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WHATEVER was the name of the driver who took a wrong turning in the Serbian city of Sarajevo a hundred years ago? History has never told us. Yet it was because of his unwitting mistake on June 28, 1914 that a young Serb Gavrilo Princip was able, just as the driver tried to reverse his car, to leap on to its running board and to assassinate the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Countess Sophie.
That murder precipitated the First World War, a conflagration that spread from Great Britain across Continental Europe, to the steppes of Russia, and the shores of Turkey. Those who began it were confident that it would be the ‘war to end wars’. Those who looked beyond its end foresaw ‘a world safe for democracy.’
“Men are reluctant to believe,” A.J.P. Taylor, one of the most eminent of them, had written 50 years ago, “that great events have small causes.” That is why for the past century, historians have tried to analyse the causes of that war. Taylor was convinced that “nowhere was there conscious determination to provoke a war. Statesmen miscalculated ... [and] became the prisoners of their own weapons. The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations by their own weight.’
Has anything changed since then?
There are no flowers for this region’s soldiers.
Nothing really, except that now, the United States is no longer a distant bystander, a late entrant into world wars. It is in a way the Gavrilo Princip of the 21st century. Its bullets start wars.
There is hardly a conflict since this century began that has not been spearheaded by the United States with or without its allies. Be it in Iraq (2003-11), Somalia (2009-11), Libya (2011), Operations Enduring Freedom in the Philippines, Horn of Africa, and Trans Sahara. The war in Afghanistan began in 2001. It is still aflame. Had president Woodrow Wilson been alive, there might have been an armistice in Kabul by now.
That is what makes the commemoration by Western countries of the outbreak of the First World War and come to think of it of events in the Second World War so questionable. These commemorations have taken on the expansiveness of a Steven Spielberg movie set. (His Saving Private Ryan springs to mind.) National leaders — the victor side by side with the vanquished — recently congregated on the sands of Dunkirk, to show that they no longer harbour any ill feelings.
Meanwhile, continents away, their armed forces are still collectively deployed in wars which have even less justification than either of the two World Wars did. After all, wasn’t the neutrality of Belgium a casus belli for the 1914-18 war, and the security of Poland that for the 1939-45 war? Where is the equivalent moral imperative today for Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan?
Perhaps it is time for non-European countries which provided cannon fodder to assist the Allies in those two world wars to demand parallel recognition for their contribution. A grudging acknowledgement of Victoria Cross awardees is not enough. No poppies grow over the unmarked graves of the sons of the subcontinent who gave their lives so that the European Union could flower.
An unlikely commemoration of the First World War came recently from the pen of Mani Shankar Aiyar. Returning from yet another twin-track marathon in Islamabad, he has sought unusual likenesses between 1914 Serbian assassins like Princip and 2014 militant jihadists.
Had he been a less influential voice, one might have dismissed him as yet another arm-chair alarmist. What he says towards the end of his argument though will resonate with every rational mind. “We can climb as many pulpits as we wish,” he warns, “make as many impassioned appeals to the world and Pakistan as we desire, prepare ourselves for the worst and ready ourselves to inflict on Pakistan the worst, but the end result will be an Armageddon worse than anything our imagination can conceive or our mythology grasp, if we do not agree now to an ‘uninterrupted and uninterruptible’ dialogue with Pakistan.”
Pushing Mr Aiyar’s suggestion a tad further, perhaps, perhaps soon, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh will be able to hold joint commemorations in which we honour those who gave their lives so that our later generations could argue.
That would be an act of supreme courage by our leaders, as it was once an act of supreme sacrifice by those who fought against each other and died and now share the same soil.
Until then, one must rely upon a 1914 clergyman poet Rev. G. Kennedy to give our dialogues a voice:
When the world is red and reeking,/ And the shrapnel shells are shrieking,/ And your blood is slowly leaking,/ Carry on./
The writer is an author and art historian.
Published in Dawn, July 3rd, 2014
