Belgrade: Serbia unveiled a statue on Sunday of the man whose killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand 101 years ago lit the fuse for World War One, feting an assassin who still divides his native Balkans.
Many Serbs regard Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, as a pan-Slavic hero, the shot he fired in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 marking the death knell for centuries of foreign occupation over the various nations and faiths that would make up the Yugoslavia that emerged.
To others he is a terrorist, a nationalist fanatic whose act triggered a war in which 10 million soldiers died and the world order was rewritten.
The former was the official line during socialist Yugoslavia, but as the federation crumbled in war in the 1990s so too did perceptions of Princip.
"Gavrilo Princip was a hero, he was a symbol of an idea of liberation," Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic said at the ceremony attended by several hundred citizens.
"Others can think whatever they want to," he said.
The two-metre tall bronze statue was a gift of Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic, one of two regions that share power in Bosnia since a 1992-95 war in which 100,000 people were killed.
It will stand in a square near the Serbian government headquarters and the finance ministry, not far from the Belgrade restaurant Princip frequented when he and his accomplices were planning the murder.
Bosnia’s Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats do not share the Orthodox Serbs’ reverence of Princip. The Bosnian Serbs built their own statue of Princip a year ago to mark 100 years since he shot dead the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne during a visit to Sarajevo.
Spared the death sentence because he was not yet 20, Princip died of tuberculosis in his jail cell in 1918.
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