МИРОСЛАВ СПАЛАЈКОВИЋ НА ФРИДЈУНГОВОМ ПРОЦЕСУ
MIROSLAV SPALAJKOVIĆ IN THE FRIEDJUNG PROCESS

Summary/Abstract: At the end of the Annexation crisis, in March 1909, Heinrich Friedjung, a Viennese historian, published an article in which he indicated some subversive activities of Serbia within South Slavic territories of the Habsburg Monarchy. The article, instigated by Aehrental, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, marked Miroslav Spalajković, Secretary General of the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as a person who participated in the financing of the Croat-Serb opposition coalition. The leaders of the coalition filed a libel lawsuit against Friedjung and there was a trial in Vienna in December 1909. In the trial, there were some witnesses from Serbia who stated that documents of the Austro-Hungarian diplomacy, on which Friedjung based his article, were forgeries, after which the defendant himself admitted that they had lost probative value. Spalajković also testified and, despite Friedjung’s fierce defense based on the provocation of hasty responses, significantly contributed to such outcome of the process. At the end of next year, the leader of the Czech opposition Tomáš Masaryk launched a campaign against Aehrental in the Delegations, trying to prove that the officials of Habsburg diplomacy were also involved in the falsification of the documents. At the same time, Serbian government in Belgrade filed a lawsuit against Vasić, the counterfeiter. Spalajković’s support of Masaryk’s campaign brought him into conflict with János Forgách, the Austro-Hungarian minister in Serbia, which ended up in ceasing all communication between them, and then removing them both from Belgrade. All these events further strained relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, culminating in the July Crisis of 1914.

• Details
• Contents