During the past week on 4^th May one could still find quite several praises and celebrations of former communist Yugoslavia and its leader Josip Broz Tito, who died on 4^th May 1980! Accolades from former communists or their children or grandchildren polluted the air Croatians who fought for freedom from communism and democracy in 1990’s breathe. At times the pollution is unbearable. And the accolades continue despite Tito’s communist regime of Yugoslavia now being confirmed as one of top ten mass murderers of its people in the 20^th Century! The Yugoslav communists held the key to state archives until 1991 and of course it was only after the archives became freely available to researchers that the world learned what a murderous butcher Tito was; 1,700 mass graves or pits so far unearthed there, 1,000 of these in Croatia. The alternative to not showering the memory of Tito with accolades would be to stand before the truth and stare into the faces of many mass murderers who carried out Tito’s orders for purges of all political opponents of communism. Most who have stood by that communist regime will not switch against it now – they cannot switch against their grandfathers, fathers, mothers, uncles… who murdered for the “glory” of communism…they cannot vacate the villas and ill-gotten wealth their families thrived upon as corruption thrived in former Yugoslavia. They are the ones who praise former Yugoslavia as being a “great country to live in”, if not the greatest…

And today 8^th of May, the former communists of Yugoslavia and their children, grandchildren and deluded followers will tell you that the Yugoslav Army of communists/Partisans marched in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia and liberated it (from fascists)! No they did not! They made sure Croatia continued imprisoned in the Serb-led concoction of a country forcefully and deceitfully stitched together after WWI led by the Serbian Monarchy related by marriage to the English Queen Victoria royal apparatus.  

Today, 8th May 1945 the First and Second communist armies entered the city of Zagreb … “soon mass killings began, the establishment of detention camps for opponents of communism and pillaging … the Canal camp at the main train station, old Zagreb disappeared … they are still with us today. Balkan bluffers, Yugo-nationalists … just look at the content of the Parliament, and how soon have we forgotten all of it … the torment of that dragon that is still among us needs to be put to an end. God and Croats…” General Zeljko Glasnovic as a Member of the Croatian Parliament for the Diaspora said in parliament in May 2020 and these words still stand as truth.

Let’s be real and realistic: Yugoslavia these pro-Tito people admire, and respect was not a successful state. Tito was not a modest, democratic, and generous, popular ruler, as he is still presented today by these and some media. Tito was not a saint protector from fascism who would probably still be here if he were not there, but an ordinary communist dictator who declared himself lifelong president, whose merit we were not part of the Western, democratic world but the repressive and economically unsuccessful socialist bloc, the primitive who built an unprecedented cult of personality in the world and carried Tito’s baton (phallic symbol) as part of the ritual of ultimate collective obedience to the demigod, and man to whose recklessly luxurious life that included private islands with a safari park, dozens of castles, Rolls, Mercedes and yachts and thousands of people who took care of everything went a good portion of the country’s GDP.

Josip Broz Tito was a dictator and a mass murderer. Tito did not liberate Croatia in World War Two, he basically fought for the introduction of a communist dictatorship across what was the previously false union of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Stalin’s empire. To portray Tito in a historical context exclusively through the prism of “anti-fascism” and to pay tribute to him for Croatian independence is a mere intelligence spin that benefits only those who thieved the Croatian public goods and purged hundreds of thousands of those who did fight for independence of Croatia during World War Two.

All of those who shower the memory of Tito today always mention how grand his funeral in 1980 was! How many world leaders, presidents, kings, princes, prime ministers attended his funeral in Belgrade! They say that such attendance is and was proof of how a great person and leader Tito was! The truth is that had Tito’s communists not falsified history, had they not kept the keys to state archives, Tito’s funeral would not have been attended by world’s respected leaders but by mass murderers such as Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, King Leopold II of Belgium, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet and so on.

“Tito built hospitals, roads, railways, schooling and health care was free,” says the pro-Tito mantra even today in Croatia! During Tito’s life in Zagreb and Rijeka, however, no new hospitals were built, although the population increased. True, the people of Zagreb “voluntarily” paid two so-called self-contribution to the university hospital, but never built. A self-contribution was also taken for the highway to Split, but it was declared nationalist and never built. In Yugoslavia corruption started, one simply did not visit the Council nor the doctor without a blue envelope with cash for bribe.

When we went to the doctor in Yugoslavia, the doctor’s examination was often waited on for months, and the operation waited on for years if you did not have a relationship or gave a bribe –  but it was free.

Zagreb had only one dialysis machine that was more often broken than it worked, diabetics were dying – but it was free.

As a matter of record and interest, the last public hospital (KBC Rebro) built in the capital of Croatia, Zagreb, was built by the regime of Ante Pavelic, WWII Independent State of Croatia!

During Tito’s Yugoslavia a highway was built from Zagreb to Karlovac, about 45 kilometers, the only one after the end of World War Two until Croatia’s independence in early 1990’s. Other roads were from Napoleon and Maria Theresa, full of potholes and poorly maintained, and Croatia had less railways in 1990 than in 1940.

The factories were ours; everything was ours, says the pro-Tito mantra. In truth, they served as living rooms for workers who waited for months for minimal and raw materials, to produce something that ended up in a warehouse or, at best, crammed into the Non-Aligned countries for fictitious clearing of dollars. They produced mostly pollution and losses and swallowed irretrievably hundreds of millions earned on tourism (largely in Croatia) and remittances from guest workers (diaspora), but they were “ours” whatever that meant.

They produced alumina in Obrovac, in which there was no raw material, no port or railway, with a loss that did not exceed the planned hundred million dollars a year, and coke in the most beautiful bay of the Adriatic. It has often been said that “they can’t pay me as poorly as I can work poorly.” By 1974 some 94% of workforce wages in Yugoslavia were paid from foreign debt or subsidised by successful industry such as tourism, but not from workers’ productivity. We pretended to work, they pretended to pay us.

True, most of them were not really hungry, with work on the black and a bit of leasing of rooms in the house or apartment little roommate, a family would cover themselves for their monthly living expenses, smuggling stuff from Trieste, Italy, even better. The “middle class” in the 1970s lived quite tolerably from the grey economy, like “Del Boy Trotter”, and in social housing like his. For some, such flats, such as those given by the governments outside Croatia to social or welfare cases for free, are still today a notion of the middle class that has allegedly destroyed after the fall of Yugoslavia. “Comrade Tito, you stole, but you also let us steal” says a graffiti – and you already have a strong foothold for the claim that “life was better in Yugoslavia”.

Substandard work, two or three-hour brunches and lunch breaks and mass paid sick leave while working elsewhere such as seasonal field work, counter workers, tellers, who are always on a break, stealing from firms ranging from cement bags to dollar bags, depending on location. A system in which people learned to “navigate” in one way or another – most often in another. Those who knew how to “get along”, the Byzantine-Balkan way, was not so badly off. Whoever wanted to solve everything in a regular way, through completely dysfunctional and extremely corrupt institutions of the system, would quickly fail. Private individuals, cafe owners and money launderers, foreign exchange smugglers, shopkeepers, comrades from the Communist Party Committee, thieving socialist directors, guest workers who were millionaires with money earned in Germany on building sites, and  room-letters on the Adriatic – these are the categories of the population anti-fascism was generally good to.

Socialism protected the workers?  No, it sent them to Munich to get German Marks. Socialism, to be honest, protected the unemployed and those who did not want to work.

And then everything got sold out, destroyed, says the pro-Tito, pro-Yugoslavia mantra. It did not fail because socialism failed, and with it the entire Eastern bloc, nor because there was no market for socialist products anywhere, it did not fail because of theft and corruption, but because of the hated capitalism, nationalists, those who wanted independence and democracy, and Franjo Tudjman. Petrol vouchers and queues that mark 1980’s communist Yugoslavia were quickly forgotten, smuggling fake jeans from a flea market in Trieste and going by bus to get laundry powder in Graz, electricity reductions and coffee shortages, hyperinflation and perpetual stabilisation and normalisation after which everything was even less normal – all quickly forgotten. The fact that one could not even secure the services of a plumber, or another tradesperson, without connections to someone in the SIZ/ Self-governing interest community – was quickly forgotten also.

Tito’s Yugoslavia was not organised and successful as pro-Titoists see it today. Its declared bankruptcy in 1983 meant that Yugoslavia could not service its debts. Bankruptcy was accompanied by shortages of everything imported, power cuts, petrol vouchers and a complete collapse of the economy. And still, the Tito die-hards will tell you these absolute facts are made up – not true! Humanity can truly sink to the depths of despair and depravity. Nothing confirms this as the pursuits of communists and former communists who defend blindly and stubbornly the indefensible. Ina Vukic