Topic Six - Reading Two
THE SARAJEVO TRIAL - INTRODUCTION
The morning of Sunday, 28 June 1914, dawned bright and sunny, as if to welcome the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofie Chotek, on their long-planned state visit to the Bosnian provincial capital of Sarajevo (pronounced Sarayevo). The heir to the throne of the once great Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife rode in an open limousine along a riverside promenade toward the city hall where a formal reception awaited them. The Archduke's automobile moved carefully through the throngs of curious townspeople. Suddenly a sharp crack-sounding like a pistol shot - startled the royal entourage, and their chauffeur glimpsed an object hurtling towards the car.
He stepped on the accelerator and the car lunged ahead. His quick reflexes forstalled a disaster. A bomb bounced off the canvas top which was folded down at the back of the car, and exploded in the street behind, wounding two security officers as well as several bystanders.
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Accounts of the events immediately following the official ceremonies are conflicting. It seems most likely that the provincial governor of Bosnia, General Oskar Potiorek, who was primarily responsible for the safety of the royal family, assured the Archduke that he would be safe in leaving the city, provided that the pre-planned route was changed. Apparently he took it upon himself to alter the motor route by which the Archduke and his wife would leave the capital. The rationale for the new route was a proposed visit by the Archduke to the hospital bed of one of the security officers wounded in the earlier bomb attack. Within moments the official party set out. Unfortunately the driver had not been informed of the change and unwittingly turned onto the old route. General Potiorek, standing on the running board of the Archduke's vehicle, immediately realized the mistake and angrily ordered the driver to stop. He did so and the car came to an abrupt halt in the midst of a crowd of onlookers. At that moment a slightly built young man stepped to the front of the crowd, raised a pistol and fired two shots at point-blank range at the occupants of the open automobile.
One bullet each struck Franz Ferdinand and Sofie. Their bodies momentarily remained frozen in their seats; then Sofie's body fell against her husband's. Blood had already appeared on Franz Ferdinand's mouth. He was heard to whisper, "Soferl, Soferl, don't die. Live for my children."(2)
The car sped them to the governor's residence nearby, but both were dead by the time they arrived, or very shortly thereafter.
The immediate consequence of the assassination was to
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Austria-Hungary had long viewed with apprehension the growing influence of the minor Balkan state, Serbia. Sarajevo is a provincial capital of Bosnia, a province of Serbia, which was, in turn, a minor yet growing thorn in the side of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire. There was a strong element in the Hapsburg court which urged that Serbia be brought to heel while there was still time.
At one time the empire controlled vast regions of Eastern and Central Europe. By 1914 its power and authority were on the decline. Political and military leaders of the empire, however, clung to dreams of past glory, seeking everywhere to forestall any further erosion of the empire's power. Many feared the growing influence of Serbia. A militant faction had been seeking a pretext for bringing this minor Balkan state to heel. The assassination of the Archduke furnished just such a pretext.
No sooner had the assassination at Sarajevo become known in Vienna--the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire-than officials there charged the government of Serbia with responsibility for the assassination. Acting upon only the flimsiest evidence, they alleged that the Serbians had either actively participated in the assassination or, at the least, permitted the conditions to exist which encouraged the assassination. The Austro-Hungarian government quickly imposed an ultimatum on Serbia which would have hopelessly compromised her independence and sovereignty.
The Serbs rejected some of the points of the ultimatum, as some members of the Imperial court had hoped they would, and the Austro-Hungarian empire took the occasion to declare war on Serbia and begin an invasion.
This called into play the complex network of diplomatic and military alliances that had developed in Europe over several generations. One European nation after the other took sides. France, England and Russia joined the Serbs; Germany and Turkey allied themselves with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Armies mobilized, diplomats closed embassies and Europe
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The assassination of an heir apparent is of course a serious matter, but Franz Ferdinand and Sofie were far from the first victims of assassination even in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The consequences of the killings were so grossly disproportionate to the provocation that the guns had hardly started firing before a great debate began over the underlying causes of the Great War. Here we are concerned with only two related questions: Why did the murderers perform the assassination? and Why did the imperial authorities knowingly act in such a way as to precipitate a major war?
The Assassination Plot
The young man who actually shot the Archduke and his wife was Gavrilo Princip (Printsip), a gymnasium (high school) student not quite twenty years old--a fact that was to save his life. He had attended the gymnasium first in Sarajevo and then in Belgrade, where he learned of the impending visit of the royal couple to Sarajevo. In Belgrade he had been joined by Triflko Grabez (Grabezh), a nineteen year old classmate, and Nedeljko Cabrinovic (Chabrinovich), also nineteen, a would-be intellectual. Cabrinovic, unable financially to attend the gymnasium, had had to earn a living as a journeyman typographer. These three had resolved to kill the Archduke, and turned for help in their plans to members of a Serbian nationalist organization called the "Narodna odbrana" (National Defense). Some of the officials of the "Narodna odbrana" were also officials in the Serbian government, and as this trial transcript depicts, able to call on the assistance of still other government officials to obtain the contraband bombs and pistols and facilitate their crossing the border.
The three Bosnians in Belgrade, led by Princip, had therefore resolved on the assassination and taken the initiative to obtain arms and smuggle them into Bosnia in time for the
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How did one go about recruiting accomplices for an assassination? Among the Bosnian students in the spring of 1914, that was easy: simply ask. As this trial transcript reveals, an invitation from one schoolboy to another to join in killing the Archduke was likely to be instantly and unquestionably accepted. Time and again in both Belgrade and Sarajevo the same transaction occurs. One student approaches another and says, "Do you know the Archduke is coming to Sarajevo?" and the ominous reply is "Mi moramo ga ocekati!" ("We must lie in wait for him!")
The translators of this document, Professors Elizabeth Pribic and W.A. (Dolph) Owings, both have grown sons. As we worked our way through the manuscript we tried to imagine our sons at the ages of sixteen to nineteen giving and receiving such an invitation. Finally we came to the questioning of Cvjetko Popovic where he relates how, while strolling in the city park one evening, he instantly agreed to a friend's invitation to join in the killing. Elizabeth and I leaned back in our chairs and stared at each other in disbelief. Returning to the manuscript, we discovered that the court was equally incredulous. The chief judge asked Popovic: "Do you mean that one had only to invite you to the assassination, and you would agree?" to which Popovic replied, "Yes."
The judge at the trial did not ask Popovic for an explanation, but sixty years later I was able to do so. Popovic and Vaso Cubrilovic were still alive in 1976.
I interviewed both of them at that time. Cubrilovic, although he became one of the most distinguished Yugoslav historians of his day, refused on principle ever to discuss the assassination. He felt that a cause, holy to him, had been degraded
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I met Popovic in the coffee-shop, the "kafana," of the Hotel Central in Sarajevo. (Yugoslavs live in their "kafanas"). He was a rather heavy-set man of medium height, still sprightly in spite of his eighty years, alert and forceful in his speech, punctuating his statements with rapid glances from his penetrating blue eyes. He himself reminded me of the transaction with the judge at his hearing. "Yes," he said, "they asked me and I instantly agreed. Look, you have to realize what it was like to live under foreigners. There we were, in our own country, and these fellows were telling us what to do. We students led the demonstrations against the Austrians. I had been in jail already for agitation (the Pjanic-Ljubibratic affair). Right down the street here in front of the cathedral we had burned the Hungarian flag. We were steeped in the literature of the Russian Social Revolutionaries (who practiced assassination). When we met, when we walked in the evenings in the park, we would ask each other, 'Have you read this or that book?', and if our "kolege" (buddy) hadn't, we would pass the book from hand to hand. We didn't have to spell things out. We knew instantly what each other had in mind."
"Look," he said, "there is no way of telling you what it is like to live under foreigners. You have to have experienced it yourself. We hated them with a burning hatred. Our ideal was Yugoslavia. Yes, I agreed instantly, and under the same circumstances I would do it again!" The passage of more than sixty years had done nothing to dull the intensity of his convictions. The gleam in his eye convinced me that there was still a man willing to kill and be killed for his ideal, a free Yugoslavia. What of the leader of the affair, Gavrilo Princip? It was he who had formed the Belgrade troika, saw to it that weapons were obtained and smuggled into Bosnia, and arranged the connection with Ilic. His determination alone was unwavering.
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Princip does not do much to help us understand him. He was a very closed person, who left almost nothing behind to reveal the person behind the events. He came from a family of considerable local reputation in the hill country of Hercegovina, one of the most impoverished parts of the mountain province. Like many others of his generation, he made his way to the gymnasium in Sarajevo and then Belgrade, hoping to improve his position through education. Such students often had to live in grinding poverty, sometimes literally on the edge of starvation. Ill-health was the natural consequence of such poverty. At the time of the Balkan wars (1912, when he was eighteen) he tried to enlist for service in the guerrilla bands fighting the Turks, but was rejected for physical reasons. Cocktail-party psychoanalysts may speculate that the rejection, by questioning his manhood, might have made him feel the need to prove himself. Yet his committment to a free Yugoslavia was uncompromising. Later, while in prison in 1913, Princip was interviewed by a psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Pappenheim of the University of Vienna.(3) He reiterated his determination to achieve a free Yugoslavia at any cost to himself.
To Pappenheim, and in his letters that have been published, Princip revealed almost nothing of himself. He cuts off the interviews whenever they begin to touch on sensitive matters. The published text of the interviews suggests that they lasted at most some three or four hours, certainly not long enough for any kind of insight to appear if the subject were resistant. As to unpublished documents, there is in the possession of the estate of Professor Bogicevic a file of letters to a sweetheart. That was a wholly platonic romance, light-years removed from the direct sexuality of our day, couched in the tender romanticism of first love, flowers pressed between the pages. These letters tell us only that a Victorian romantic lived behind the facade of the assassin. Perhaps it was another manifestation of this romanticism that made Princip willing to sacrifice himself in the cause of freedom for his people.
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The Ideal of a Free Yugoslavia
The reaction of the Imperial authorities is of course rooted in the historical circumstances leading up to the assassination, and those circumstances involved the tangled question of Balkan nationalism. The Balkan peninsula throughout the nineteenth century had been a theater of conflict among the great European powers, principally the Ottoman empire, the Austro- Hungarian empire, and the Russian empire. The Balkans had been overrun by the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century. In 1458-61 they conquered the mountain district of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they had established a military headquarters, a "seraj" (literally a military encampment), whence "Sarajevo." At the peak of their power the Turks twice laid siege to Vienna itself (1529 and 1683). Toward the end of the seventeenth century the Ottoman empire began to recede, and during the eighteenth century the Hapsburg empire established a military frontier along the Sava and Danube rivers.
The district immediately to the south of the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, with the ancient fortress city of Belgrade as its capital, was inhabited by an ethnic group known as the Serbs.
Serbia had enjoyed a brief period of power as a medieval kingdom before being overwhelmed by the Turks (1389), and the Serbs had never forgotten their days of glory. They were always restless subjects, and the Turkish administration was always more or less subject to harrassment by Serbian equivalents of Robin Hood, who were "bandits" to the governing Turks but who were heroes to the subject Serbian peoples. The exploits of the "hajduks" (pronounced "highduk") gave rise to one of the world's great body of folk epics, and the Serbs saw them as bearing the burden of resistance to foreign oppressors. This tradition is so deeply embedded in the consciousness of the Serbs and the other South Slav peoples that to this day their automatic response to any suggestion of foreign invasion is that "We will fight!" completely without regard to political ideology. That tradition has had a good deal to do with the acceptance of the Tito regime in our own time, Tito being able
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As the Ottoman empire weakened during the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in connection with the Napoleonic wars, the local Serbian leaders were able to raise the first successful resistance movement against the Ottoman empire, establishing an autonomous principality of Serbia by 1817. The two principal leaders were successively George Petrovic (Petrovich), known as "Black" (Kara) George, and Milos Obrenovic (Milosh Obrenovich). Bitter personal enemies, they were the founders of rival dynasties which contended for power in Serbia throughout the nineteenth century. During that time Serbia was preoccupied with two principal problems: the dynastic struggle, and the fact that most of the ethnic Serbs still lived outside the boundaries of the principality (from 1882, the kingdom) of Serbia. Fanatical nationalism was part of the heritage of the French revolution and Napoleonic period. As the power of nationalism increased, it became increasingly intolerable that fellow Serbs should be subject to the rule of others. Then as now, nationalistic drives could unify the Serbian people even when they bitterly opposed each other domestically because of dynastic or class rivalries. Likewise, ethnic Serbs who still lived under foreign domination longed for union with their brothers in Serbia. Irredentism, the drive to unify ethnic groups which live under alien regimes, became a primary political force. The two principal groups of Serbs under foreign domination that concern us in the context of the Sarajevo assassination comprised the Serbs living across the Danube river from Belgrade in Hapsburg territory, and the ethnic Serbs living in the adjoining mountain region of Bosnia, still under Turkish domination. The Bosnian Serbs were particularly restless. Their rulers belonged to an alien religion, Islam, and in the Balkans, religion had come to be equated with nationalism. The Turkish conquerors had in the fifteenth century established a feudal system with themselves as lords and the Serbs as serfs, initiating a social conflict. Many Serb landowners had converted to Islam. These converted Serbian Moslems were likely to be the staunchest
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In 1875 another rebellion broke out in Bosnia, which drew support from Serbia and by 1877 drew Russia into a war with Turkey. The crisis was ended by the Congress of Berlin which settled Near Eastern affairs to the satisfaction of the great powers, but without consulting the Balkan peoples directly involved. The ambassadors of the great powers in Berlin did not even extend the courtesy of a hearing to the Serbian delegation. The settlement provided that the Austro-Hungarian empire be given the right to administer Bosnia and Herzegovina, although the suzerainty of the Sultan was to be respected--a hybrid arrangement which was to be important to the trial of the Sarajevo assassins. The Bosnians, placed under Hapsburg rule, had no more use for the Austrian empire than the Turkish one. The Austrian army had to impose order by force in 1878, and again in 1881. Thereafter the people of Bosnia settled down more or less passively to an acceptance of Austrian imperium.
By 1881 the Austrians had also imposed a de facto control over Serbian affairs, so that from 1881 to 1903 the Balkans were relatively quiet so far as Austria was concerned. In 1903, however, the increasingly restless natives began to reassert themselves. The initial sign was a palace coup in which the king of Serbia, Alexander Obrenovic (Obrenovich), and his queen, were murdered by a group of army officers. The officers installed on the throne the pretender from the rival dynasty, Petar Karadjeordjevic (Karageorgevich). King Petar was a cultivated Euro-
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One of those officers was Major Dmitrije Dmitrijevic (Dmitrijevich), a giant of a man, known to his school companions as "Apis" because of a supposed resemblance to the Egyptian god. He had been deeply implicated in the plot to kill Alexander Obrenovich, and there were suspicions that he might resort to regicide again if he feared that his influence with the Karageorgevich dynasty was waning. During the Balkan wars (1912) Apis, as a military intelligence officer, was involved with raising and deploying in Turkish territory bands of guerrilla warriors who played a significant role in the struggles with the Turks. Many Bosnian Serbs volunteered for the bands. By 1914 Dmitrijevic-Apis, by then a colonel, was chief of Serbian military intelligence and a leading figure in an underground organization known as "Ujedinjenje ili smrt" (uyedinyenye ili smrt), "Unification or Death," commonly known as the Black Hand. The purpose of the organization was the unification of all ethnic Serbs under Serbian rule, and uncompromising hostility to all, whether foreign or Serb, who would stand in the way of unification.
While the first world war was in progress Apis was accused of plotting the assassination of the Serbian Prince Regent (later king) Alexander. He was tried by court-martial at the Serbian army headquarters in Salonika, convicted, and shot. The Salonika trial remains one of the most mysterious episodes in Balkan history. It was easy, however, to suppose that a man like Apis, who had plotted and helped to carry out the assassination of one king and allegedly plotted the assassination of another, might also have plotted the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The trial of the Sarajevo assassins was intended in large part to expose and prove the complicity of agents of the Serbian government such as Apis in the killing of the royal couple.
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By 1903 the Bosnian Serbs were stirring again. Although pathetically impoverished and backward by the standards of the rest of Europe, education and culture had begun to develop, beginning with the establishment of the rudiments of a system of education. Gymnasia, schools whose graduates had about the equivalent of a junior-college education, had been established in Sarajevo and elsewhere. The formal curriculum was similar to that in the other schools of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but besides the formal curriculum, the students in the schools were also deeply steeped in the ideals of nationalism and national liberation. These students became the cutting edge of the revolutionary nationalism that developed after 1903. As we have seen, revolutionary nationalism was nothing new for the Bosnians. What was novel was that the standard-bearers of revolution were the youth rather than established leaders of the community.
These youth were deeply steeped in the revolutionary literature of the Russian Social Revolutionaries, or "SR's," from which the Bosnian youth coined the word "eseri." The SR's were the heirs of the tradition of the Russian student revolutionaries of the 1870s and 1880s who had carried out a number of assassinations, including that of Tsar Alexander II in
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The practice of assassination began as early as 1910, when one Bogdan Zerajic (Zherayich) unsuccessfully attempted to kill the then-governor of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Zerajic committed suicide on the spot. He was considered a hero by the radical Bosnian youth. His grave became an object of pilgrimage, and his example an inspiration to others. Some of the youth acquired practical experience in the Balkan wars, joining the guerrilla bands raised by the Serbian government and participating in the wars against the Turks. One of those was Vladimir Gacinovic (Gatsinovich) who, although not directly involved in the plot for the Sarajevo assassination, was to a great extent considered by the radical youth to be their spiritual leader. Zerajic was twenty-four when he killed himself in 1910, and Gacinovic was twenty-four in 1914. We might speculate that their age enabled them to stand in the relation of elder brothers to the students still in the gymnasium in 1914 and therefore serve as models whom the boys would hold in esteem. The nationalistic radicalism of the Bosnian youth was of a distinctive type. They said of themselves that they did not merely seek a unification of Bosnian Serbs with their ethnic brothers in Serbia. That would not suit conditions in Bosnia. Bosnia may once have been primarily Serbian, but that was before the Turkish invasion (1458-61). Since then many Turks had settled in Bosnia and had made their home there. Many more ethnic Serbs had converted to Islam, and, while of the Moslem faith, had roots as old as any Serb. Furthermore, Bosnia contained many Croats. Croats are also Slavs, and speak a language which is for all practical purposes the same as the Serbian. The common language is called Serbo-Croatian, and the dialectical differences are no greater (although of a different kind) than between British English and American English. The principal cultural difference is that the Croats are Roman Catholic in religion, while the Serbs are Eastern Orthodox (and, in the case of Bosnia, sometimes Moslem). These peoples are inextricably intermingled. It is often the case in Bosnia that a village contains both a Christian church and a mosque, their
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Yugoslavism was an outgrowth of the peculiar conditions of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Hapsburgs in medieval times had patched the empire together out of a grab-bag of peoples, mainly using the device of dynastic marriage to cement the medieval states into a personal union with the Hapsburg crown. Joseph II (1780-1790) attempted to create a unified, culturally Germanic state, but failed. The principal result of his attempt was to strengthen the national consciousness of the non-Germanic peoples of the empire. The problem was that no single ethnic group was in the majority. The two most numerous groups were the Austro-Germans and the Magyars (Hungarians). The attempt to Germanize the Magyars merely made them fanatically nationalistic Magyars. The result was rebellion in 1848, which was repressed; but by 1867 the Magyars forced the division of the Empire into Austrian and Hungarian kingdoms, theoretically joined only in personal loyalty to the Hapsburg monarch.
That, however, merely whetted the appetite for autonomy of the third major element of the Empire, the Slavs. The Slavs were neither geographically nor culturally homogenous. In the north of the Empire were the Czechs and Slovaks; in the southern part, the Slovenes, Croats, and considerable numbers of ethnic Serbs. What they really wanted was impossible to determine, since almost up to the outbreak of the first world war the press was under censorship, and nationalistic agitators were subject to trial and punishment for high treason. The demand most frequently heard was for "Trialism," that is, a division of the Empire into three parts, one of them Slav. Geography would at best have made that an awkward arrangement. From about 1890, particularly in Slovenia, and later among the Bosnian
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The position of Serbia in a "Yugoslavia" was of course a problem. The Serbs of Serbia were also South Slavs, but Serbia would most certainly not consent to entering the Austro-Hungarian empire. What was much more serious for the Hapsburg monarchy was the possibility of the alternative solution--a "Yugoslavia" built about Serbia as the core, but including the Slavic peoples and lands of the southern part of the Empire, a "Greater Serbia." Should such a "Yugoslavia" evolve itwould mean the dissolution of the Hapsburg empire.
This consideration was the crux of the political crisis that came from the Sarajevo assassination. The youthful assassins were committed to the ideal of Yugoslavism, seeking the formation of a state comprised of South Slavs, which would inevitably have to be carved largely out of the Hapsburg empire, which in turn meant the dissolution of the Empire. The existence of Yugoslavism in general, and of Serbia as the magnet drawing the other South Slavs into a common state, therefore represented a clear and present danger to the existence of the Hapsburg empire. Not because Serbia could ever hope to destroy the Empire by direct attack--no one ever dreamed of that in the predictable future, but because by presenting the ever-present example of one South Slav people freely managing its own affairs, it encouraged the others to make demands which, if granted, would dissolve the empire.
This situation had led the Hapsburg monarchy to take control of Bosnia in 1878. In 1903, when the Empire lost control of Serbia in the aftermath of the assassination of Alexander Obrenovich the Empire began to fear the corrosive effect of the mere existence of Serbia on her southern frontiers. The danger had increased so much that by 1908 the Empire risked general European war by formally annexing Bosnia, thereby hoping to put an end to the aspiration of the Bosnians for unification with the other South Slavs. Some elements of the Hapsburg court, notably the military chief of staff, Conrad von Hotzendorff, urged still stronger action--a preemptive war on Serbia which
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In fact, the degree of complicity of the Serbian government, if any, has never been determined. There is no question that some of the officials of the Serbian government helped the high-school boys to obtain and transport arms from Belgrade to Sarajevo in order to carry out the assassination. This trial transcript affords proof of that. It is also known that Colonel Dmitrijevic-Apis knew of the boys' intentions, and at least permitted their activities to progress, and that he sent an agent to Sarajevo who made a feeble attempt to stop the assassination before it was carried out. It would, however, have been an act of the greatest folly for the Serbian government (the crown and ministry) to have planned such an assassination. A Serbia small in size and exhausted by the Balkan wars was in no position to provoke her powerful neighbor, and her prime minister, Nikola Pasic, was one of the ablest statesmen of his day. Unless some convincing evidence to the contrary is someday discovered, the idea that the Serbian government planned the killing of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand can safely be dismissed.
That did not mean that the Austro-Hungarian government, having decided to engage in war with Serbia, would not try to prove that the killing was Serbia's fault. A good way to begin was to conduct a show trial of the killers (five of whom were in the hands of the Austrian police) and their accomplices.
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