Thirty-nine years ago on 4th May 1980 I sat with friends watching a matinée movie at a theatre in the centre of Zagreb, Croatia, and suddenly the movie stopped screening, lights came on and a man, his face an embodiment of doom, gloom and despondency, appeared on the stage announcing Josip Broz Tito’s death. The Yugoslav dictator, the communist criminal had died – I sighed with relief, making sure nobody noticed my relief. I joined the rest of the moviegoers exiting the theatre with their heads bowed – dazed and bewildering silence was deafening! Got out into the streets to face people walking along the footpaths silently, heads down, lost – overcast of doom and gloom as if the promise of life had just been sucked out from underneath their feet … Unsure what to expect, people went straight home, waiting for further news or, better said, how to express grief one was expected to feel even though multitudes could dance from joy if only there was freedom to express that joy. Theatres, streets and restaurants were deserted in no time. The air was uncomfortably heavy with one question: Now what? What do we do now?
The overwhelming majority of the population of Yugoslavia at that time did not know it, but the answer to “ now what?” had been prepared well in advance – Tito’s death has changed nothing for you; you continue as you were conditioned to adore Tito and what he was! Ahead of Tito’s death the communist regime had prepared special editions of newspapers that were simply sent to press, in order to reach newsstands the same evening. Communist controlled television and radio programmes had also been made in advance – ready to go on air.
The police and the army were put on the highest alert.
That media content was engineered to serve the regime’s needs is unsurprising, considering that Yugoslavia was an oppressive dictatorship and autocracy. But the quick mobilisation of the army shows just how bad an autocracy it was. The mobilisation of its army was not to fend off any would-be external enemy but to ensure its people, whom the system feared, was kept in check.
A couple of days later Tito’s coffin, on its way to the burial place in Belgrade, arrived at the central railway station in Zagreb and brought out into the vast city square in front of the station. The army and the police (in either uniform or civilian attire) took up strategic positions, ensuring order. All workers from all employers (communist government owned and run, of course) in Zagreb were ordered and commanded to go to that square, stand in a designated spot and “mourn” and “wail”. Photographs of millions mourning Tito’s passing that circled the world were the result of multitudes being forced to go to the event, no one dared not to go. The staged “goodbye to Tito” event, in particular, the realisation of how shockingly successful the communist regime under Tito was in brainwashing its people, creating servants of them like no other oppressive government apparatus I had come across, had sunk into me like a heavy load impossible to bear.
This country under Tito’s regime had managed to brainwash quite a number of its people into behaving as if the brutal and genocidal communist crimes ( led by Tito himself) during and after WWII were a necessity and a “human right” within the realm of communist regime survival. Within a couple of months my bags were packed, to leave. It would take a generation or two to cleanse the nation of communist mentality, I was certain of that and certain that such cleansing would be ugly.
Josip Broz Tito manipulated the Leninist doctrine to suit his needs and boost his popularity – all in pursuit of power. He used the Communist secret police UDBa to take command of Yugoslavia in Belgrade after the Second World War, and quickly subjected the country to a one-party system under the control of one man – himself. When he realised that Moscow wanted to curb his power, Tito broke off ties with Stalin (1948) and started flirting with the West. Once his new friends started pushing for fair elections and a multi-party system, he turned his back on them, too …
From early 1960s Tito decided to open the borders to Yugoslavia’s unemployed – so that they could go and work abroad. A huge wave of people left, hoping for jobs that did not have Communist party membership as the main prerequisite. But free travel was not for everybody – many political opponents and dissidents were banned from leaving the country, just as they were banned from working in it. In fear of reprisal and brutalities against them multitudes of anti-communist Croatians fled Yugoslavia before the opening of the borders, risking their own lives in that process.
Whoever Tito saw as an obstacle to his ultimate control was removed – killed, or arrested and sent to labour camp. One of the most notorious ‘penitentiaries’ for political prisoners was Goli Otok (Naked Island), which operated in a similar way to Stalin’s death camps. During Tito’s 37 years of rule, tens of thousands were detained and punished for speaking out against the regime, or even for expressing divergent views… hundreds of thousands of innocent Croatians murdered, dumped into mass graves either while still alive or dead.
Saturday 4 May 2019 saw a number of chilling events in Croatia remembering with seeming respect and devotion Tito’s death, by displaying the symbols of communist Yugoslavia, photos of Tito – by spreading further lies and deceit about how great Tito was. The hundreds of mass graves of victims of communist crimes strewn across Croatia – remain without justice. The events that marked remembrance of communist crimes victims did not make it into the Croatian mainstream media.
Nothing much has changed there; communist sympathisers and followers still control the mainstream media. The leaders of Croatia’s antifascist movement, such as former presidents of Croatia like Stjepan Mesic and Ivo Josipovic, repeatedly identify themselves with Tito. They offer no apologies for Tito’s methods and the Communist Party’s crimes. Ivo Josipovic had the gall last week to try and convince the Croatian public that the scores innocent Croatian monks murdered in February 1945 by Tito’s communists during WWII in Siroki Brijeg, Bosnia and Herzegovina, were a legitimate military target – because they were anti-communist!
Be aware, antifascism is not a catchall category of democrats as Croatian antifascists, and many throughout the world, paint it. It is a communist construct. It is, indeed, meaningless without reference to communist ideology. Its exponents quickly manifest this even today by their willing defence of the record of Communism, their espousal of a recognisable (anti-Western) Communist world view, and their unshakeable conviction that the only threat to civilisation comes from the Right, not the Left.
Tito, in fact, behaved as Communists do, promoting revolution by the mass liquidation of potential opponents, by subverting every independent institution, and by bringing all power within the Party’s control. He authorised the killing of hundreds of thousands of people without trial, some with staged trials — soldiers, conscripted Home Guard members, unpolitical civilians, Catholic priests, monks and nuns, doctors, nurses, teachers, journalists, businessmen, women and children. The mass graves, where people were thrown in alive to be slowly suffocated by the weight of those who followed, are still gradually being excavated and the mainstream media instead of keeping this fact in public view constantly choose to pay it a lip service and bury it as quickly as the victims in those mass graves perished. For fear of annoying influential Communist cadres, who had joined anti-Communists to create the fledgling Croatian state in 1991, these horrible crimes were for many years left unmentioned. Until recently, most Party and secret police archives were similarly inaccessible. There has been no lustration of Party members and functionaries. Not a single trial within Croatia has been held of a Communist official: only in Munich, after Germany managed to secure their extradition, were two high-ranking Yugoslav secret police officials (Josip Perkovic and Zdravko Mustac) given life sentences (2018) for a politically authorised murder on German soil in 1983.
Tito’s communist murder squads operated across Yugoslavia, across Croatia, across the world. Surely, his death cannot be mourned or remembered by anything other except disdain and contempt for Tito and what he stood for! The only thing that can be mourned in Croatia is the fact that no person, no persons who engaged in that murderous purge of anti-communist Croatian people have been brought to justice, no condemnation of the communist regime has been achieved so to stamp, once and for all, Croatia’s past under the communist regime with facts that show unreservedly that Tito’s communist Yugoslavia was a frightening bundle of crimes and genocide against humanity. Ina Vukic