14/09/2023
🇨🇿 Tomáš Masaryk was the first president of Czechoslovakia, an acknowledged politician, philosopher, sociologist and journalist. A true friend of Serbia.
🇷🇸 Tomáš defended the rights of the Serbs — especially at the time of the illegal annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina by Austria. Once he saved 53 Serbs from death:
🇦🇹 "It is difficult to decide whether it was an operetta, a comedy, an inquisition or a tragicomedy," Masarik described the rigged trial of a group of 53 Serbs from Croatia, known as the "Agram Trial." It all started back in March 1906, when the majority in the Croatian Parliament was won by the Croatian-Serbian coalition, the originator of Yugoslavia and the principle that Serbs and Croats are one nation. Vienna realized that it had gained an angry opponent who could take Croatia away from it, but the real reason for the process that was soon mounted lay in something else: the monarchy was preparing for the illegal annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, so it needed a justification for that act. The Croatian parliament was dissolved, and the Austrian government, with the support of Emperor Franz Josef, ordered the Croatian ban Pavlo Rauh to collect information about the Serbs against whom shameful proceedings would be initiated. Rauch, a known Serb hater, didn't find it difficult to fulfill the task. The plan was to declare the Serbs and Croats who advocated for a South Slavic state mercenaries of Serbia, accuse them of breaking the Habsburg monarchy and creating an alleged Greater Serbia.
The first indicted Serbs were Adam and Valerijan Pribićević, brothers of a prominent Serbian politician from Croatia, Svetozar Pribićević. The state prosecutor requested the death sentence for all those arrested, and Rauch himself stated that it is not possible to kill all the Serbs in Croatia because there were 700,000 of them, otherwise he would prefer to do so.
📢 However, the campaign didn't bear the expected fruit. It caused an avalanche of condemnation of intellectual Europe, initiated by Tomáš Masaryk. He was overwhelmed by the prosecutor's monstrous request for the death penalty, even though there was neither evidence nor valid witnesses to bring the indictment. From the parliamentary platform, he addressed the whole of Europe: he accused the puppet authorities in Croatia and presented the entire background of this case. In his closing speech, he said: "I hope that there will not be any MP, any party in this house (the Habsburg Parliament) who will vote, even indirectly, for this political and cultural disgrace, for this so-called Agram Trial."
His words were supported by 68 deputies. Due to the increasingly loud protests of the European public, the Judicial Council in Zagreb sentenced the defendants to temporary sentences, not death sentences, as was planned, but this verdict didn't last either. Emperor Francis Joseph was forced to pardon all the accused because of the "great uproar in the world".
