Free The Trigger by Tim Butcher

‘with a company of men and a brass band at their head’, but events proved him guilty of hubris. It would ultimately require the deployment of 300,000 troops by Austria–Hungary to fulfil the occupation and, later, the full annexation of Bosnia. They took the towns quickly enough, but out in the rural areas they came across entrenched hostility, mostly from the Bosnian Muslim community. Official figures showed that in the first few months alone 5,198 men from the invading Austro-Hungarian force were killed or wounded. In keeping with its history of resistance, Herzegovina was one of the last regions to fall to the new occupiers.
    The Austro-Hungarians claimed their occupation of Bosnia was a philanthropic act of civilisation, a ‘cultural mission’, as they put it rather prosaically. Like so much colonialism of the era – the Scramble for Africa was taking place at the same time – outsiders routinely presented themselves as being committed to upliftment, promising to modernise, reform and advance the local population. But, just as in Africa, the philanthropy turned out to be largely a sham. Furthermore, the Ottoman legacy in Bosnia brought out many Western prejudices against Islam, the implicit message being that a Christian nation would necessarily make good the cruel, corrupt, conservative incompetence of Muslim rule.
    The supposed altruism of the Habsburgs did not reach far in Bosnia. A few hundred miles of road were built by the new occupiers, but mostly out of the simple military necessity for swift mobilisation and the deployment of troops. Railway lines were laid but, again, the primary motivator was hardly to help the local community. The railway was needed in order for Austro-Hungarian investors to profit from commercial exploitation. Timber from Bosnia’s rich forests was a target of this new trade, so within a few years narrow-gauge railway tracks snaked across the country and up into the forests, where felled trunks could be loaded for export. The character of town centres and cityscapes changed dramatically as European architects were encouraged to express themselves through new buildings of modern Western design. Within a few years the ancient hans, caravanserais, souks and turbes left by the Ottomans had been overshadowed, symbolically and literally, by an architectural avalanche of governors’ palaces, military barracks, university buildings, cathedrals, museums and the occasional brewery.
    Aside from these cosmetic changes, the fundamentals of life did not alter for the vast majority of Bosnians spread across the rural hinterland. Academics have carried out detailed studies of the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia after 1878, revealing how the new occupiers failed to modernise the country for which they were now responsible. They barely touched the old feudal system, meaning that serfdom continued here well into the twentieth century. They did not fundamentally tackle the social structure in the rural areas, where begs were still able to demand taxes set at arbitrary levels. And they set up yet further tiers of state fees that kept the peasants in penury. Their schools, built with great show in the larger urban areas like Sarajevo, made so meagre an impression on the population that by 1910, after more than three decades of Austro-Hungarian rule, 88 per cent of the Bosnian population could not read or write.
    In Obljaj the arrival of the Austro-Hungarians was a long drawn-out disappointment for the Princips. Sitting in the village listening to their history brought home to me the disconnect that so often separates policy from reality. The statesmen leaving the Berlin Congress smugly convinced themselves that the people of Bosnia would benefit from the diplomatic finesse of having the Western Austro-Hungarians replace the Eastern Ottomans. What they had actually done, however, was quite the opposite, sowing seeds of resentment that would eventually destroy the status quo of the entire Western