(b) Why were the evidence of the witnesses and the
declarations of the authors of the assassination not
published? It was only in 1918 that the Austrian Government,
with the help of a professor of Berlin University, published
a few facts taken from the proceedings of the trial.
Although in this book[75] a great deal of material
importance has been omitted--for example, the declarations
of the witnesses as well as the last declarations of the
accused, nevertheless that which we have before us
constitutes one of the most terrible accusations against the
Habsburg Monarchy. The young accused persons were not afraid
to state, even behind closed doors in a barrack-room, some
bitter truths concerning Austria-Hungary. One can have some
idea of what they would have said in a public trial from the
results of the famous trials of Zagreb and of Friedjung. All
the accused persons, as well as their accomplices, declared
that the decision to kill the Archduke was an act of their
own personal will and that nobody incited or ordered them
to make the attempt, least of all any authority of the
Kingdom of Serbia. The crime was the personal act of Bosnian
patriots who believed that they were serving their oppressed
people. "In Bosnia," said the Minister Burian--"in Bosnia,
there is no policy, there is only administration."
(c) Why did the Sarajevo police and Austro-Hungarian
official circles conduct themselves so strangely with
respect to the bomb-thrower Čabrinović, a notorious
anarchist and son of a Sarajevo police spy, who had on a
former occasion been expelled by the police from Sarajevo?
Later on, after the Belgrade police had been obliged, owing
to the intervention of the Austrian Consulate, to allow him
to stay in Belgrade, he returned to Sarajevo and was quite
unmolested by the police, whose precautions a few years
previously, at the time of the visit of Francis Joseph, had
gone so far as to expel, as suspected persons, two members
of the Bosnian Parliament.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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