The Sleepwalkers (9 page)

Every patriotic Servian who takes any interest or active part in politics, thinks of the Servian nation not as merely including the subjects of King Peter, but as consisting of all those who are akin to them in race and language. He looks forward, consequently, to the eventual creation of a Greater Servia, which shall bring into one fold all the different sections of the nation, at present divided under Austrian, Hungarian and Turkish dominion. [. . .] From his point of view, Bosnia is both geographically and ethnographically the heart of Great Servia.
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In an almost contemporary tract on the crisis, the celebrated ethnographer Jovan Cvijic, Nikola Pašić's most influential adviser on the nationality question, observed that ‘it [was] plain that Bosnia and Herzegovina, by . . . their central position in the ethnographical mass of the Serbo-Croat race, . . . hold the key to the Serb problem. Without them, there can be no Great Serb state'.
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From the perspective of pan-Serb publicists, Bosnia-Herzegovina belonged to the ‘Serb lands under foreign domination' – its population was ‘entirely Servian in race and language', consisting of Serbs, Serbo-Croats and ‘Serb-Mohammedans', except, of course, for the minority of ‘temporary inhabitants' and ‘exploiters' installed by the Austrians over the previous thirty years.
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Powered by this wave of outrage, a new mass organization sprang up to pursue nationalist objectives. Known as the Serbian National Defence (Srpska Narodna Odbrana), it recruited thousands of members dispersed across more than 220 committees in towns and villages of Serbia and a network of auxiliaries within Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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The irredentist campaign that had been gaining momentum in Macedonia was now directed at the annexed provinces: Narodna Odbrana organized guerrilla bands, recruited volunteers, established espionage networks within Bosnia and lobbied the government for a more aggressive national policy. Veterans from the fighting in Macedonia, such as Major Voja Tankosić, a close associate of Apis, were deployed to the Bosnian frontier, where they trained thousands of new recruits for the coming struggle there. It looked for a time as if Serbia was on the point of launching a suicidal assault on its neighbour.
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The leaders in Belgrade at first encouraged the agitation, but they were also quick to see that Serbia stood no chance of reversing the annexation. The key to this sobering of the mood was Russia, which did little to encourage Serbian resistance. This was hardly surprising, since it was the Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky who had proposed the annexation – in principle at least – to his Austrian counterpart Alois Aehrenthal. Izvolsky had even warned the Serbian foreign minister Milovan Milovanović in advance of the impending annexation. At a meeting at Marienbad, where Izvolsky was taking the waters, the Russian foreign minister had informed his Serbian counterpart that although St Petersburg considered the Balkan states to be ‘children of Russia', neither Russia herself, nor any of the other great powers would do anything to contest the annexation. (Izvolsky omitted to mention to his Serbian interlocutor the fact that he himself had proposed the annexation of the provinces to the Austrians as part of a deal to secure better access for Russian warships to the Turkish Straits.) The Serbian minister in St Petersburg was later warned that Belgrade should under no circumstances mobilize against Austria, ‘because no one would be able to help us, the whole world wants peace'.
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Foreign Minister Milovanović, a moderate politician who had been critical of Pašić's handling of the Austro-Serbian crisis of 1905–6 and was shocked to find him advocating war in 1908, was placed in an extremely delicate position. Having conferred directly with Izvolsky, he could see that there was no mileage in the idea of rallying the European powers against the annexation. But he also had to rein in the nationalist hysteria in Serbia, while at the same time unifying the Skupština and the political elite behind a moderate ‘national' policy – two objectives that were virtually irreconcilable, since the Serbian public would construe any hint of a concession to Vienna's standpoint as a ‘betrayal' of the national interest.
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His difficulties were compounded by the hostility between the Radicals and their former party comrades the Independent Radicals, who expounded an uncompromising brand of pan-Serb nationalism. Factional rivalries within the Radical leadership, such as that between the ‘Pašić group' and the ‘court Radicals' around Milovanović, deepened the confusion and uncertainty. Behind the scenes, Milovanović worked hard to pursue a moderate policy focused on securing limited territorial compensation for Serbia, and endured without complaint the vilification of the pan-Serb press. In public, however, he adopted an intransigent rhetoric bound to rouse enthusiasm at home and provoke outrage in the Austrian newspapers. ‘The Serbian national programme,' he announced to rapturous applause in a speech before the Skupština in October 1908, ‘demands that Bosnia and Herzegovina be emancipated;' by interfering with the realization of this plan, he declared, Austria-Hungary had made it inevitable that ‘one day in the near or distant future, Serbia and all of Serbdom will fight it in a struggle for life or death'.
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Milovanović's predicament illuminates the stresses to which Serbian policy-makers were exposed in this era. This intelligent and cautious man understood very clearly the limitations imposed by Serbia's location and condition. In the winter of 1908–9, all the powers urged Belgrade to step down and accept the inevitable.
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But he also knew that no responsible minister could afford openly to disavow the national programme of Serbian unification. And in any case, Milovanović was himself a fervent and sincere proponent of that programme. Serbia, he had once said, could never afford to abandon the cause of Serbdom. ‘From a Serbian standpoint, there is no difference between Serbian state interests and the interests of other Serbs.'
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Here again were the projections of the Serbian mental map, on which political and ethnic imperatives were merged. The crucial point was this: moderates like Milovanović and even Pašić (who eventually climbed down from his calls for war) differed fundamentally from the extreme nationalists only on the matter of
how
to manage the predicaments facing the state. They could not afford (and did not wish) to disavow the nationalist programme as such. Domestically, then, the extremists were always at a rhetorical advantage, since it was they who set the terms of the debate. In such an environment, moderates would find it difficult to make themselves heard, unless they adopted the language of the extremists. And this in turn made it difficult for external observers to discern any variation in the positions adopted across the political elite, which could deceptively appear to form a solid front of unanimity. The dangerous dynamics of this political culture would haunt Belgrade in June and July 1914.

In the event, Austria-Hungary of course prevailed and Belgrade was forced formally to renounce its claims on 31 March 1909. With great difficulty, the government managed to calm the agitation. Belgrade promised Vienna that it would disarm and break up its ‘volunteers and bands'.
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Srpska Narodna Odbrana was divested of its insurrectionary and war-waging functions and transformed – outwardly at least – into a peaceful pan-Serbian propaganda and information agency operating in close association with a range of other nationalist associations, such as the Soko gymnastic societies and groups like Prosveta and Prirednik, whose task was to reinforce Serbian cultural identity through literature, public education and youth work.

Serbia may have failed to reverse the annexation or secure the territorial concessions that Milovanović had demanded as compensation, but there were two important changes. First, the crisis inaugurated a period of closer collaboration between Belgrade and the two friendly great powers. The link to St Petersburg was strengthened by the arrival of the new Russian minister, Baron Nikolai Hartwig, a vehement pan-Slav and Serbophile, who would play a central role in Belgrade political life until his sudden death just before the outbreak of war in 1914. The financial and political ties to France were also reinforced – manifested in a huge loan from Paris for the purpose of expanding the Serbian army and improving its striking power.

Secondly, the rage and disappointment of 1908–9 had a radicalizing effect on the nationalist groups. Though they were temporarily demoralized by the government's capitulation on the annexation question, they did not renounce their ambitions. A gulf opened up between the government and the nationalist milieu. Bogdan Radenković, a civilian national activist in Macedonia, where the struggle against the Bulgarians continued, met with officer veterans of the Macedonian front, some of them conspirators of 1903, to discuss the creation of a new secret entity. The result was the formation on 3 March 1911 in a Belgrade apartment of Ujedinjenje ili smrt! (‘Union or death!'), popularly known as the ‘Black Hand'. Apis, now Professor of Tactics at the Military Academy, was among the seven men – five officer-regicides and two civilians – present at that founding meeting; he brought with him the network of younger regicides and fellow travellers over which he now exercised unchallenged leadership.
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The constitution of Ujedinjenje ili smrt! opened with the unsurprising declaration that the aim of the new association was the ‘unification of Serbdom'. Further articles stated that the members must strive to influence the government to adopt the idea that Serbia was the ‘Piedmont' of the Serbs, and indeed of all the South Slav peoples – the journal founded to expound the ideals of Ujedinjenje ili smrt! duly bore the title
Pijemont
. The new movement assumed an encompassing and hegemonic concept of Serbdom – Black Hand propaganda did not acknowledge the separate identity of Bosnian Muslims and flatly denied the existence of Croats.
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In order to prepare Serbdom for what would surely be a violent struggle for unity, the society would undertake revolutionary work in all territories inhabited by Serbs. Outside the borders of the Serbian state, the society would also combat by all means available the enemies of the Serbian idea.
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In their work for the ‘national cause' these men increasingly saw themselves as enemies of the democratic parliamentary system in Serbia and especially of the Radical Party, whose leaders they denounced as traitors to the nation.
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Within Ujedinjenje ili smrt! the old hatred of the Serbian military for the Radical Party lived on. There were also affinities with proto-fascist ideology: the objective was not merely a change in the sovereign personnel of the state – that had been achieved in 1903, without any appreciable benefits to the Serbian nation – but rather a thoroughgoing renovation of Serbian politics and society, a ‘regeneration of our degenerate race'.
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The movement thrived on a cult of secrecy. Members were inducted by means of a ceremony devised by Jovanović-čupa, a member of the founding council and a freemason. New recruits swore an oath before a hooded figure in a darkened room pledging absolute obedience to the organization on pain of death.

I [name], in joining the organisation Union or Death, swear by the sun that warms me, by the earth that nourishes me, before God, by the blood of my ancestors, on my honour and on my life, that I will from this moment until my death be faithful to the laws of this organisation, and that I will always be ready to make any sacrifice for it.

I swear before God, on my honour and on my life, that I will execute all missions and commands without question.

I swear before God, on my honour and my life, that I will take all the secrets of this organisation into my grave with me.

May God and my comrades in the organisation be my judges if, knowingly or not, I should ever violate this oath.
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Little was kept in the way of records – there was no central register of members, but a loose network of cells, none of which possessed an overview of the organization's extent or activities. As a result, uncertainty remains about the size of the organization. By the end of 1911, the number of members had risen to around 2,000–2,500; it grew dramatically during the Balkan Wars, but a retrospective estimate deriving from a defector-turned-informant of 100,000–150,000 is certainly inflated.
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Whatever the precise numbers, the Black Hand spread quickly into the structures of official Serbia, reaching out from their base within the military to infiltrate the cadres of Serbian border guards and customs officers, especially along the Serbian–Bosnian frontier. There were also numerous recruits among the espionage agents still working in Bosnia for the Narodna Odbrana, despite the ostensible shut-down of 1909. Among their activities was the maintenance of a terrorist training camp, at which recruits were instructed in marksmanship, bomb-throwing, bridge-blowing and espionage.
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Here was a set-up made to measure for the seasoned conspirator Apis. The cult of secrecy suited his temperament. So did the organization's official insignia, a circular logo bearing a skull, crossbones, a knife, a phial of poison and a bomb. Asked later why he and his colleagues had adopted these symbols, Apis replied that, for him, ‘those emblems [did] not have such a frightening or negative look'. After all, it was the task of all nationally minded Serbs ‘to save Serbdom with bombs, knives and rifles'. ‘In my work in [Macedonia],' he recalled, ‘poison was used and all guerrillas carried it both as a means of attack and to save someone if he fell into enemy hands. That is why such emblems entered the organisation's seal and it was a sign that these people were prepared to die.'
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