Who Remembers Yugoslavia?

Inter Press News Service/Inter Press News Service
December 6, 2007

The meeting of several hundred World War II veterans last weekend would not have meant much, had it not been convened in a town that symbolises so many things about a country that no longer exists, Yugoslavia. Vesna Peric Zimonjic BELGRADE
The veterans met in Jajce, the central Bosnian town where the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) had convened on Nov. 29, 1943. That anti-fascist council represented all ethnicities -- Bosniaks, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes. It laid the foundation for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that lasted until 1991, when it fell apart in bloody wars among its people.
That was a historic meeting said Ljubo Babic, a veteran who had participated in the original AVNOJ convention. Without it, we would not have had Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, it fell apart. The biggest achievement after World War II was peace; the biggest misfortune was the mutual killing between its people.
Babic said reconciliation has barely begun after the wars of the 1990s. People of former Yugoslavia need calm heads to try to solve their problems.
The meeting called now was also representative of different groups, but it was shadowed over. Jajce symbolises something other now than the kind of togetherness that created Yugoslavia.
The small town suffered greatly in the 1992-95 war, falling prey to warring parties -- Serbs, Bosniaks or Croats. As a result, its population structure changed completely. From 45,000 in 1991, its population has shrunk to some 30,000; most of its inhabitants are Croats now (47 percent), along with Bosniaks (38 percent) and some 13 percent Serbs.
Before the war, Croats were 35 percent, Bosniaks 38 percent and Serbs 19 percent. Some 5.5 percent of town people described themselves in the 1991 census, the last for Yugoslavia, as Yugoslavs, meaning they came from mixed marriages.
But though the war changed the face of the town, it has not erased all the old feelings. Yugoslavia does not exist any more, and you do not meet people calling themselves Yugoslav, but Yugoslavia feeling still exists among many in this town, and indeed, all over the former state.
A café-restaurant named November opened recently in the Slovenian town Maribor. It houses memorabilia of the Yugoslavia era, including the old coat of arms of the vanished state in its window. It has six torches (representing six republics) whose flames unite in one.
The café upholds the red communist-era, five-point star, forgotten in all the newly created nations, who dropped communism from their agenda more than a decade ago. A similar café has been in business in Bosnian capital Sarajevo for years now, and another in Belgrade.
In Croatia, memories of Yugoslavia are inevitably linked with the man once called its biggest son -- former leader Josip Broz Tito.
Croat by birth, Tito loved to spend his summer on the exclusive islands of Brioni in the northern Adriatic. These islands are now a tourist Mecca, particularly for the Yugo-nostalgic.
Most of the area remains as it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before Tito's death in 1980. His native home in Kumrovec, a village close to Croat capital Zagreb, also draws many.
But Yugo-nostalgia is not popular in Croatia, at least not in public. The pro-government Vjesnik daily strongly attacked the Social Democratic Party (SDP) whose members celebrated their second ranking in the Nov. 25 election with the song Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia.
Vjesnik described the celebration as shameless, as it stood by the official line that the former homeland had oppressed Croats.
In Serbia, Yugo-nostalgia is not seen as a shame. The Serbian Business Registers Agency shows that almost 300 firms have kept the prefix Yugoslav in their names. Many were sold to foreign companies, but kept the old name after the demands of employees and business partners.
Yugoslav Airlines (JAT) remains the Serbian flag carrier. It remained JAT and will probably remain that even when sold, JAT public relations official Mirjana Dragovic told IPS. It's a brand. For many, it would sound weird to say 'Serbian Airlines' or something like that. For our company, it is no loss if there is an association with Yugoslavia by its name.
Being Yugo-nostalgic means remembering better times that preceded wars, sociology professor Ratko Bozovic told IPS. For many young people who were just children when former Yugoslavia fell apart, it's normal to investigate what it was and what it looked like. They are not burdened by misdeeds of their elders, and can create a bridge of better relations among us.