The Sleepwalkers (5 page)

Dimitrijević originally planned to kill the royal couple at a ball in central Belgrade on 11 September (the queen's birthday). In a plan that seems lifted from the pages of an Ian Fleming novel, two officers were assigned to mount an attack on the Danube power plant that supplied Belgrade with electricity, while another was to disable the smaller station serving the building where the ball was in progress. Once the lights were shut off, the four assassins in attendance at the ball planned to set fire to the curtains, sound the fire alarms and liquidate the king and his wife by forcing them to ingest poison (this method was chosen in order to circumvent a possible search for firearms). The poison was successfully tested on a cat, but in every other respect the plan was a failure. The power plant turned out to be too heavily guarded and the queen decided in any case not to attend the ball.
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Undeterred by this and other failed attempts, the conspirators worked hard over the next two years at expanding the scope of the coup. Over one hundred officers were recruited, including many younger military men. By the end of 1901 there were also contacts with civilian political leaders, among them the former interior minister Djordje Genčić, he who had been slapped for his candid objections to the king's marriage plans. In the autumn of 1902, the conspiracy was given formal expression in a secret oath. Drawn up by Dimitrijević-Apis, it was refreshingly straightforward about the object of the enterprise: ‘Anticipating certain collapse of the state [. . .] and blaming for this primarily the king and his paramour Draga Mašin, we swear that we shall murder them and to that effect affix our signatures.'
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By the spring of 1903, when the plot encompassed between 120 and 150 conspirators, the plan to kill the royal couple inside their own palace was mature. Carrying it out required extensive preparation, however, because the king and his wife, falling prey to an entirely justified paranoia, stepped up their security arrangements. The king never appeared in town except in the company of a crowd of attendants; Draga was so terrified of an attack that she had at one point confined herself to the palace for six weeks. Guard details in and around the building were doubled. The rumours of an impending coup were so widespread that the London
Times
of 27 April 1903 could cite a ‘confidential' Belgrade source to the effect that ‘there exists a military conspiracy against the throne of such an extent that neither King nor Government dare take steps to crush it'.
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The recruitment of key insiders, including officers from the Palace Guard and the king's own aide-de-camp, provided the assassins with a means of picking their way past the successive lines of sentries and gaining access to the inner sanctum. The date of the attack was chosen just three days in advance, when it was known that all the key conspirators would be in place and on duty at their respective posts. It was agreed that the thing must be done in the greatest possible haste and then be made known immediately, in order to forestall an intervention by the police, or by regiments remaining loyal to the king.
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The desire to advertise the success of the enterprise as soon as it was accomplished may help to explain the decision to toss the royal corpses from the bedroom balcony. Apis joined the killing squad that broke into the palace, but he missed the final act of the drama; he was shot and seriously wounded in an exchange of fire with guards inside the main entrance. He collapsed on the spot, lost consciousness and only narrowly escaped bleeding to death.

Assassination of the Obrenović, from
Le Petit Journal
, 28 June 1903

‘Town quiet people generally seem unmoved,' noted Sir George Bonham, the British minister in Belgrade, in a lapidary dispatch to London on the evening of 11 June.
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The Serbian ‘revolution', Bonham reported, had been ‘hailed with open satisfaction' by the inhabitants of the capital; the day following the murders was ‘kept as a holiday and the streets decorated with flags'. There was ‘an entire absence of decent regret'.
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The ‘most striking feature' of the Serbian tragedy, declared Sir Francis Plunkett, Bonham's colleague in Vienna, was ‘the extraordinary calmness with which the execution of such an atrocious crime has been accepted'.
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Hostile observers saw in this equanimity of mood evidence of the heartlessness of a nation by long tradition inured to violence and regicide. In reality, the citizens of Belgrade had good reason to welcome the assassinations. The conspirators immediately turned power over to an all-party provisional government. Parliament was swiftly reconvened. Petar Karadjordjević was recalled from his Swiss exile and elected king by the parliament. The emphatically democratic constitution of 1888 – now renamed the Constitution of 1903 – was reinstated with some minor modifications. The age-old problem of the rivalry between two Serbian dynasties was suddenly a thing of the past. The fact that Karadjordjević, who had spent much of his life in France and Switzerland, was an aficionado of John Stuart Mill – in his younger years, he had even translated Mill's
On Liberty
into Serbian – was encouraging to those with liberal instincts.

Even more reassuring was Petar's proclamation to the people, delivered shortly after his return from exile, that he intended to reign as ‘the truly constitutional king of Serbia'.
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The kingdom now became a genuinely parliamentary polity, in which the monarch reigned but did not govern. The murder during the coup of the repressive prime minister Cincar-Marković – a favourite of Alexandar – was a clear signal that political power would henceforth depend upon popular support and party networks, rather than on the goodwill of the crown. Political parties could go about their work without fear of reprisals. The press was at last free of the censorship that had been the norm under the Obrenović rulers. The prospect beckoned of a national political life more responsive to popular needs and more in tune with public opinion. Serbia stood on the threshold of a new epoch in its political existence.
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But if the coup of 1903 resolved some old issues, it also created new problems that would weigh heavily on the events of 1914. Above all, the conspiratorial network that had come together to murder the royal family did not simply melt away, but remained an important force in Serbian politics and public life. The provisional revolutionary government formed on the day after the assassinations included four conspirators (among them the ministers of war, public works and economics) and six party politicians. Apis, still recovering from his wounds, was formally thanked for what he had done by the Skupština and became a national hero. The fact that the new regime depended for its existence on the bloody work of the conspirators, combined with fear of what the network might still be capable of, made open criticism difficult. One minister in the new government confided to a newspaper correspondent ten days after the event that he found the actions of the assassins ‘deplorable' but was ‘unable to characterise them openly in such terms owing to the feeling which it might create in the army, on the support of which both throne and Government depend'.
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The regicide network was especially influential at court. ‘So far', the British envoy Wilfred Thesiger reported from Belgrade in November 1905, the conspirator officers ‘have formed his Majesty's most important and even sole support'; their removal would leave the crown ‘without any party whose devotion or even friendship could be relied on'.
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It was thus hardly surprising that when King Petar looked in the winter of 1905 for a companion to accompany his son, Crown Prince Djordje, on a journey across Europe, he should choose none other than Apis, fresh from a long convalescence and still carrying three of the bullets that had entered his body on the night of the assassinations. The chief architect of the regicide was thus charged with seeing the next Karadjordjević king through to the end of his education as prince. In the event, Djordje never became king; he disqualified himself from the Serbian succession in 1909 by kicking his valet to death.
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The Austrian minister in Belgrade could thus report with only slight exaggeration that the king remained, even after his election by the parliament, the ‘prisoner' of those who had brought him into power.
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‘The King is a nullity,' one senior official at the Austrian Foreign Office concluded at the end of November. ‘The whole show is run by the people of 11 June.'
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The conspirators used this leverage to secure for themselves the most desirable military and government posts. The newly appointed royal adjutants were all conspirators, as were the ordnance officers and the chief of the postal department in the ministry of war, and the conspirators were able to influence military appointments, including senior command positions. Using their privileged access to the monarch, they also exercised an influence over political questions of national importance.
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The machinations of the regicides did not go unchallenged. There was external pressure on the new government to detach itself from the network, especially from Britain, which withdrew its minister plenipotentiary and left the legation in the hands of the chargé d'affaires, Thesiger. As late as autumn 1905, many symbolically important Belgrade functions – especially events at court – were still being boycotted by representatives of the European great powers. Within the army itself, a military ‘counter-conspiracy' concentrated in the fortress town of Niš emerged under the leadership of Captain Milan Novaković, who produced a manifesto calling for the dismissal from the service of sixty-eight named prominent regicides. Novaković was swiftly arrested and after a spirited defence of his actions, he and his accomplices were tried, found guilty and sentenced to varying periods of imprisonment by a military court. When he left prison two years later, Novaković resumed his public attacks on the regicides and was incarcerated again. In September 1907, he and a male relative perished in mysterious circumstances during an alleged escape attempt, a scandal that triggered outrage in parliament and the liberal press.
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The question of the relationship between the army and the civilian authorities thus remained unresolved after the assassinations of 1903, a state of affairs that would shape Serbia's handling of events in 1914.

The man who shouldered the lion's share of the responsibility for managing this challenging constellation was the Radical leader, Nikola Pašić. Pašić, a Zurich-trained engineering graduate, was the kingdom's dominant statesman after the regicide. During the years 1904–18, he headed ten cabinets for a total of nine years. As the man who stood at the apex of Serbian politics before, during and after the Sarajevo assassinations in 1914, Pašić would be one of the key players in the crisis that preceded the outbreak of the First World War.

This was surely one of the most remarkable political careers in modern European history, not just on account of its longevity – Pašić was active in Serbian politics for over forty years – but also because of the alternation of moments of giddy triumph with situations of extreme peril. Though he was nominally an engineer, politics consumed his entire existence – this is one of the reasons why he remained unmarried until the age of forty-five.
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From the beginning, he was deeply committed to the struggle for Serbian independence from foreign sovereignty. In 1875, when there was a revolt against Turkish rule in Bosnia, the young Pašić travelled there as correspondent for the irredentist newspaper
Narodno Oslobodjenje
(National Liberation) in order to send dispatches from the front line of the Serbian national struggle. In the early 1880s, he oversaw the modernization of the Radical Party, which would remain the single most powerful force in Serbian politics until the outbreak of the First World War.

The Radicals embodied an eclectic politics that combined liberal constitutional ideas with calls for Serbian expansion and the territorial unification of all the Serbs of the Balkan peninsula. The popular base of the party – and the key to its enduring electoral success – was the smallholding peasantry that made up the bulk of the country's population. As a party of peasants, the Radicals embraced a variety of populism that linked them to pan-Slavist groups in Russia. They were suspicious of the professional army, not only because they resented the fiscal burdens imposed to maintain it, but also because they remained wedded to the peasant militia as the best and most natural form of armed organization. During the Timok rebellion of 1883, the Radicals sided with the arms-bearing peasants against the government and the suppression of the uprising was followed by reprisals against Radical leaders. Pašić was among those who came under suspicion; he fled into exile just in time to escape arrest and was sentenced to death
in absentia
. During his years in exile he established enduring contacts in St Petersburg and became the darling of pan-Slav circles; thereafter his policy was always closely linked with Russian policy.
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After Milan's abdication in 1889, Pašić, whose exile had established him as a hero of the Radical movement, was pardoned. He returned to Belgrade amid popular adulation to be elected president of the Skupština and then mayor of the capital city. But his first tenure as prime minister (February 1891–August 1892) ended with his resignation in protest at the continuing extra-constitutional manipulations of Milan and the Regents.