The daily health bulletins had described kidney failure, pneumonia, septicaemia, internal bleeding, liver damage and a comatose state. Television starts broadcasting a long tribute to the man who led the communist resistance to the German Nazi invaders, before founding the people's republic in He adopted the pseudonym Tito in the s after five years in prison for activism in the Yugoslav Communist Party, which was banned at the time. Educated in Moscow, at the end of World War II he became leader of a group of nations which had lived in a state of mutual suspicion and hatred that had torn them apart for centuries.
Tito preserved unity with an iron grip. The man who would be named Yugoslavia's president-for-life split with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement, grouping states advocating a middle course between the Eastern and Western blocs. With a fondness for cigars and usually dressed in a gleaming uniform or white suit, Tito liked to host world leaders and Hollywood stars in his villas on the Brioni archipelago in Croatia or on his yacht in the Adriatic.
Seven days of national mourning is decreed during which chanting and funereal symphonies are played in succession on the radio. The next day, on May 5, his coffin is placed aboard the official presidential "blue train" which travels from Ljubljana to Belgrade via Zagreb, accompanied by his two sons Zarko and Misa, so all can mourn him.
Yugoslavs line the route, many in tears. The poem of devotion "Comrade Tito, from your path we will not stray! In Belgrade portraits edged in black are displayed in shop windows, along with enormous red banners bearing slogans in his honour: "Tito, your name is freedom".
Several hours before the train arrives, the crowd converges in the rain on the federal Yugoslav parliament where the body will lie in state. Citizens file day and night past the coffin draped with the Yugoslav flag stamped with a red star. An old peasant woman in a black headscarf, her face lined with pain, genuflects then makes a sign of the cross before the coffin. Behind her a former member of the Yugoslav anti-fascist partisan movement, his chest adorned with medals, makes the communist salute of his youth.
The coffin is mounted on a pile of earth on Dedinje Hill, overlooking Belgrade, to the sound of the "Internationale" -- the anthem of the socialist movement -- followed by the Yugoslav anthem. Sirens ring out in all the country's towns and ports. In Yugoslavia, it was not the Soviets that defeated Germany and its allies, as was the case in Eastern Europe. Tito liberated his country without the participation of the Red Army, except for the support that it provided for the liberation of Belgrade.
This gave him the legitimacy to start his own search for a path to socialism. When Stalin tried to align Tito to his orders, in , came the rupture, the expulsion of the Yugoslav communists from the Cominform.
In those years, it was not easy to oppose Moscow, the hegemony it had already imposed in the world communist movement, and less so the Soviet propaganda machine that dedicated itself to slandering Tito and his revolution. Stalin boasted that it was enough for him to move his little finger to make him fall.
It was not so, and he even tried to assassinate him on several occasions. Tito sent him a letter, which is said to have been found among the papers that Stalin kept in his safe at the time of his death.
In it he said that on five occasions the assassins had been captured: "Stop sending people to kill me. I will send only one, and it will not be necessary to send more.
The rupture with Moscow had harsh consequences in Yugoslavia, there was the persecution of communists accused of being pro-Soviets along with executions, concentration camps and political prisoners.
Tito started a new path based on self-managed socialism with open borders that allowed free emigration, limited market economy, private property of small companies and land, which made a substantial difference with the other socialist countries. He also obviously did not adhere to the Warsaw Pact, the Moscow-led military alliance. The socialism built by the Yugoslav communists, with its peculiarities, was a one-party dictatorship, without political or press freedom, with the cult of personality around Tito well-developed.
With great vision, they declared themselves not followers of the policies of neither Moscow nor Washington, generating broad adherence by developing countries and condemning colonialism, promoting self-determination and independence, and actively supporting peace.
The sixties and seventies of the last century gave Yugoslavia prestige and respect for its efforts and commitments on major issues on the world agenda. It was a strong State, with a victorious story of a leader who confronted Hitler and Stalin, with a powerful army in Europe, a country that counted on the international scene.
Tito's death, the lack of a leader, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disappearance of the Soviet Union, were part of the elements that led to the start of the civil war and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, a country that had been born at the end of the First World War, in It was a creation of the victorious powers that brought together Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and around twenty ethnic minorities. In , Germany was the main supporter of the country's division and dismemberment.
Berlin, all by itself, without the support of the then European Community or the United States, was the first to recognize the independence of Slovenia, and this was the step to unleash the civil war. Lackluster leaders in Croatia and Serbia, imbued with primitive nationalism, gave birth to six new countries and to one still seeking international recognition.
Two of these Balkan states, Slovenia and Croatia, managed to enter the European Union, while the others wait in line. Ethnic cleansing and the civil war left more than , dead, many thousands wounded, women raped, cities destroyed. NATO bombed Belgrade leaving 5, victims. The question is still floating in the air: where was the European Union, where the UN? Profil, Zagreb, , p. Editions English.
The death of Tito And of Yugoslavia. Fernando Ayala.
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