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By:

Shoumojit Banerjee

27 August 2024 at 9:57:52 am

The Road to Europe’s Apocalypse

Vladimir Dedijer’s long-neglected The Road to Sarajevo remains one of the finest guides to the assassination that changed the course of the twentieth century. Later this month, on July 28th, the world will quietly pass the 112th anniversary of one of history’s defining moments. On that day in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within days, Europe’s elaborate alliance system would lurch into motion. By August, the Continent, which had largely been at peace for nearly a century since...

The Road to Europe’s Apocalypse

Vladimir Dedijer’s long-neglected The Road to Sarajevo remains one of the finest guides to the assassination that changed the course of the twentieth century. Later this month, on July 28th, the world will quietly pass the 112th anniversary of one of history’s defining moments. On that day in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within days, Europe’s elaborate alliance system would lurch into motion. By August, the Continent, which had largely been at peace for nearly a century since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, was engulfed in the ‘war to end all wars.’ The First World War would claim more than 20 million lives, bring about the downfall of four empires, redraw maps from the Baltic to the Levant, and sow the seeds of Bolshevism, fascism and, lead ultimately to an even deadlier World War within the next two decades. The catastrophe that led to the First World War began with seven young conspirators waiting to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand – the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne - on the streets of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Few episodes in modern history have generated so vast a literature from so small a stage. By 1939 itself, as Europe stood on the brink of World War Two, nearly 3,000 books and pamphlets had already appeared on Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Among this formidable library stands one unjustly neglected masterpiece. Yugoslav author-politician Vladimir Dedijer’s Road to Sarajevo, published in 1966. It deserves to stand beside other great ‘origin’ classics of WW1, namely Luigi Albertini’s monumental The Origins of the War of 1914 (1942-43); Barbara Tuchman’s riveting narrative history The Guns of August (1962) and Christopher Clark’s celebrated The Sleepwalkers (2012). If Albertini reconstructed the tangled diplomacy that led to the Great War, Tuchman recreated the drama and Clark the intricacies of the European system, Dedijer illuminated something that few authors could ever possess on the subject -the historical and political psychology of Bosnia and its peculiar political turbulence. Tangled Geopolitics As a Bosnian Serb by birth and a Partisan fighter under Tito during the Second World War, Dedijer, later to become one of the former Yugoslavia’s foremost historians, brought to the origins of the First World War not merely archival diligence but an intimate understanding of the land, its people and the tangled skein of its many ethnic nationalisms. What distinguishes Road to Sarajevo from the shelves groaning with WW1 books is the balance of its historical imagination. Dedijer understood that Sarajevo was simultaneously a provincial Bosnian town and the fault line of European geopolitics. He neither elevates the 19-year-old Gavrilio Princip – the student activist and Franz Ferdinand’s assassin - into a nationalist martyr nor reduces him to a terrorist in search of notoriety. Princip emerges as a product of a peculiar political ecology born from the cauldron of Habsburg rule, South Slav nationalism, youthful idealism and the febrile atmosphere created by the Balkan Wars. Few historians have so convincingly captured the tension between individual agency and the larger historical forces that converged on June 28, 1914. Conspiracy Theories One of the book’s great pleasures lies in its treatment of the extraordinary historiography surrounding the assassination. Dedijer is less interested in peddling yet another grand theory than in forensically dissecting the countless theories that others invented. The result being that The Road to Sarajevo reads like a controlled Umberto Eco novel – a febrile, yet historically grounded thriller populated by diplomats, spies, policemen, Freemasons, revolutionaries and ambitious politicians - each cast in successive generations as the hidden puppeteer pulling the strings on that fateful day in Sarajevo. Almost immediately after the Archduke’s assassination, the hunt for invisible hands began. The American historian Sidney B. Fay, whose landmark The Origins of the World War (1928) overturned the simplistic Versailles thesis that Germany alone bore responsibility for the conflict, accused Serbia of failing to warn Vienna despite prior knowledge of the conspiracy. Bernadotte E. Schmitt’s meticulous two-volume The Coming of the War, 1914 (1930) reconstructed the July Crisis with exemplary scholarship while Pierre Renouvin, himself a decorated veteran of the Great War, subjected the diplomatic record to equally rigorous scrutiny in Les Origines immédiates de la guerre (1925). Dedijer catalogues these competing claims with enviable detachment. Few crimes in modern history have attracted so many imaginary accomplices. Alfred von Wegerer, the German authority on the Sarajevo assassination, writing in 1937, suspected a Bolshevik hand behind the deed. His argument rested largely on testimony extracted from Karl Radek - the brilliant, caustic Polish-born Bolshevik intellectual - during Stalin’s infamous Moscow show trials. Leon Trotsky, who had visited Serbia several times before 1914 and knew some members of the revolutionary circles surrounding Princip, inevitably found himself drawn into the speculation, though he had consistently opposed individual acts of terrorism as a revolutionary method. Others found darker conspirators. Father Anton Puntigam, the Jesuit priest who administered the last rites to Franz Ferdinand, believed that international Freemasonry had engineered the assassination. Count Ottokar Czernin, later Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister and one of the Archduke’s closest associates, claimed Franz Ferdinand himself had confided that Freemasons intended to murder him. Under Nazi rule, such allegations acquired an unmistakably antisemitic colouring. Hitler’s party paper - Völkischer Beobachter - described Princip as both a Jew and a Freemason - a grotesque fabrication entirely in keeping with the conspiratorial obsessions of the Third Reich. Wickham Steed, the influential British journalist and historian, suggested remarkable negligence on the part of Sarajevo’s security arrangements while others hinted that the Hungarian Prime Minister, Count István Tisza, had maintained secret contacts with Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević - better known by his nom de guerre ‘Apis’ - the formidable chief of Serbian military intelligence and guiding spirit behind the clandestine Black Hand organisation. Franz Ferdinand’s own family entered the debate. His eldest son, Max Hohenberg, accused the German secret service of complicity. The charge proved inconvenient after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938; Max and his younger brother soon found themselves imprisoned at Dachau. In one of history’s stranger ironies, Hitler himself later blamed British intelligence for the 1914 assassination while justifying his invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. A.J.P. Taylor, in his delightful review of Dedijer’s book for The New Yorker in 1966, observed that almost everybody eventually found themselves accused. Serbia, Russia, Germany, Britain, Hungary, the Bolsheviks and even American anarchists - all appeared, at one time or another, in the dock for Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Taylor’s own description of Dedijer remains one of the finest appreciations of the man: “He is a Yugoslav, not a Serb nationalist, and is not committed either to Pasic, the Serbian prime minister, or to Apis, the head of the Black Hand (though he was once dandled on Apis’s knee as a little boy).” Few historians have enjoyed quite such a colourful connection to their subject. Perhaps that explains the book’s extraordinary confidence. Dedijer neither sensationalises nor dismisses these theories. He simply lays them before the reader, examines their evidentiary foundations and wryly allows most of them to collapse under their own improbability. Every generation invents the conspiracy it deserves. Just as the assassination of Julius Caesar generated tales of omens and prophecies, and the murder of John F. Kennedy continues to nourish an endless conspiracy industry, Sarajevo has repeatedly become a screen onto which successive political eras have projected their own anxieties. But the book is perhaps even more vital - and rewarding - beyond the assassination itself. Behind Princip’s pistol stood decades of imperial rivalry, the slow retreat of Ottoman power, the ambitions unleashed by Italian and German unification, and the unresolved ‘Eastern Question’ that had vexed European statesmen since the Congress of Vienna. More signally, Dedijer anticipated a truth that later events would painfully confirm. The collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the brutality it unleashed demonstrated that the region’s history was a bottled djinn of unresolved grievances. Once uncorked, the questions of identity, sovereignty and historical grievance that animated Princip’s generation resurfaced, in a far more violent form, during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. There are books that answer historical questions. There are rarer books that teach readers how history itself is constructed. The Road to Sarajevo belongs firmly in the latter category. More than sixty years after its publication, this rich, humane and intellectually honest work deserves to find a new generation of readers.

Growing Risks Of Cyber Warfare

Updated: Oct 21, 2024

In a shocking series of events, multiple coordinated explosions have rocked Lebanon and parts of Syria, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands. The blasts occurred after explosive devices, hidden inside pagers and other radio communication devices, were detonated. The targeted individuals were primarily members of Hezbollah, with the explosions taking place in densely populated areas, resulting in widespread injuries to civilians, including children.

The devices, mainly pagers, walkie-talkies, and radios, had been in the possession of Hezbollah operatives, who had acquired them months prior, under the assumption they were secure. However, Hezbollah has accused Israel’s intelligence agency, Shin Bet, of tampering with the devices during transit.

According to security experts, Israel’s elite secret cyber warfare unit was behind the attack. This unit, known for its global cyber operations, is also linked to the creation of the STUXnet malware, which was responsible for the failure of Iran’s nuclear power plant. The pagers were rigged with explosive materials in place of a battery, and a relay switch was installed, allowing the explosions to be triggered remotely in a synchronized manner. The result was devastating injuries to the eyes, face, hands, and legs of those carrying the devices.

The incident occurred in Hezbollah-stronghold areas, including the Dahieh suburb of Beirut, southern Lebanon, and parts of the Beqaa Valley, with some explosions also reported across the border in Syria. The blasts overwhelmed hospitals, as hundreds of victims sought medical help for injuries ranging from severe burns to shattered limbs. The intensity of the explosions, far beyond that of ordinary battery malfunctions, indicates a highly sophisticated sabotage operation.

These explosions have not only deepened the crisis in Lebanon but have also raised critical questions about supply chain security, intelligence tactics, and the legality of using booby-trapped electronics in conflict zones.


What Are Pagers, and Why Are They Still Preferred?

Despite being old-school tele communication technology, pagers or beepers are still used in many countries, particularly in critical sectors and organizations. Pagers primarily facilitate one-way communication, pager uses higher frequencies than car radios i.e. 400 MHz band frequency. It also used a very basic type of VHF spectrum. These devices operate in restricted areas to transfer messages, alerts, and information. These devices are considered more secure and harder to trace or track compared to mobile phones, as they only receive messages, similar to a car radio that receives signals without revealing the listener’s identity or location. Additionally, pagers lack features like Bluetooth or GPS, making them more difficult to hack or compromise.

Among their many advantages, pagers are known for their long battery life and durability, making them ideal for continuous use in specific industries. There are an estimated two million active pager users worldwide. Hezbollah began using pagers after Israel successfully assassinated a high-ranking Hezbollah target by hacking his cellphone and precisely targeting him with a missile. Since then, many Hezbollah members have switched to more primitive communication devices, like pagers, to avoid being tracked via the internet.


Are Mobile Phones and Smartphones Similarly Vulnerable?

American and European security agencies suggest that, theoretically, it is possible to alter mobile phones and other smart devices to turn them into explosive devices. However, practically, it is more difficult due to the advanced security systems in modern smartphones. A hacked smartphone may exhibit various signs, such as abnormal temperature changes, slower system performance, unexpected reboots, odd sounds during calls, hung applications, or irrelevant messages and pop-ups, all of which could indicate tampering. These security systems make it more challenging to modify smartphones in the same manner as simpler devices like pagers.


New Security Challenges

The Hezbollah pager explosion serves as a wake-up call for sectors involving critical infrastructure and aviation. In an era where smartphones are network-connected and can be charged wirelessly, the possibility of tampering with batteries or embedding explosives, like HMX, PETN and other type of plastic explosives pose significant risks. During flights, even a minor explosion could result in catastrophic consequences. On the ground, the threat extends to damaging nearby aircraft, equipment, and infrastructure. Airport security may soon impose stricter regulations, potentially banning pagers, walkie-talkies, and radios, much like power banks, which are now restricted on flights. In the future, mobile phones may only be allowed in switched-off modes, placed in lithium-safe bags during flights. Suspicious devices could be handled separately in Faraday-sheet bags to block any network or signal connections.

This incident highlights the growing risks of cyber warfare and the dangers posed by everyday communication devices being exploited for sabotage. It is an alarming call for a nation’s security as the treat of such critical infrastructure being handled by terrorist organisations can compromise the use of day-to-day electronics for malicious activities. As technology advances, so must the protocols for ensuring public safety, particularly in high-risk environments where even the smallest vulnerability could lead to devastating consequences.

(The writer is an eminent cyber and explosives forensic expert. Views personal.)

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