engleski

Construction of madness to justify a terrorist act: Case trial from Croatia in 1912

The beginning of the twentieth century in Croatia also marked the beginning of a new course in its politics. After several decades of oscillating between Budapest and Vienna, Austria-Hungary’s two main political centres, Croatian politicians intensified their collaboration with Serbs in an attempt to finish the process of national and territorial unification. This Croat-Serb Coalition increasingly envisioned a new state of South Slavs as the resentment with Hungarian and Austrian politics grew stronger. Such antimonarchist sentiments were especially deep among youth, particularly students, and they quickly developed revolutionary features. On 8 June 1912, a prominent member of one such youth organization Luka Jukić waited for the government car with King's commissary Slavko Cuvaj on an uphill street in Zagreb. Cuvaj was a politician installed by King Franz Joseph I of Austria to crush the Croat-Serb Coalition and continue the process of Germanisation and Hungarisation of Croatia. When the car almost came to a halt, Jukić fired several shots but missed the commissary and instead killed his advisor, fleeing the scene immediately. Before being apprehended a few streets away, Jukić also killed a guard who tried to stop him from escaping. The investigation was conducted hastily and more than a hundred young students were arrested, as the nation recovered from the shock. It was soon discovered that although part of a group of activists, Jukić acted mostly on his own, bragging about the assassination prior to the event itself. At the same time, many Croats celebrated his act as a heroic attempt to free the country from Austro-Hungarian colonial claws. The trial started on 30 July 1912, with several newspapers bringing detailed reports, even full transcripts, from the court sessions. Crucial part of the trial was the psychiatric evaluation of Jukić by the most prominent Croatian psychiatrist Ivo Žirovčić, the head of the Zagreb Hospital for the Mentally Ill. His role was to determine whether Jukić was insane, as his defence was trying to prove, with the final ruling depending chiefly upon this expertise. Despite various attempts to create the illusion of Jukić's hereditary insanity and even mental retardation, in his testimony Žirovčić asserted that although paranoid, Jukić was perfectly sane during the terrorist attack. Žirovčić based his expertise on clinical psychiatric examination performed in Jukić's prison cell, as well as observations of his behaviour during the trial. Originally, Jukić was found guilty and was sentenced to death by hanging, but due to strong public protests the court changed his penalty to a life in prison. When Austro-Hungary reached its end and Yugoslavia was born in 1918, Jukić was soon released from prison. In this paper we will elaborate the complexity of the concept of insanity commonly used at trials as a defence strategy. We will follow the construction of madness from different standpoints: political, juridical, psychiatric and public/media, highlighting the socio-political background of different interest groups and social strata in using this concept as a weapon in their clashes, showing the reality of manipulation of medical knowledge for political purposes during tumultuous pre-World War I times.

terrorism ; Croatia ; Luka Jukić ; psychiatry ; Ivo Žirovčić

nije evidentirano