SARAJEVO READY TO CELEBRATE ITS JAILERS IF ORDERED BY FOREIGN AGENDA

SARAJEVO, FEBRUARY 27 /SRNA/ - Tomislav Tamburić, a historian, told SRNA that erecting a monument to an occupier at Latin Bridge, a site that symbolizes resistance, sends a message that Sarajevo is ready to celebrate its own jailers if so ordered by a foreign agenda or a cheap party directive.

Tamburić said that the initiative to reinstall a monument to Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo is not only controversial but offensive, representing an attempt to portray the executioner as a victim and occupation as a civilizational gift.

"While the world in the 21st century is striving to cast off the last shackles of colonial consciousness, in Sarajevo we are witnessing an attempt to resurrect an imperial illusion. Tyrants are not guests, and occupation is not tourism," Tamburić emphasized.

Tamburić described as hypocritical the fact that Gavrilo Princip is labeled a terrorist in Sarajevo, noting that he was not a religious fanatic, but rather a member of Young Bosnia, a movement that dreamed of freedom for all South Slavic peoples.

"His shot was not aimed at a man, but at a symbol of tyranny. Gavrilo Princip was a tyrannicide. In the history of civilization, the act of removing a tyrant has been celebrated as the highest expression of human dignity," Tamburić emphasized.

According to him, the initiative to reinstall a monument to Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife near Latin Bridge, formerly known as Princip's Bridge, in Sarajevo, which was adopted yesterday by the Sarajevo City Council, is the product of alarming historical ignorance and a deliberate intention to once again submit to the will of others.

"An attempt to buy political points with foreign mentors or to lure tourists at the cost of one's own humiliation is nothing more than a bow to occupiers and the defeat of all national dignity," Tamburić pointed out.

He said that erecting a monument to representatives of the Habsburg Monarchy at a site where the heart of resistance once beat amounts to spitting in the face of every peasant who, under that same crown, remained a disenfranchised serf.

The Sarajevo City Council yesterday adopted an initiative by the councilors' caucus of the Party for BiH to reinstall a monument to Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife near the Latin Bridge /formerly known as Princip's Bridge/ in Sarajevo.

The monument to Franz Ferdinand and his wife was removed from the site of the Latin Bridge and destroyed after the end of the Great War and the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.