Vaso Čubrilović

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vaso Čubrilović was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1897. He was a student in Sarajevo, when Danilo Ilić recruited him and his friend, Cvjetko Popović, to help assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. His brother, Veljko Čubrilović, was also involved in the plot.

On Sunday, 28 June 1914, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg were assassinated by Gavrilo Princip. Princip and Nedeljko Čabrinović were captured and interrogated by the police. They eventually gave the names of their fellow conspirators. Muhamed Mehmedbašić who managed to escape to Serbia, but Vaso Čubrilović, Danilo Ilić, Veljko Čubrilović, Cvjetko Popović and Miško Jovanović were arrested and charged with treason and murder.

Eight of the men charged with treason and the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand were found guilty. Under Austro-Hungarian law, capital punishment could not be imposed on someone who was under the age of twenty when they had committed the crime. Nedjelko Čabrinović, Gavrilo Princip and Trifko Grabež therefore received the maximum penalty of twenty years. Vaso Čubrilović got sixteen years and Cvjetko Popović thirteen years. Miško Jovanović, Danilo Ilić and Veljko Čubrilović, who helped the assassins kill the royal couple, were executed on 3 February 1915.

Vaso Čubrilović was released when the Allies defeated the Central Powers in November 1918. He became a teacher in Sarajevo and went on to become a university professor in Belgrade.

In 1937, Čubrilović wrote his "The Expulsion of the Albanians" [1] memorandum, which he hoped would solve their Albanian problem once in for all. Having failed to colonize Kosovo, Čubrilović urges the Serbian government to do whatever it could to remove as many as 200,000 Albanians from Kosovo and have Serbs and Montenegrians take over their property. In 1937, he saw it as politically feasible: "If Germany can evict hundreds of thousands of Jews, if Russia can transport millions of people from one part of the continent to another, a few hundred thousand evicted Albanians will not provoke a world war." [2]"

If harassment, high taxation and confiscation are not enough, Čubrilović suggests inciting riots which "will be bloodily suppressed by the most effective means, though by colonists from the Montenegrin clans and the Chetniks, rather than by means of the army."[3] This way he argued, the government cannot be blamed. As a last resort, he reasons, the Serbs can revert to a proven technique: "There remains one more method Serbia employed with great practical effect after 1878, that is, secretly razing Albanian villages and urban settlements to the ground."[4]

After World War II, Vaso Čubrilović served as Minister of Forests in Yugoslavia's government. He died in 1990.