Tito’s Yugoslavia was a state that deserved respect and Tito, a Croatian liberal communist, was a visionary politician but under no circumstances can Serbia call on the legacy of Tito and Yugoslavia. It was Serbian thirst for total domination that destroyed Yugoslavia and the Serbian nationalists were the ones who constantly plotted against Tito and his vision of Yugoslavia.

 

When asking for support against Kosovo’s independence Serbia, through its Foreign Minister Jeremic, calls upon the legacy of Tito and Yugoslavia even though it was the Serbian nationalists who destroyed Yugoslavia. Let us together remind some of the key facts that Jeremic fails to remember.

Tito was the chief architect of the "second Yugoslavia", a socialist federation that lasted from World War II until 1991. Despite being one of the founders of Cominform, he was also the first Communist leader in power to defy Soviet hegemony. A backer of independent roads to socialism (sometimes referred to as "national communism"), he was one of the main founders and promoters of the Non-Aligned Movement, and its first Secretary-General. As such, he supported the policy of nonalignment between the two hostile blocs in the Cold War.

Under Tito's leadership, Yugoslavia became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1961, Tito co-founded the movement with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia's Sukarno and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, in an action called The Initiative of Five (Tito, Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Nkrumah), thus establishing strong ties with third world countries. This move did much to improve Yugoslavia's diplomatic position. On 1 September 1961, Josip Broz Tito became the first Secretary General of the Non-Aligned Movement.

It is of no doubt that Tito’s policy contributed to the peace in the world through creating a middle ground between the extreme rivalries between the two blocks. This move was visionary and positive. The worldwide respect for Yugoslavia was a direct merit of Tito, who struggled throughout his time as Yugoslavia’s leader to control the extreme appetites of Serbian nationalists who constantly strived for domination.

Among few leaders of the time Tito also realized that the hard repression against the Kosovo Albanian population should be stopped and that the denial of rights of the Kosovo Albanians was not the right policy. This was a time of massive imprisonments, mass torture, mysterious murder and complete denial of rights, including the right for education in mother tongue. The architect of such repression was the Serbian politician Aleksandar Rankovic, was minister of the interior and head of the military intelligence ("OZNA") and political police ("UDBA"), who among other things, to prevent the reforms thought by Tito and also Tito’s policies towards the third world, with the help of other Serb nationalists organized a conspiracy coup to overthrow Tito in 1966. At the time of the coup Tito was in one of his international trips related to the Non Alignment Movement. Luckily Tito returned fast and prevented the coup. Rankovic was sacked and in the same year Tito declared that Communists must henceforth chart Yugoslavia's course by the force of their arguments (implying a granting of freedom of discussion and an abandonment of dictatorship). The state security agency (UDBA) saw its power scaled back and its staff reduced to 5000. The sacking of Rankovic was followed by a relaxation of the situation in Kosovo while only two years after Tito began giving institutional rights to Kosovo. Under the leadership of Tito, and among other things to punish Serb nationalists, within six years Kosovo’s constitutional position from almost neglectable margins was advanced into a constituent element of the Federation envisaged by the Constitution of the 1974.

Serbian nationalists never forgave Tito and it was the same nationalists that produced Slobodan Milosevic as an absolute leader who immediately began implementing his policy of violently reversing all the achievements of Tito starting from annulling key provisions of the Constitution designed by Tito and by reinforcing the domination of Serbs throughout the Yugoslav Federation. As a result of this anti Tito policy Serbia initiated a chain of conflicts with hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees.

Today, in its struggle against Kosovo, Serbian politicians without any shame call upon the legacy of Tito. Serbian Foreign Minister calls upon Tito totally neglecting all the wrong doings, all the treasons, conspiracies and other ill doings designed by Serbian nationalists against Tito, against Tito’s vision and against Tito’s Yugoslavia. Tito in 1974 designed Yugoslavia as a federation of equals and not as a federation under Serb domination as Milloshevic, Rankovic and other predecessors of Jeremic wanted because if it wasn’t for Serb nationalism there would still be Yugoslavia, there would be no bloodshed, there would be no genocide. It would have been a truly different world. Jeremic knows this but unfortunately we need to remind him again. Kosovo deserves freedom and this was also Tito’s vision which he could not finish due to his early death.