Tito Nostalgia: Uniting the generations

I just came back from a huge protest organized in the center of Sarajevo by the city's various youth organizations. The protests were organized to force the city's mayor and the canton's Primer Minister to resign after a series of violent acts by teenagers shocked the public and showed the inefficiency of the local authorities to provide even a semblance of safety on the streets of the Bosnian capital: a day after an elderly woman was burned alive in her apartment by three hooligans, a 17 year old boy was stabbed to death on a crowded tram while the passengers looked away. What I was particularly struck by at the protest were the images of Tito held by pensioners as well as the young people (as it is shown in the images above. The slogan says: 'Tito did not hide from the youth!"). The memory of Tito is omnipresent on the streets of Sarajevo and it crosses the generational gap.

I was struck by the resonance of Tito's memory among the city's inhabitants the other day when I was looking for the now-famous restaurant that carries his name. The restaurant was opened 5 years ago by three Sarajevans. I stopped an elderly man to ask for directions. At hearing what I was looking for, he grabbed me, pushed me towards him, and enthusiastically pointed to a small cafe across the street. "See, that's where it is!" he said, almost shouting. "We love that place, wonderful people go there, and we are very proud of it. Enjoy your time there." The cafe's red walls were peppered with the pictures of Tito: Tito fighting the Germans in the trenches of Bosnia, Tito with famous world leaders, such as Egypt's Nasser or India's Nehru. One wall was a relief of the famous Partisan-German battle on the banks of Neretva River. The waitress, a young woman in her 2oies, talked about the restaurant with the same enthusiasm of the lovely elderly man whom had just given me directions. (pictures of the restaurant in the next post)

While it is obvious that the memory of Tito has been very commercialized and made into the everyday kitsch, it is equally clear that this memory has a powerful political resonance for the people of Sarajevo. Tito's recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina as an autonomous republic in the midst of World War II and the emergence of a prosperous political Bosnian Muslim elite during his rule are in stark contrast to the divided, dysfunctional monster that is the Dayton Bosnia. The utter poverty in which most pensioners live in this city and throughout the country, the desperate hope of the country's youth to leave the country forever, explain the echo of Tito nostalgia across the generational divide.

What is significant is that the memory of Tito fuels the ideology that sees Bosnia-Herzegovina as an independent, united, multi-ethnic country. In this respect, it is used to oppose the nationalist ideologies that want to partition Bosnia among its three major ethnic communities (most vocally advocated by the Bosnian Serb leadership especially after Kosovo's declaration of independence). In other words, rather than being a bland commercial brand, the images of Tito held by a frail elderly man and the energetic young man in the pictures above point to the continuing political capital Tito still enjoys in this country, 28 years after his death.

The sensitivity of Bosnians to any attempts to discredit Tito's legacy became clear in the early 1990s when on the brink of the war, the Serbian nationalist leadership wanted to move Tito's body from Belgrade to his native Croatian village of Kumrovec. Upon hearing this, the Croatian nationalists vowed that they would never bury Tito in the Croatian soil after which the Bosnian leadership offered to bury him in the Bosnian city of Tuzla.