To assess the degree of Serbian guilt, we should look in three places:

the young Bosnian assassins, their backers in Serbia, and the Serbian
government.

In an open car, Franz Ferdinand, his wife Sophie Chotek and Governor
Potiorek passed seven assassins as their procession drove through
Sarajevo. A look at the actual participants tells us something about
South Slav nationalist dissatisfaction in Habsburg-ruled Bosnia.

The first conspirator along the parade route was Mehmed

Mehmedbasic, a 27-year old carpenter, son of an impoverished
Bosnian Muslim notable: he had a bomb. After planning a plot of his
own to kill Governor Potiorek, Mehmedbasic joined the larger plot.
When the car passed him, he did nothing: a gendarme stood close by,
and Mehmedbasic feared that a botched attempt might spoil the
chance for the others. He was the only one of the assassins to escape.

Map: SARAJEVO IN 1905/1914

[Clicking here will display a tourist map of the city of Sarajevo in 1905
in another browser window, while leaving this lecture text in the
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Next was Vaso Cubrilovic, a 17-year old student armed with a revolver.
Cubrilovic was recruited for the plot during a political discussion: in
Bosnia in 1914, virtual strangers could soon be plotting political
murders together, if they shared radical interests. Cubrilovic had been
expelled from the Tuzla high school for walking out during the
Habsburg anthem. Cubrilovic too did nothing, afraid of shooting
Duchess Sophie by accident. Under Austrian law, there was no death
penalty for juvenile offenders, so Cubrilovic was sentenced to 16
years. In later life he became a history professor.

Nedelko Cabrinovic was the third man, a 20-year old idler who was on
bad terms with his family over his politics: he took part in strikes and
read anarchist books. His father ran a cafe, did errands for the local
police, and beat his family. Nedeljko dropped out of school, and moved
from job to job: locksmithing, operating a lathe and setting type. In
1914 Cabrinovic worked for the Serbian state printing house in
Belgrade. He was a friend of Gavrilo Princip, who recruited him there
for the killing, and they travelled together back to Sarajevo. Cabrinovic
threw a bomb, but failed to see the car in time to aim well: he missed
the heir's car and hit the next one, injuring several people. Cabrinovic
swallowed poison and jumped into a canal, but he was saved from
suicide and arrested. He died of tuberculosis in prison in 1916.
The fourth and fifth plotters were standing together. One was Cvetko
Popovic, an 18-year old student who seems to have lost his nerve,
although he claimed not to have seen the car, being nearsighted.
Popovic received a 13-year sentence, and later became a school
principal.

Nearby was 24-year old Danilo Ilic, the main organizer of the plot; he
had no weapon. Ilic was raised in Sarajevo by his mother, a laundress.
His father was dead, and Ilic worked as a newsboy, a theatre usher, a
laborer, a railway porter, a stone-worker and a longshoreman while
finishing school; later he was a teacher, a bank clerk, and a nurse
during the Balkan Wars. His real vocation was political agitation: he
had contacts in Bosnia, with the Black Hand in Serbia and in the exile
community in Switzerland. He obtained the guns and bombs used in
the plot. Ilic was executed for the crime.

The final two of the seven conspirators were farther down the road.
Trifko Grabez was a 19-year old Bosnian going to school in Belgrade,
where he became friends with Princip. He too did nothing: at his trial
he said he was afraid of hurting some nearby women and children, and
feared that an innocent friend standing with him would be arrested
unjustly. He too died in prison: the Austrians spared few resources for
the health of the assassins after conviction.

Gavrilo Princip was last. Also 19-years old, he was a student who had
never held a job. His peasant family owned a tiny farm of four acres,
the remnant of a communal zadruga broken up in the 1880s; for extra
cash, his father drove a mail coach. Gavrilo was sickly but smart: at 13
he went off to the Merchants Boarding School in Sarajevo. He soon
turned up his nose at commerce in favor of literature, poetry and
student politics. For his role in a demonstration, he was expelled and
lost his scholarship. In 1912 he went to Belgrade: he never enrolled in
school, but dabbled in literature and politics, and somehow made
contact with Apis and the Black Hand. During the Balkan Wars he
volunteered for the Serbian army, but was rejected as too small and
weak.

On the day of the attack, Princip heard Cabrinovic's bomb go off and
assumed that the Archduke was dead. By the time he heard what had
really happened, the cars had driven past him. By bad luck, a little
later the returning procession missed a turn and stopped to back up at
a corner just as Princip happened to walk by. Princip fired two shots:
one killed the archduke, the other his wife. Princip was arrested before
he could swallow his poison capsule or shoot himself. Princip too was a
minor under Austrian law, so he could not be executed. Instead he was
sentenced to 20 years in prison, and died of tuberculosis in 1916.

We can make some generalizations about the plotters. All were

Bosnian by birth. Most were Serbian, or one might say Orthodox, but
one was a Bosnian Muslim: at their trial, the plotters did not speak of
Serbian, Croatian or Muslim identity, only their unhappiness with the
Habsburgs. None of the plotters was older than 27: so none of them
were old enough to remember the Ottoman regime. Their anger over
conditions in Bosnia seems directed simply at the visible authorities.
The assassins were not advanced political thinkers: most were high
school students. From statements at their trial, the killing seems to
have been a symbolic act of protest. Certainly they did not expect it to
cause a war between Austria and Serbia.

A closer look at the victims also supports this view: that symbolic, not
real, power was at stake. Assassination attempts were not unusual in
Bosnia. Some of the plotters originally planned to kill Governor
Potiorek, and only switched to the royal couple at the last minute.
Franz Ferdinand had limited political influence. He was Emperor Franz
Joseph's nephew, and became the heir when Franz Joseph's son killed
himself in 1889 (his sisters could not take the throne).

This position conferred less power than one might think. Franz
Ferdinand's wife, Sophie Chotek, was a Bohemian noblewoman, but
not noble enough to be royal. She was scorned by many at court, and
their children were out of the line of succession (Franz Ferdinand's
brother Otto was next). Franz Ferdinand had strong opinions, a sharp
tongue and many political enemies. He favored "trialism," adding a
third Slavic component to the Dual Monarchy, in part to reduce the
influence of the Hungarians. His relations with Budapest were so bad
that gossips blamed the killing on Magyar politicians. There have been
efforts to say that Serbian politicians had him killed to block his pro-
Slav reform plans, but the evidence for this is thin.

Serbian blame: the Black Hand

The assassins did not act alone. Who was involved within Serbia, and
why? To understand Serbian actions accurately, we must distinguish
between the Radical Party led by Prime Minister Pasic, and the circle of
radicals in the army around Apis, the man who led the murders of the
Serbian royal couple in 1903.
The role of Apis in 1914 is a matter of guesswork, despite many
investigations. The planning was secret, and most of the participants
died without making reliable statements . Student groups like Mlada
Bosna were capable of hatching murder plots on their own. During
1913 several of the eventual participants talked about murdering
General Oskar Potiorek, the provincial Governor or even Emperor Franz
Joseph.
Once identified as would-be assassins, however, the Bosnian students
seem to have been directed toward Franz Ferdinand by Dimitrijevic-
Apis, by now a colonel in charge of Serbian intelligence. Princip
returned from a trip to Belgrade early in 1914 with a plan to kill Franz
Ferdinand, contacts in the Black Hand who later supplied the guns and
bombs, and information about the planned June visit by the heir, which
Princip would not have known without a leak or tip from within Serbian
intelligence. In 1917, Apis took credit for planning the killing, but his
motives can be questioned: at the time, he was being tried for treason
against the Serbian king, and mistakenly believed that his role in the
plot would lead to leniency. In fact, the Radical Party and the king were
afraid of Apis and had him shot.
Those who believe Apis was at work point to "trialism" as his motive.
Apis is supposed to have seen the heir as the only man capable of
reviving Austria-Hungary. If Franz Ferdinand had reorganized the
Habsburg Empire on a trialist basis, satisfying the Habsburg South
Slavs, Serbian hopes to expand into Bosnia and Croatia would have
been blocked. In early June 1914, Apis is said to have decided to give
guns and bombs to Princip and his accomplices, and arranged to get
the students back over the border into Bosnia without passing through
the border checkpoints. Later in the month, other members of the
Black Hand ruling council voted to cancel the plan, but by then it was
too late to call back the assassins.

Serbian blame: Pasic and the state

While Apis may or may not have been guilty of planning the murder,
the murder did not necessarily mean war. There was no irresistable
outburst of popular anger after the assassination: Austria-Hungary did
not take revenge in hot blood, but waited almost two months. When
the Habsburg state did react against Serbia, it was in a calculated
manner as we will see in a moment. For now, suffice it to say that the
Austrians chose to blame the Pasic government for the crime. How
culpable was the Serbian regime?
There is no evidence to suggest that Pasic planned the crime. It is
unlikely that the Black Hand officers were acting on behalf of the
government, because the military and the Radical Party in fact were
engaged in a bitter competition to control the state. After the Balkan
Wars, both military and civilian figures claimed the right to administer
the newly liberated lands (the so-called Priority Question). After 1903,
Pasic knew that Apis' clique would kill to get their way.
Pasic's responsibility revolves around reports that he was warned of
the intended crime, and took inadequate steps to warn Austrian
authorities. Despite Pasic's denials, there is substantial testimony that
someone alerted him to the plot, and that Pasic ordered the Serbian
ambassador in Vienna to tell the Austrians that an attempt would be
made on the life of the heir during his visit to Bosnia.
However, when the Serbian ambassador passed on the warning, he
appears to have been too discreet. Instead of saying that he knew of
an actual plot, he spoke in terms of a hypothetical assassination
attempt, and suggested that a state visit by Franz Ferdinand on the
day of Kosovo (June 28) was too provocative. Austrian diplomats failed
to read between the lines of this vague comment. By the time the
warning reached the Habsburg joint finance minister (the man in
charge of Bosnian affairs) any sense of urgency had been lost, and he
did nothing to increase security or cancel the heir's planned visit. After
the murders, the Serbian government was even more reluctant to
compromise itself by admitting any prior knowledge, hence Pasic's
later denials.
If we agree that the Pasic government did not plan the killings, what
can we say about their response to the crisis that followed? War in
1914 was not inevitable: did the Serbs work hard enough to avoid it?