KARAJLIĆ: DIRECT CALL TO FIGHT AGAINST DEMOCRATIC AND FREE EUROPE

BELGRADE, FEBRUARY 27 /SRNA/ - The initiative by the City of Sarajevo to restore the monument to the occupier Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie is a direct call to fight against a free, democratic, and united Europe, multimedia artist Nenad Janković, also known as Dr. Nele Karajlić, told SRNA.

He said that in BiH, anything is possible, even the construction of a monument to an occupier. However, Karajlić says that, no matter how much views on Austria-Hungary and Young Bosnia differ in BiH, it is difficult to dispute the fact that Austria-Hungary was a decadent feudal state, and that some ideologues of “Young Bosnia,” in their public statements, "foretold" the unification of a democratic Europe. He recalls that one of them, Dimitrije Mitrinović, wrote in the English magazine The New Age about Europe as the "ego of humanity" and about the necessity of its unification. "He was writing at a time when Germans and French were still staring at each other down the gun sights. What he wrote more than 100 years ago is today the obligatory narrative of every pro-European politician," Karajlić noted. He says he does not wish to repeat stories about identity-seeking and pandering, but instead to emphasize that Young Bosnia represented what was progressive and demanded that Europe be democratic and united, while Austria-Hungary was a backward feudal state. Karajlić emphasizes that democracy in Serbia in 1914 was far more developed than in Austria-Hungary, or rather that democracy did not exist in that empire at all. He recalled that the Austrian Parliament never ratified the annexation of BiH, something that neither the emperor nor his heir to the throne was particularly concerned about, which clearly shows how totalitarian Austro-Hungarian society was. "One should ask the question: if someone had killed Hitler in Paris in 1940, would they have been called a terrorist, and would Hitler, as the victim of an assassination, have had a monument erected to him on the Champs-Élysées 100 years later?" Karajlić asked. In response to the remark that his family has indirect ties to Gavrilo Princip, Karajlić noted that his ancestor, Archpriest Milan Bilbija, baptized Princip. "The Austro-Hungarian police demanded that he falsify the baptismal record, that is, to declare him of legal age, so they could sentence him to death. But my great-grandfather refused. Because he refused, he was tortured and eventually died, and a few years ago the Serbian Orthodox Church proclaimed him a saint," Karajlić stated. He recalled that Ilija Bilbija, a priest of the Grahovo parish and the father of Milan Bilbija, was also an archpriest and that he led an uprising in BiH in 1878. The Sarajevo City Council has adopted an initiative to restore the monument to Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie near the Latin Bridge, formerly known as Princip's Bridge, at the exact location marking the footprints of Gavrilo Princip.