8 - The First Moments

Summary

In 1914, occupation’ was a concept as alien as the gas mask, ration card, or aerial bomb. In the history of Europe various territories had been repeatedly occupied by enemy armies and, after the end of hostilities, had been either annexed or returned to the defeated state. The longest such episode began in 1878, when Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina. With the consent of the international community, this occupation was euphemistically referred to as an ‘administration’; it would last for thirty years. In 1908, the Habsburg monarchy annexed Sarajevo and adjacent areas, provoking a storm of protest. Lawyers had long struggled with the problem of how to define the responsibilities of an occupier (which had no legal right to the given territory under international law) towards the population of the territory it administered. War presented an additional problem: how decent could one realistically expect a state to be if the (largely hostile) occupied territory was situated close to its front lines?