Goodbye Tito? Tomb at risk as Serbs argue over Yugoslav legacy

In a move akin to kicking Lenin out of Moscow's Red Square, the mayor of Belgrade wants to rid the Serbian capital of the tomb of Tito, the socialist leader who held Yugoslavia together for decades.

Nationalist Aleksandar Sapic wants to send Tito -- the wartime resistance leader who liberated the country from the Nazis -- back to his native Croatia despite his tomb in the Museum of Yugoslavia attracting 120,000 visitors a year.

Sapic insists Tito has to go if Serbia is to "move away from communism", and wants to turn his mausoleum into a museum of Serbian history.

"The communist regime has literally brought nothing good to the Serbian people," said the mayor, who instead wants to put up a statue to a controversial Chetnik leader who fought against Tito during World War II.

The call has reopened bitter disputes over the bloody German occupation when two rival resistance groups fought the Nazis, though many Chetnik groups ended up cooperating with the Axis forces.

Tito's communist Partisans finally prevailed over the royalist and nationalist Chetniks, whose leader Dragoljub Mihailovic was executed in 1946 for war crimes and collaboration with the Nazis.

Serbia's nationalist government later rehabilitated the Chetniks with a 2003 law giving the two movements equal status. Mihailovic's convictions were overturned in 2015, with judges dismissing his original trial as "political".

Yugo nostalgia

A man carrying the Yugoslav flag visits the tomb of its late leader Tito in the Serbian capital Belgrade © Andrej ISAKOVIC / AFP/File

The mayor has so far only floated the idea of removing the tomb, with the Croatian village of Kumrovec -- where Tito was born Josip Broz in 1892 -- already applying to take his remains if Belgrade no longer wants them.

Several towns and cities in Bosnia and Montenegro are also keen to have him in a sign of the nostalgia that still surrounds Tito in the former Yugoslavia, which collapsed a decade after his death in 1980 in a series of bloody wars.

Serbia's president, Aleksandar Vucic -- the founder of Sapic's party -- is less keen to see Tito go, however, saying the tomb is part of the country's heritage.

Historian Milovan Pisarri told AFP that the mayor's controversial move was another step in a long ideological battle over the disputed legacy of World War II.

"It's simply a continuation of what started around 20 years ago, when this new nationalist ideology entered institutions and succeeded in turning a collaborator into an anti-fascist," he said, referring to Mihailovic.

A Tito admirer shows his tattoo of the late Yugoslav leader © Andrej ISAKOVIC / AFP/File

Sapic has already asked permission to put to a statue of the Chetnik leader near one of Belgrade's main squares and also wants to remove the tombs of four communist partisans from the city's largest park.

But Mihailovic's grandson Vojislav, an MP for the opposition monarchist party, dismissed Sapic's efforts as "insincere" and "manipulative", accusing the ruling party of using his ancestor for political gain.

"While I fully support the idea [of a statue], I question their true intentions," said Mihailovic, who -- like many Serbs -- regards Tito as a dictator.

Even today, his grandfather's face adorns T-shirts and walls in Belgrade. The Chetnik movement enjoyed a resurgence in popularity as Yugoslavia collapsed in the 1990s, with some Serbian paramilitary groups adopting Chetnik nicknames, symbols and their signature long beards.

History 'can't be erased'

Tito's tomb is not the only symbol of the former Yugoslavia under threat in Serbia's capital.

The renowned Yugoslavia Hotel -- once a source of national pride -- is soon to make way for a luxurious new skyscraper on the banks of the Danube complete with a casino and dock.

Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner is also planning to build another luxury hotel on the site of the former Yugoslav army headquarters, which was badly damaged in the 1999 NATO bombing of Belgrade.

Its Brutalist design was meant to evoke a canyon on the River Sutjeska where the Partisans made a key breakthrough against German forces in 1943.

In the latest surreal twist in the culture war, the mayor said he also wants to change the color of Belgrade's new buses from "socialist" red to the blue of the mediaeval Nemanjic dynasty.

For Pisarri, the changes are nothing short of an attempt to erase all trace of Yugoslavia and everything it represented. "But Yugoslavia cannot be erased from people's memory," the historian insisted.

© 2024 AFP