Tito Go Home

“Josip Broz Tito should return to Kumrovec.”

That’s the bottom line of the mayor of Belgrade Aleksandar Šapić’s proposal last week that Tito’s grave be relocated from the House of Flowers at the Museum of Yugoslavia to the man’s birth village in Croatia.

This is the only way to “once and for all put the fatal communist politics to rest,” Šapić said by way of an explanation, adding that he would personally see to it that the relocation of Tito’s grave was done in a dignified way (“a quality exhumation”) and that the city would finance the move.

The mayor’s proposal also included:

• the relocation of the Tomb of People’s Heroes of Yugoslavia (Ivo Lola Ribar, Djuro Djaković, Moša Pijade, and Ivan Milutinović) from the Kalemegdan Fortress; and
• the reconstitution of the Museum of Yugoslavia into that of Serbia; and
• the erection on the central Terazije Boulevard of a monument to the leader of the WWII-era Nazi-collaborating Četnik movement, Gen. Dragoljub “Draža” Mihajlović.

To underscore the meaning of the proposed moves, Šapić said they are “an extremely important matter for the Serbian people and the future of this country.”

Once More into the Grave

This was not the first time Šapić floated these ideas.

The dear mayor first announced the initiative back in April. Tito, he said then, had been in WWI an Austro-Hungarian corporal who shot at the Serbs and ended up buried in the best plot in Belgrade. By contrast, Mihajlović, a highly decorated general who had defended Serbia in the Balkan Wars and the First World War from the Austro-Hungarians and in the Second World War from the Nazis, was after WWII pronounced a traitor and his burial site remains unknown.

Predictably, Tito’s descendants reacted to the news with condemnation. His grandchildren, Svetlana, Zlatica, and Joška (the daughters and son respectively of Tito’s son Žarko, from his first marriage, to Pelagija Belousova) expressed shock and disgust at the mayor’s proposal.

While for Zlatica the idea was so revolting as to not warrant a comment, Svetlana said it was a great shame that her hometown, Belgrade, had deteriorated so deeply that it is led by people who have “such a lack of awareness, education, and intellectual capacity to propose something like that. It’s a disgrace for both Belgrade and for Serbia.”

Consider the Source

The “bizarre quarrel with Tito’s body 44 years after his death,” said the historian Danilo Šarenac speaking for Nova, “says more about the person quarreling and the world he lives in.”

Šapić was in a previous life an elite and much decorated water polo player on the Serbian national team, with medals from the Olympics, world and European championships, and other tournaments.

He entered politics after his retirement from sports in the early aughts. From 2012 to 2022 he was the head of the municipality of New Belgrade. In 2018 he became president of the newly formed party called the Serbian Patriotic Association, which was in 2021 absorbed into the ruling Serbian Progressive Party.

In June 2022, Šapić was elected mayor of Belgrade—a “Serbian Mayor,” to use his own words. His term in office has been plagued by allegations of corruption, abuse of power, and other scandals.

Known for his vocal support of the WWII-era Chetnik movement and his pro-Russian views, Šapić tends to call his opponents and critical media anti-Serbian and unpatriotic. He labeled the opposition city councilors “liberals and neo-Bolsheviks.”

Timing Is Everything

These are not just some harebrained ideas of a smooth-brained nationalist.

Šapić first proposed Tito’s relocation in the run-up to the Belgrade municipal election. He won with nearly 54 percent of the vote and was comfortably re-elected as mayor.

The renewed call for discarding Tito’s corpse came before the city council session whose agenda included the municipal budget and public transport, which is widely seen as a disaster in Serbia’s capital.

A week later, Šapić appeared in court at a hearing for his defamation lawsuit against the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network over their report finding he had failed to declare his foreign properties.

In other words, if the first proposal was electoral politics, the second one is pure diversion.

Šapić aims to distract the public’s attention from the pressing issues in Serbia’s capital, including public transit (buses are falling apart and catching on fire) and environment (Belgrade is one of the most polluted capitals in Europe). Nationalism is always a ready-made distraction.

Not to mention the fact that the Historical Museum of Serbia has operated in Belgrade since 1963 or that a monument to Mihajlović already exists in the city, at a private museum dedicated to him.

The Big Picture in Three Strokes

On the grander scale, the proposals point to three major issues.

#1 Revising History

The proposals are yet another manifestation of the continued historical revisionism in Serbia, which, as you’ve heard Jelena Djureinović say on the Remembering Yugoslavia podcast, aims to criminalize the Yugoslav Partisans as enemies of the Serbian Četniks who are, conversely, recast as victims of communism, redefined as defenders of Serbia, and rehabilitated as national heroes.

Indeed, this is not the first time the relocation of Tito’s remains was proposed. In 1991, members of Vojislav Šešelj’s Serbian Radical Party proposed it for the first time, followed in 2020 by the leader of the right-wing populist party Dveri, Boško Obradović; the move is central to the platform of the Movement for the Restoration of the Kingdom of Serbia led by Mihajlović’s grandson Vojislav.

Historian Milovan Pisarri told Balkan Insight this was merely “another act in the policy that entails the rehabilitation of those war criminals [Četnik movement], that nationalist ideology and actually the project that the Četniks themselves had about creating a Greater Serbia.”

The proposals come on the heels of Hotel Yugoslavia’s demise, itself part of “a brutal cleansing of Belgrade of any traces of yugoslavism,” according to the historian Šarenac. To many, the Hotel’s demolition, due in December, further underscores how the legacy of socialism continues to be devalued and delegitimized in Serbia.

“The act [is about] erasing any connection with Yugoslavia, with communism, with that period which brought about great progress not only for Serbia but also for all peoples on the territory of that country,” Pisarri said.

#2 Useful Idiot

It’s also déjà vu all over again.

Shortly after Šapić reiterated his proposal, the country’s president and Šapić’s boss within the party, Aleksandar Vučić, poured cold water on it, saying it won’t happen.

“I have never been a big fan of communists and the communist regime,” said Vučić, himself an authoritarian who channels his inner Tito, particularly in foreign policy. “But Josip Broz is a part of our history, he lived here and he was buried here, and he will remain a part of Serbian and Yugoslav history.”

Interior Minister Ivica Dačić who leads the Socialist Party of Serbia, which claims to be the successor to the League of Communists of Serbia and which is a junior partner in the country’s and capital city’s government, said his party would not support the removal of communist memorials and that “history cannot be erased.”

The story may have caused a rift in Vučić’s big tent party, with various factions from more moderate center-right to ultra-nationalists quarreling.

But Šapić may ultimately be useful to Vučić, the same way Slobodan Milošević tolerated extremists on his flanks in the 1990s: they help demonstrate that, in comparison, he’s quite moderate and reasonable.

#3 Socialism Lives

The brouhaha speaks to the continued utility, if not relevance, of Tito and socialism decades after their respective deaths.

“One of the goals of the anticommunist memory politics and historical revisionism [is] also to convince people there is no alternative to capitalism and that the neoliberal Serbian nation state is the best form of political order and statehood,” Djureinović told me.

Even if they are just scapegoats, political play toys, or distractions from the real issues plaguing the country, Tito and his partisans are a powerful reminder what was, what is, and what could be. I mean, if you truly want to deny the existence or validity of something, you stop talking about it.

Tito isn’t going anywhere, indeed.

Sources (English-language sources are also linked above): Balkan Insight, CDM, Danas, N1, NIN, Nova, Politico, Radio Slobodna Evropa, Reddit, Vijesti