Serbia Unveils Monument to Gavrilo Princip

“Gavrilo Princip was a hero, he was a symbol of an idea of liberation. Others can think whatever they want to,” Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic said at the ceremony in Belgrade on Sunday.

Nikolic said Serbia was not defending the assassination, but people who struggle to protect Serb interests.

“It is the easiest thing today to blame everything on Serbs and Serbia,” he said.

Princip’s shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 is widely considered one of the incidents that helped spark the 1914-18 conflict.

Some Serbs believe that Princip was a hero and a freedom fighter against the Austro-Hungarian empire, although in other former Yugoslav countries, he is widely seen as a terrorist.

The two-metre-high bronze statue has been installed in a park where Princip and other members of the radical Young Bosnia movement used to gather before they set out for Sarajevo before the killing in 1914.

The initiative to erect the statue was proposed by Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic. The Serbian government initially announced that it would be installed on the centenary of the outbreak of WWI last year, but the plan was postponed.

The monument was a gift from Bosnia’s Serb-led entity Republika Srpska, which last year also erected a statute of Princip in East Sarajevo.

Milorad Dodik, the president of Republika Srpska, attended Sunday’s ceremony and said the statue symbolises “today’s fight for freedom” by Serbs in the Balkans.

“Princip was a symbol of freedom as he was ready, as an 18-year-old man, to give his life for the freedom of his own people,” Dodik said.

Dodik also said that Serbs have never been aggressors.

“We never attacked anyone, we only defended what is ours,” he said.

The installation of the monument marked Vidovdan, or St Vitus’ Day, one of the most important state and religious holidays in Serbia.

Each year, the state marks the anniversary of Serbia’s battle with Ottoman Turkish forces in Kosovo in 1389. The battle, which Serbia lost, is seen as a crucial moment in Serbian history and has inspired much of the country’s epic poetry.

BIRN