Two concerts in two Bosnian cities will today mark the 100th anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination that lit the fuse for World War I, in a divided country where the past still haunts the present.

The separate events speak volumes to Bosnia a century on, where perceptions of the Bosnian Serb who gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand have been warped by time and politics, and wounds are still raw from the bloody demise of Yugoslavia.

In the capital, where the heir to the Habsburg throne was shot with a Browning gun on a summer’s morning in 1914, the Vienna Philharmonic will play Haydn, Schubert, Brahms and Ravel in remembrance of the murder that triggered the march to war and turned out the lights on an age of European peace and progress.

To the east, in the Drina river town of Visegrad, Serbia’s premiere orchestra will perform Vivaldi’s summer concerto in tribute to Gavrilo Princip, to Serbs a hero whose act brought down the curtain on centuries of occupation over the Balkans.

Leaders of Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs have refused to join the Sarajevo events, saying Bosnia’s Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats want to paint Princip as a nationalist terrorist and the Orthodox Serbs as guilty for the wars that opened and closed the 20th century.

Instead, they will unveil a mosaic of Princip and his collaborators in Visegrad, where actors will re-enact Ferdinand’s murder and the trial of his 19-year-old assassin, who died in jail of tuberculosis months before World War I ended.

The assassination “began the liberation from serfdom and slavery”, film-maker Emir Kusturica, organiser of the Visegrad events, said. “I don’t know why everyone would mark the day inthe same place when they look on it so differently.”

The row threatens to drown out those hoping to send a message of unity; Saturday’s events in Sarajevo will close with an open-air musical bringing together 280 performers from across Europe, including Serbs, under the title A Century of Peace after the Century of Wars.

“We would like to symbolically start a new century with an artistic act about peace and love,” said director Haris Pasovic.

“We represent a younger generation,” said Serbian drama student Uros Mladenovic. “These people are carried along by the same basic idea – the victory of peace and life over all the bad things that have happened.”

Austrian President Heinz Fischer is expected to head a list of dignitaries mainly from around the region. Much of the commemoration is sponsored by France.

With the unity and prosperity of Europe tested by economic and social strife, leaders of the 28-member European Union met on Thursday in Ypres, a city synonymous with the death and suffering of World War I.

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