The Sleepwalkers (10 page)

There was a paradoxically public quality to the clandestinity of the Black Hand.
¹⁰³
Loose talk soon ensured that the government and the press were aware of the movement's existence and there is even some evidence that Prince Alexandar, successor to the throne after the abdication of his older brother Djordje, was informed in advance of the new foundation and was supportive of its activities. (The prince was one of a small circle of sponsors who helped to finance the foundation of
Pijemont
.) Recruitment processes were informal and often semi-public; recruiters had merely to mention the patriotic work of the organization and many officers joined without further ado.
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There were dinners and banquets in the Belgrade cafés, where Apis would preside over a long table thronged with nationalist students.
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When the commandant of Belgrade, Miloš Bozanović, asked his subordinate, Major Kostić, for information about the Black Hand, Kostić was incredulous: ‘Don't you know? It is public knowledge. They are talking about it in the cafés and public houses.' Perhaps all this was inevitable in a city like Belgrade where everyone knew everyone, and where social life took place in coffee-houses, rather than in private homes. But the spectacular secrecy of the Black Hand presumably also filled an emotional need, for what was the point of belonging to a secret organization if nobody knew that you did? To be seen wining and dining with other conspirators at the regular table conferred a sense of importance; it also created a thrilling sense of collusion among those who were formally outside the network, but in the know – and this was important for a movement that claimed to represent the silent majority of the Serbian nation.

But if its existence was a matter of general knowledge, there was plenty of room for uncertainty about its aims. Like many Radical Party leaders, Pašić viewed the Black Hand as a movement primarily dedicated to the overthrow of the Serbian state from within – he appears to have seen its ultra-nationalism as mere camouflage for domestic subversion. This misreading made its way into many of the diplomatic reports. The usually well informed Austrian minister in Belgrade reported in November 1911, for example, that the Black Hand's claim to be a patriotic group operating outside Serbia in order to unite all Serbs was ‘really only a cover; its real purpose is to intervene in internal affairs'.
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This misapprehension would continue to befuddle the Austrian authorities during the crisis of July 1914.

Within Bosnia and Herzegovina, the networks of Ujedinjenje ili smrt! and Narodna Odbrana became interwoven with local groups of pan-Serb activists, of which the most important was Mlada Bosna (‘Young Bosnia'). Mlada Bosna was not a unified organization, but rather an aggregation of groups and cells of revolutionary youth operating across the province from around 1904; its focus was less narrowly Serbian than that of the Black Hand or of Narodna Odbrana.
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Since they were operating under the eyes of the Austrian police, the Young Bosnians adopted a decentred, flexible structure based on small ‘circles' (
kruzki
), linked only by designated intermediaries. Young Bosnia's great hour arrived in 1910, when one of their number launched a suicide attack on the Austrian governor of Bosnia. On 3 June 1910, on the occasion of the opening of the Bosnian parliament, Bogdan Žerajić, a Serbian student from Herzegovina, fired five shots at Governor Marijan Varešanin. When all his bullets went wide, Žerajić emptied the sixth and last round into his own head. He was buried anonymously in a section of Sarajevo cemetery reserved for criminals and suicides, but his grave soon became a shrine for the Serb underground movement and his deed was celebrated by the nationalist press in Belgrade.
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No one did more to exalt Žerajić's reputation than his fellow Young Bosnian Vladimir Gačinović. Gačinović had left Bosnia to attend high school in Belgrade, staying on to complete one term at the university there, before winning a government scholarship to the University of Vienna. In 1911 he had joined both Ujedinjenje ili smrt! and Narodna Odbrana; after his return to Sarajevo, he established a network of activist cells in the city. But Gačinović was best known for a tract he wrote celebrating the life and death of Žerajić.
The Death of a Hero
described the suicide shooter as ‘a man of action, of strength, of life and virtue, a type such as opens an epoch' and closed with an incendiary challenge: ‘Young Serbs, will you produce such men?' Gačinović ‘s pamphlet circulated widely as contraband in Bosnia and became one of the key cult texts of the pan-Serbian terrorist milieu, blending as it did the themes of assassination and sacrifice in a manner reminiscent of the Kosovo epics.
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Žerajić's attack marked the beginning of the systematic use of political terrorism against the political elite of the Habsburg Empire; there were seven further similar incidents and more than a dozen other abortive plots were detected in the South Slav provinces of the empire during the three years between Žerajić's death and the fatal shots of 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo.
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At the end of September 1911, only six months after the foundation of Ujedinjenje ili smrt!, Italy launched an invasion of Libya. This unprovoked attack on one of the integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire triggered a cascade of opportunist attacks on Ottoman-controlled territory in the Balkans. A loose coalition of Balkan states – Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece – mounted parallel assaults on Ottoman territory, thereby starting the First Balkan War (October 1912–May 1913). The result was a momentous victory for the Balkan allies over the Ottoman forces, who were driven out of Albania, Macedonia and Thrace. In the Second Balkan War (June–July 1913), the belligerents fought over the spoils of the first: Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Romania fought Bulgaria for territories in Macedonia, Thrace and the Dobrudja.

The impact of these two wars is discussed in more detail in
chapter 5
. For the moment, it suffices to note that their most conspicuous beneficiary was Serbia, which acquired central Vardar, including Ohrid, Bitola, Kosovo, Štip and Kočani, plus the eastern half of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar (the western half fell to Montenegro). The kingdom's territorial extent increased from 18,650 to 33,891 square miles and its population grew by more than one and a half million. The acquisition of Kosovo, the mythscape of Serbian national poetry, was a cause for great rejoicing, and since the kingdom now shared a border with Montenegro to the west, there was the prospect that Serbia might, through a political union with its neighbour, secure a permanent access to the Adriatic coast. Moreover, Serbia's conduct of the war appeared to show that the years of military investment financed by French loans (there was another big one from a consortium of French banks in September 1913) had not been in vain. Three hundred thousand troops had been put into the field within three weeks of the first mobilization order. The Serbian army was now, as one foreign observer noted, ‘a factor to be reckoned with', and Serbia itself a major regional power.
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Dayrell Crackanthorpe, the British minister in Belgrade, reported on the mood of public elation: ‘Serbia feels that she has, so to speak, attained her majority and [. . .] can pursue a national policy of her own.' The kingdom's political elites were currently ‘passing through a phase of extreme self-satisfaction'; everywhere in the press and in public debate, Serbian successes in the field were contrasted with ‘the failures of Austrian diplomacy'.
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For many of those in the territories newly conquered by Belgrade, the imposition of Serbian rule brought harassment and oppression. The freedom of association, assembly and the press guaranteed under the Serbian constitution of 1903 (Articles 24, 25 and 22) were not introduced into the new territories; nor was Article 13 revoking the death penalty for political crimes. The inhabitants of the new areas were denied active or passive voting rights. In other words, the conquered areas acquired, for the moment, the character of a colony. The government justified these decisions on the grounds that the cultural level of the new territories was so low that granting them freedom would endanger the country. In reality the chief concern was to keep the non-Serbs who constituted the majority in many areas out of national politics. Opposition newspapers such as
Radičke Novine
and
Pravda
were quick to point out that the ‘new Serbs' had actually enjoyed better political rights under the Turks than they did under Serbian administration.
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On the Serbian side, this was a war in two kinds, fought not only by regular army units, but also, as so often in the past, by partisan bands,
comitatjis
, and other freelance fighters. In the newly conquered areas, the collusion between official authorities and informal groups had appalling consequences. There was much arbitrary destruction of Turkish buildings, such as schools, baths and mosques. British consuls managed to limit the damage in some instances by persuading the local Serbian military commanders that this or that building dated back to the empire of Stepan Dušan and was thus a part of the Serbian national patrimony; this ruse succeeded, for example, in the case of the beautiful sixteenth-century Turkish bridge in Macedonian Skopje (Üsküb).
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In October and November 1913, the British vice-consuls in Skopje and Monastir reported systematic intimidation, arbitrary detentions, beatings, rapes, village-burnings and massacres by the Serbs in the annexed areas.
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‘It is already abundantly evident,' Vice-Consul Greig of Monastir reported, ‘that Moslems under Servian rule have nothing whatsoever to expect but periodical massacre, certain exploitation and final ruin.' Eleven days later, he filed a further report warning that the ‘Bulgarian and especially the Moslem populations in the districts of Perlepe, Krchevo and Krushevo [were] in danger of extermination by the very frequent and barbarous massacres and pillage to which they are subjected by Servian bands'.
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By the end of the month, ‘pillages, murder and outrages of other kinds by bands of Servian comitajis and persons in league with them' had created conditions of near-anarchy.
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Albanians and other Muslims, Bulgars, Vlachs and Jews, the vice-consul reported in December, dreaded the prospect of subjection to ‘a penniless state' that seemed bent on ‘draining every community of its means of existence to an extent unknown in the blackest days of the Turkish regime'.
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From Bitola in the south, near the Greek border, the British vice-consul reported that the old municipal officials had been replaced by a new cohort of corrupt ‘Servian ex-propagandists' whose ringleaders were ‘(1) an ex-barber, spy and Serbian agent [. . .] and (2) a local Serboman of unmentionable profession called Maxim'. ‘Nothing,' Greig concluded, ‘could be more favourable to the enemies of Servia than the reign of terror set up by this clique.'
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What is interesting about these reports is not merely their disturbing content, but the scepticism with which they were received by the British minister Crackanthorpe, a man of pronounced Serbophile sentiment. Crackanthorpe, whose most important source on the events unfolding in the annexed areas was ‘a Servian officer of his acquaintance',
¹²⁰
accepted the official denials of the Belgrade government at face value and tried to mute the impact of Greig's dispatches from Monastir by suggesting to the Foreign Office that the vice-consul was the dupe of hysterical refugees and their tall tales. Already, one might argue, the events unfolding in the Balkans were being viewed through the geopolitical lens of the alliance system, in which Serbia figured as a friendly state locked in a gallant struggle with fearsome neighbouring Austria-Hungary. It was only the cumulative detail of the reports emerging from the annexed areas, combined with corroborating accounts from Romanian, Swiss and French officials that persuaded the British Foreign Office that the news of Macedonian atrocities should not be dismissed as Austrian propaganda.

In the meantime, the Serbian government showed no interest whatsoever in preventing further outrages or in instigating an investigation of those that had already occurred. When Pašić was alerted to the events in Bitola by the British, he simply replied that he did not know the prefect there personally and therefore could not comment. His offer to send a commissioner to the south to explore the matter further never materialized. Informed by the Serbian minister in Constantinople of complaints from a delegation of senior Muslim dignitaries, he declared that these stories stemmed from emigrants who had exaggerated their sufferings in order to secure a warmer welcome among their new compatriots.
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When the Carnegie Commission – composed of a hand-picked international team of experts selected for their impartiality – arrived in the Balkans to conduct their famous investigation of the atrocities committed in the contested areas, they received virtually no assistance from Belgrade.
¹²²

The wars seemed for a time to have resolved the tensions within the executive structure in Belgrade. For a brief interval, the covert networks, the regular army, the partisan bands and the cabinet ministers pulled together in the national cause. Apis was sent to conduct covert operations for the army in Macedonia before the Serbian invasion in 1912; in its work negotiating with Albanian chieftains in 1913, the Black Hand essentially functioned as an arm of the foreign ministry in Belgrade. The pacification of the newly conquered areas in the south involved not just regular army units but also volunteer bands affiliated with Black Hand operatives such as Voja Tankosić, a former regicide conspirator who had overseen the murder of Queen Draga's two brothers.
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It was a mark of the Black Hand's enhanced prestige that Apis was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in January 1913 and appointed chief of the General Staff's intelligence division in August, a role that placed him in control of the extensive network of Serbian Narodna Odbrana agents inside Austria-Hungary.
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