POLITICS: Serbs Look Forward to Their Past

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, May 6 2003 (IPS) - What they fondly named "Yugoslavia" opened May Day. The country is gone, but a nostalgic Blasko Gabric opened a park called Yugoslavia in Subotica, 170 km north of Belgrade.

"As long as there are people who remember what the old Yugoslavia looked like, this will continue to exist," Gabric said at the opening ceremony.

The "old Yugoslavia" as it is now called was a federation of six members that fell apart in bloody wars in 1991. What remained was the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, comprising just Serbia and Montenegro. In February this year, that too fell apart.

What is now left, and only for some time, is the "State Union of Serbia and Montenegro" û and memories of Yugoslavia.

The park was opened to mark those memories. "This is the place for those who remember Yugoslavia’s honourable past," Gabric said to hundreds of people who attended the ceremony at the park spread over three hectares.

On its corners stand large white stones marked "Yugoslavia". A popular song from the eighties, "From Vardar to Triglav", became the anthem for the occasion. Vardar is a river in the former Yugoslav republic Macedonia. Triglav was the highest mountain of the former federation, now in Slovenia.

Models of old Yugoslavia’s most popular tourist sites will be built on three ‘streets’ in the park "for those who remember to re-live, and for those who don’t know, to learn", Gabric said.

Among the guests was Josip-Joska Broz, grandson of former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, who led old Yugoslavia from 1945 until he died in 1980.

"In the past we had normal lives" Joska Broz said. "Now we just strive for normality".

New signs of nostalgia are coming up around Serbia. A café named Tito has opened in the central Serbian town Kragujevac, 120 kilometres south of Belgrade. This was once the heartland of the powerful Yugoslav car industry..

A bronze statue of Tito stands in the corner of the café. The décor copies the look of Tito’s house seen in pictures put up around the café.

Many now think nostalgically of former Yugoslavia as a good place to live in. They look back to the high living standards, to days of law and order, and to the red passport. Yugoslavs did not need visas for countries other than the United States, Canada and Australia.

The international community punished the Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milosevic with travel restrictions. Now Serbs need visas to travel even to neighbouring Croatia.

"It was a blessing to live in a country where you could take an evening train from Belgrade and wake up at the Adriatic Coast (Croatia), spend a month at the seaside and then go to Sarajevo (Bosnia) to visit friends," says 55-year-old Marija Bacic, who came to the opening of the park in Subotica.

"Try doing that now," she says. "No way, this is what the politicians left to us."

Slovenia and Croatia were the first to proclaim independence in 1991. Bosnia- Herzegovina followed in the early 1992.

Serbia, the biggest republic in the federation led by Milosevic, opposed the independence drives. The wars that followed led to the death of more than 200,000 people.

Hundreds of thousands of people from a country that once boasted religious diversity, multicultural history and mixed marriages, left the land. Others faced unprecedented misery and poverty.

Milosevic’s Yugoslavia lived through a decade of international sanctions and isolation. The devastation was topped with 11 weeks of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) bombing in 1999 to stop Milosevic’s moves towards ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Milosevic fell from power in October 2000 after a popular uprising.

Serbs now face an uncertain future. Life has hardly improved since the fall of Milosevic. As the future looks bleak, many Serbs turn to the past.

"No matter what they say, we had normal life with Tito," says 60-year-old Nenad Djordjevic. "With my salary from the factory I built the house, sent my kids to school and lived like a man. In the past ten years I became nothing."