years and Popovic 13 years—but were freed at the end of World War I. Professor Popovic told the “Borba”:

“Nationalist youth conceived the assassination as a question of national honour . . . but if anyone had told us and convinced us beforehand that it would be the cause of war between Austro-Hun-gary and Serbia (which was the beginning of World War I) no conscientious youth would have agreed to carry it out.”