Tito, The Benevolent Dictator

I must admit that prior to going to the Balkans I had never heard of this Tito guy. 

I first came across his name when I was reading As Long As Sarajevo Exists. The author (who was the editor of Oslobodjenje an newspaper that was mentioned in this book about Tito!!) wrote that he had taken a quote of Tito's out of his newspaper and the people were in an uproar. Everyone loved Tito!

But who was Tito? I needed to know.

So after finishing the book about the forensics of Bosnia, it was time to dig a little deeper into the history of the Balkans.

There are a few very important things you need to know about Tito, listed in order of importance.

1. His personal jinx was that he could never keep a good suit. (He loved dressing well, so this was especially bothersome. His first suit was stolen. His second suit was eaten by a cow.)
2. He was known as the Benevolent Dictator.
3. Tito came to power during WWII
4. Tito was a communist.
5. Churchill supported Tito, even though he was a communist, thanks to information he got from Ultra. (It took historians 30 years to learn this. It took you 2 minutes. You are smart.)
6. Tito ruled in Yugoslavia from September of 1944 to his death on May 4, 1980.
7. Tito eventually split from Stalin. (Surprisingly, Stalin didn't treat him very well. He didn't like it. He got out. This is an important life lesson learned from Tito. Take note.)
8. His split from Stalin was significant for the economy of Yugoslavia because he was able play the east against the west and get money from both.
9. Times were prosperous in Yugoslavia under his rule because he borrowed lots of money.
10. Everybody loves the leader when they (the people) have lots of money.

After Tito died, Yugoslavia fell apart.

The wars started in 1991.

But why?

Backstory: When I was reading the book that made me cry en route to Bosnia - one question plagued me was - How, how do leaders get people to do such atrocious things? This kind of extreme barbarian behavior doesn't happen over night. People would have to be heavily primed - so HOW ON EARTH was this done to this gruesome extent? What were the Serbs told to get them to do such horrible things? I just couldn't wrap my head around it, but my ample experience as a human told me that there had to be a backstory leading up to this terrible massacre.

Kemal Kurspahi in the book As Long as Sarajevo Exists made it sounds like there was this little thing that happened 50 years before the wars in the Balkans that everyone needed to get over. 

Well, this book explained what the Serbs needed to get over. I warn that this is extremely graphic. 

It is also historically accurate.

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Once upon a time there was a radicalized group of Croatian Nationalists who wanted a free Croatia. They were called the Ustasha (or NDH). 

They also wanted to ethnically cleanse Croatia of the Serbs.

Many of these facts you will find you have never heard of because 

"In virtually all the memoirs and history books, the Independent State of Croatia, or NDH, appears if a tall as a vague and shadowy puppet regime, and its leader, Ante Pavelic, as an insignificant quisling." Pg. 74

"Far from being an unpopular alien state, the NDH had the undoubted support both of the great majority of the Roman Catholic Croat population and of the Church itself. Far from from being a docile puppet regime subservient to its Axis allies, the NDH was incomparably more determined, more ambitious and more independent than Mussolini's Italy, and more violent than Hitler's Reich. The NDH policy towards the almost two million Orthodox Serbs of 'convert a third, expel a third and kill a third' was conceived without the support of the Axis powers, and was executed with a ferocity that horrified the Italian army and shocked even the German SS." Pg. 74

• For most of the 1930s, Pavelic ran an Ustasha training camp at Siena, from which he sent back agents to Yugoslavia to plan the uprising, carry out bomb attacks and swear in recruits. Many of these recruits were novice Franciscans, as the novelist Evelyn Waugh discovered when he served in the military mission to Yugoslavia in 1944-5. pg. 78

• In dealing with his Axis allies, Pavelic was respectful and eager to please, provided they let him eliminate the Serbs. When Mussolini objected, Pavelic turned to the more understanding Hitler, who in June 1941 advised him that if he wanted a truly lasting NDH he must pursue 'a fifty-year-long policy of intolerance'. pg. 78

• Another important player was Archbishop Stepinac. He was archbishop of Zagreb in 1934 and the leader of the Roman Catholic church at that time. On him lies moral responsibility for much of what happened. The church had to be in a position to accept hundreds of thousands of forced converts, and many of the atrocities were conducted by Franciscan monks, as you will read below.

• In 1941 the Independent State of Croatia was born.

• Just as what happened in Germany, the government policies of intolerance began to come forth: In April 1941 the government issued decrees forbidding the use of Cyrillic script, closing the Orthodox schools and making the Serbs wear blue armbands, with the letter 'P' for "pravoslav' (Orthodox). In May and June the government passed laws depriving the Jews of the right to property or marriage with gentiles.

• The state authorities took the lead in the mass conversion of Orthodox Christians to the Roman Catholic Church, waiving the need for instruction and granting the rebaptism virtually on demand. Through out the spring and early summer of 1941 Roman Catholic priests, attended by Armed Ustasha, carried out mass baptisms in Orthodox villages throughout the Military Frontier and in Bosnia-Hercegovina. A Bosnian newspaper boasted that by September 1941 more than 70,000 Serbs had converted in the Banja Luka dioceses alone. By 1945 the number of converts the NDH amounted to more than 300,000.

• Those who joined the Catholic Church, often literally at gunpoint, were without exception poor and ignorant peasants, because the laws of the NDH expressly refused conversion of anyone with a secondary education, teachers, merchants, rich artisans and peasants, and above all Orthodox priests. Pg. 89

• At Otosac, early in May, the Orthodox priest was made to watch as his son was literally hacked to death, along with 350 other villagers. Then the Ustasha turned on the father, pulled out his hair and beard, gouged out his eyes and then tortured him to death. Pg. 91 - 92

• At the small town of Glina, the Ustasha butchered 1,000 Serb men, women and children inside the Orthodox church, which they then set on fire, burning alive a further thousand Serbs including the priest. Pg. 92

• Near Drvar, the Ustasha took the Orthodox priest and seventy of the faithful into the hills, where tehy cut their throats and hurled the bodies into a ravine. Pg. 92

• At Osijek, in eastern Slavonia, a Franciscan ordered the death of an Orthodox priest, who was seized by the Ustasha and then had his nose, ears and tongue cut off before he was stabbed in the stomach. Pg. 92

• Of the 577 Orthodox clergy, 131, including three bishops, are known to have been murdered in cold blood, while sixty or seventy others died in the fighting. Pg. 92

• The Ustasha burnt down or dynamited a third of the Orthodox churches, frequently with the faithful inside. Pg. 92

• Within forty-eight hours, on St Vitus's Day (28 June), when Serbs gathered in solemn memory of their ancestors who fell at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the Ustasha started a second and even more ghastly round of mass murder. Whereas the first atrocities took placed largely in the Military Frontier region of Croatia, the second wave struck at the larger Orthodox populations of Bosnia and Hercegovina, the stony and mountainous hinterland of the Adriatic coast. During the first two months of the NDH, the Ustasha had been inhibited in their task of killing the Serbs by the presence of German and Italian occupation troops, who did not understand or approve this fratricidal hatred. However, after the launching of the "Operation Barbarossa' on 22 June 1941, most of the German units left to fight on the Eastern Front, while the Italians withdrew to their new territory on the coast."

• On the morning of St Vitus's Day, which is also the anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination, the Ustasha death squads carried out mass arrests of the Orthodox Christians in Mostar, the smaller towns and many villages, especially in western Hercegovina, where Croats outnumbered the Serbs. The Ustasha seized, bound and imprisoned thousands of men, women and children, including many who had already changed their religion and started to go to Mass on Sundays. The more fortunate Serbs were led to the outskirts of the town or a nearby wood and quickly shot or clubbed to death. However, in many places the Ustasha went to elaborate lengths to dispatch the Serbs with the utmost terror and cruelty, perhaps as a reminder and threat to those who escaped. Pg. 94

• At the head of the quarry near the Franciscan monastery at the village of Medjugorje, the Ustasha threw 600 women and children, still alive, over the edge of the precipice. Pg. 94

• Crimes such as these had until now gone unreported. There were no foreign journalists in the NDH, nor any local newspaper foolhardy enough to defy the Ustasha. Pg. 94

• The German and Italian occupation forces were nauseated by that they had seen, but had not yet taken action against their NDH ally. Pg. 94

• Far from protesting against the Ustasha crimes, the Croat episcopate, which had gathered in Zagreb on 26 June, promised slavish support to Ante Pavelic. Pg. 94 - 95

• But one of the bishops who did not attend that meeting, the elderly Dr. Misic of Mostar, now demonstrated his courage and Christian spirit. 

• After the massacre on St. Vius's Day, the Bishop of Mostar ordered the clergy in his diocese to read out in church a solemn reminder that those who committed the sin of murder could not apply for absolution. Although this may seem to us simply an obvious statement of Christian teaching, priests in the NDH were sentenced to death for saying 'Thou shalt not kill', or even for refusing to say Te Deum on Pavelic's birthday. pg. 95

• The first people to come to the help of the Serbs in the NDH were not the Chetniks or the Partisans but the German and, still more, the Italian occupation troops. Pg. 97

• The reports of the SS show that even these hardened killers were horrified by the Ustasha. Pg. 97

• They dug up some Serbs who had been buried alive in April and filed their documents under the heading 'What the Ustasha did at Bjelovar'. They described with disgust how the Ustasha had made Serb peasants lie on their faces in church, then speared them with pikes. Pg. 97

• ...The sympathy of the Germans did not extend to the Jews, and it was they as much as the Serbs who came to look for salvation from the Italians." Pg. 98

• The more they saw of the Ustasha, the more the Italians helped the Serbs. In early June, the carabinieri in Split reported a stream of Serb and Jewish refugees crossing into Italian territory iwht stories of Ustasha atrocities. The bodies of Serbs floated in huge numbers down the River Neretva, through Mostar. Pg. 100

• The Italian Foreign Ministry accumulated a grisly collection of photographs from the NDH, showing the butcher's knives and axes used by the Ustasha to dismember the Serbs, whose corpses are also shows. Pg. 100

• on 28 June 1941 the 32nd Infantry Regisment stationed at Bilec were caught in a storm of automatic fire and threw themselves to the ground shouting "Siamo Italiani!' ('We're Italian!'). The firing stopped and some Serbs came up to apologise, saying that they had thought the Italians were Ustasha. At a nearby village, the Italians discovered 200 Serb corpses. Pg. 100

• In the spring of 1941, soon after the establishment of the NDH, the Ustasha arrived in Foca and, assisted by Muslim thugs, slaughtered the Serbs, beginning with twelve only sons of prominent citizens. In the village of Miljevina, the Ustasha slit the throats of the Serbs over a large vat formerly used to store fruit pulp. Later, Serb Chetniks led by a drunken White Russian officer took their revenge by seizing and binding the Muslims, then throwing them off the bridge to drown. Four hundred Serbs and 3,000 Muslims were reported to have been killed in Foca, but judging by the devastation he witnessed, Djilas believed that the estimated number of Serb casualties was too low. Pg. 117

• Young Ustasha had fun with the girls in this manner: when they shook hands with them during walks, they would place human ears, fingers or noses in their hands... Pg. 124

• Although the Ustasha tried out poison gas as a way of killing the Jews on special trains, they scorned modern technology at Jasenovac and the other camps. They normally killed with knives, axes and clubs, or by hanging, burning in furnaces or burying alive. One group of Ustasha posed for their photograph as they sawed off the head of a young Serb. Pg. 128 - 129

• ...written in August 1941, the then Bishop of Mostar described among other atrocities how the Ustasha had brought 'six wagons full of mothers, girls and children under eight to the station fo Surmanci, where they were taken out of the waggons, brought into the hills and thrown alive, mothers and children, into deep ravines'. Pg. 385

• The government of the NDH had built temporary camps in the summer of 1941 to hold the arrested Jews and the Serbs waiting for transportation to Belgrade. When the Italians reoccupied their sphere of influence in the NDH, the Ustasha killed their prisoners rather than let them fall into friendly hands. On the island of Pag the Italians discovered the bodies of 4,500 Serbs and 2,500 Jews, including women and children, all of them murdered. Pg. 128

• In September 1941 the Minister of the Interior Andrija Artukovic set up a system of concentration camps in the German sphere of influence, to be run by Eugen-Dido Kvaternick, the son of Croatia's Field Marshal. An Ustasha zealot, Maks Luburic, who planned an extermination camp while in exile, was given permission to build it at Jasenovac on the northern bank of the Sava, in the marshes formed by the confluence with the Una. This was the nucleus for a chain, or archipelago, of camps stretching from Sisak, which specialised in the killing of children, to Nova Gradiska, which was mainly for killing women, under teh supervision of Maks's sister Nada Tanic-Luburic and her pretty colleague Maja Slomic-Buzdon, both of whom were accomplished stranglers. The Jasenovac complex was linked to the railways bringing in truck-loads of Serb and Jewish deportees, who later departed floating along the Sava to Belgrade. Pg. 128

• The main Jasenovac camp had a regular occupancy of from 3,000 to 6,000 inmates from the autumn of 1941 to the spring of 1945. Few lasted as long as three months, after which time, in accordance with the camp rules, they were murdered. Pg. 129

• The camp had previously been a brick-yard and was situated on the embankment of the Sava river. IN the middle of the camp stood a two-storey house, originally erected for the offices of the enterprise...The screams and wails of despair and extreme suffering, the tortured outcries of the victims, broken by intermittent shooting, accompanied all my waking hours and followed me into sleep at night. Pg. 129 (written by Vlatko Macek, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, who had declined the German offer to be the head of the NDH. They sent him to Jasenovac to write his memoirs.)

• Macek noticed that one of the guards who spent his day killing would cross himself on retiring at night: 'I asked him if he were not afraid for the punishment of God. "Don't talk to me about that," he said, "for I am perfectly aware of what is in store for me. For my past, present and future deeds I shall burn in hell but at least I shall burn for Croatia." Pg. 129

• Coats did sometimes survive the Jasenovac complex. From the mass of Ustasha documents on the 'cleansing', as well as detailed testimonies of the few inmates who escaped or were released, it seems that at least 70,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies were killed at Jasenovac alone. The total number of dead at all the NDH camps is certainly very much higher, though not as high as the million sometimes claimed by the Serbs. It is especially frightful to learn that the killers at Jasenovac included six Franciscn priests. of whom the worst was Father Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, known to the inmates as "fra Sotona' ('Brother Devil'). According to one of the witness at the priests's subsequent trial" 'Filipovic-Majstovic seemed kind and gentle, except when the massacring was going on. Then he was incomparable. He was leader of all the mass killings...He went off to conduct the slaughtering every night and came back in the morning, his shirt covered in blood." Pg. 130

• Another former inmate described how one day Maja Slomic-Buzdon arrived drenched in blood and proudly announced to 'Brother Devil' that she had just 'slaughtered seven of them', at which the delighted Father Majstorovic warmly embraced her and said: 'Now I love you, now I know you're a real little Ustasha girl." Pg. 129 - 130

• Another Franciscan killer, Zvonko Brekalo, was constantly to be found drunk with prostitutes at the local taverns but nevertheless had the letters 'K-R-I-Z' ('Cross') tattooed on the fingers of his left hand. These Franciscans continued to say Mass and preach sermons of loyalty to the Ustasha state. Pg. 131

• Like all the Italian generals in Yugoslavia, Roatta would not hand over Jews to the NDH, because 'they would be interned at Jasenovac with the well-known consequences'. On 7 September 1941 his colleague General Vittorio Ambrosia gave his 'word of honour' to protect the Jews. The Italian attitude to the Jews was a constant source of annoyance to their German allies. Pg. 135

• Throughout 1942, and until their country's surrender on 8 September 1943, the Italians did not hand over a single Jew to the Germans, the Croats, or anyone else who intended to kill them." Pg. 137 (Way to go Italians!!!)

• During the trial of Adolf Eichmann after teh war, many survivors of Hitler's "Final Solution' praised those Italians who had provided false documents, ignored their orders, bent the rules and in hundreds of other ways helped the Jews to escape." Pg. 137

• "What in Denmark was the result of an authentically political sense, an inbred comprehension of the requirements and responsibilities of citizenship and independence...was in Italy the outcome of the almost automatic general humanity of an old and cultured people." Pg. 137

• At Crkveni Bok, an unhappy place where, under the leadership of an Ustasha lieutenant-colonel, some 500 yokels (Lumpen) from fifteen to twenty years old met their end, all murdered, the women raped and then tortured to death, the children killed. I saw in the Sava river a woman's corpse with the eyes gouged out and a stick shoved into the sexual parts. This woman was at most twenty years old when she fell into the hands of these monsters. Pg. 138

• Hitler himself was one of the first to spot the Partisan danger. Pg. 139 (Partisans was the word used for the Communists. The Communists were the most successful resistance against Hitler in that area, and so much more humane than the Ustasha. Churchill knew this through Ultra and this is why he supported Tito. He was by far the best of the options available, even though he was a communist.)

• From mid-November 1942 to mid-January 1943, Tito presided over his Bihac Republic in north-west Bosnia. The Partisans brought out their newspapers, meted out justice to Ustasha criminals, reopened the schools and permitted freedom of worship to the Muslims and both Christian churches. Pg. 141

• Letter from Muslims of Sarajevo to Hitler: To achieve two ends with a single stroke, that is to annihilate the Muslims as well as the Orthodox Serbs in Bosnia-Hercegovina, they sent several Ustasha battalions from Zagreb wearing our caps [the fez], with orders to kill the Serbs, at the same time addressing each other with Muslim names. The aim of this devilish plan was to show how Muslims slaughter Serbs. Pg. 142

• And now you can understand why this happened, and also how Tito got into power: Behind Tito's army there followed a thousand wounded and many more women and children, who saw the Partisans as their only protection. The suffering of this multitude, all of them hungry and some of them barefoot in spite of the snow, was made more hideous by a typhus epidemic." Pg. 145

• The English writer Stephen Clissold, who always regarded the Yugoslavs with mixed emotions of admiration and horror, has told how the young Hercegovinians would, on joining the Communist Party during the war, demonstrate their loyalty by first shooting their 'borgeois' parents. Pg. 146

• Ten years after the war, when I shared a room in a student hostel in Sarajevo with young Hercegovinians and Montenegrins, they used to regal each other with stories of what fun it had been to witness the execution of the Italian prisoners, especially when the victims wept and called out for their mothers. Pg. 146

• All the Italian troops - the entire Third Battalion of the 259th Regiment of the Murge Division - were put to death. We put into effect the conditions they had rejected, and vented our bitterness. Only the drivers were speared - to help transport the munitions and the wounded. Many corpses were tossed into the Rama River. Several got caught among the logs, and I shared with our officers a malicious joy at the thought of Italian officers on the bridges and embankments of Mostar stricken with horror at the sight of the Neretva choked with the corpses of their soldiers. Pg. 146

• The Germans admired the fighting quality of the Partisans but clearly were horrified by the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina: 'Look what you've done to your own country! A wasteland! Cinders! Women are begging on streets, typhus is raging, children are dying of hunger. And we wish to bring you roads, electricity, hospitals." Pg. 150

• Tito listened carefully to his [Djilas's] experiences and characteristically wanted to hear his impressions about the Germans as human beings. 'Yes,' he said afterwards, 'it seems that the German army has kept something of the spirit of chivalry.' Pg. 150

• One Soviet officer raped a woman Partisan as she brought him a message during a battle. When Tito made a complaint, General Korneyev, the head of the Soviet military mission, at first refused to listen and then grew angry, at which point Milovan Djilas intervened to say that enemies of the revolution were making propaganda out of the rapes: 'They are comparing the attacks by the Red Army soldiers with the behavior of the English officers who do not indulge in such excesses." Korneyev exploded with fury: 'I protest most sharply against the insult to the Red Army in comparing it with the armies of capitalist countries." The exchanged was reported back to Moscow and rankled in Stalin's mind. Pg. 190

• On Sunday, 15 April, as Pavelic, Artukovic, Budak, Archbishop Saric of Sarajevo adn Luburic, the commandant of Jasenovac, were preparing to go into exile in Argenita, Spain or the United States, Archbishop Stepinac devoted his sermon to what he believed was Croaita's worst sin, not mass murder but searing. His lack of any sense of proportion amounted almost to madness. Stepinac could see no distinction in the degree of evil between cursing a neighbour and hurling that neighbor over the side of a precipice. Pg. 192

• The Yugoslav Communists brought in a one-party state with a fraudulent parliament; they imprisoned some fo th e'bourgeois' politicians, and closed the independent newspapers by thuggery, arson, or printing strikes. Pg. 194-5

• On his last visit to Sarajevo in Tito's lifetime, I went to look again at the fatal plaque in honour of Gavrilo Princip. Once more it gave me a sense of foreboding, so I ended my article with these words: 'Since terror always produces a counter-terror, so the assassination by Princip led not only to World War One but to the cycle of violence between the Serbs, Croats and Muslims, to the chronic hatred that still slumbers beneath the surface in Sarajevo and could break out once more. Then more shots might be heard that would echo around the world.

• The many Serbs in the old Military Frontier had suffered terribly in the Second World War. Within days of coming to power in April 1941, the Ustasha in Sisak arrested a Serb merchant and flayed him alive. The German Plenipotentiary General Glaise von Horstenau gives a harrowing account of the Ustasha camp at Sisak for the extermination of Serb women and children. Pg. 320

• In Zagreb flats were expensive and hard to find. The Party bosses after the war had taken over the mansions of the borgeoisie in the old town and the leafy suburbs up on the hills. Pg. 321

• One quote from earlier in the book that I found significant after our conversations with Duje was this: In Zagreb flats were expensive and hard to find. The Party bosses after the war had taken over the mansions of the bourgeoisie in the old town and the leafy suburbs up on the hill. 

But the Ustasha came back:

• The Ustasha were the first terrorist group to threaten to plant bombs on aircraft, and the Yugoslav national airline, JAT was the first to institute baggage and body searches. 
• Despite these precautions, in Stockholm in January 1972 Ustasha agents succeeded in planting a bomb on a JAT DC9, which blew up over Czechoslovakia. The sole survivor, a Montenegrin air hostess, fell 33,330 feet without a parachute, to enter the Guinness Book fo Records Hall of Fame. 
• In 1976 the Ustasha hijacked an aircraft flying from Chicago to Paris, forcing a detour to London to scatter leaflets over the city.
• A number of Ustasha bomb attacks inside Yugoslavia, in cinemas and at Belgrade railway station, caused people to grumble that the UDBA therefore sent death squads to gun down Ustasha in Munich and other centers abroad, leading to diplomatic incidents with governments concerned. Pg. 303

In conclusion: Tito kept the country together partially because he understood Ustasha and the power of nationalism in the Balkans. Being a dictator, he put pretty heavy-handed quashes on uprisings and demonstrations. After he died, this all came unraveled, as it seems most everyone, including Tito suspected it would.

But this 'little something' that the Serbs needed to get over...wow. It was so much more than a 'little something' to get over. It is the kind of thing one doesn't ever get over.

I feel so grateful that I didn't know any of this before I went to Bosnia because instead of being taken by the natural beauty of the place, the spell would never been cast because, like the author, this is what I would have seen when I visited these places:

"Going by bus from Dubrovnik to Mostar and heading upstream along the River Neretva, I looked with a feeling of horror towards the limestone hills of western Hercegovnina, the scene of the Medjurgorje apparitions, and tens of thousands of murders fifty years ago." Pg. 138

I was so in love with Mostar when we visited. That was where we spent our first night. It was beautiful and all of my pictures are labeled things like 'charming building' and such. Could I have thought it so charming if I had known this river once had dead bodies floating along...not just once, but twice - during WWII and the 1990s...and that women and children were once thrown off of these mountains?

Could I have had such a carefree time?

Could I have been so charmed by everyone I met there?

At the end of the book the author got stuck in Mostar right before the war broke out there in the 1990's. He broke his ankle and could not move. The tension was palpable. I thought this was touching:

• During my second week in Mostar, the children started collecting signatures for peace, either on streets of foolscap paper or in their exercise books. Since there were more collectors of signatures than there were people to sign, the very few customers in cafes like the Neretva were much in demand. There was a solemn little Croat girl in a bonnet who asked me so many times that I started to sign the names of my friends in England. Some of the male Yugoslavs muttered that 'peace is for women and children', but nevertheless they signed. 

The author ends with this:

On the day before I was ready to leave, tens of thousands of young people and children marched to a Mostar sports ground to hold a rally for peace. Some came on foot, some by car, scooter or bicycle, but almost all of them carried two symbols of peace: the red, white and blue flag of Yugoslavia superimposed by a Communist red star, and Tito's portrait. The memory stays with me of one platoon of boys and girls, scarcely old enough to be born when Tito died, who carried his picture above their heads as they solemnly marched, their little arms swinging and little knees rising to stamp the roadway; and as they marched they changed and piped the old cry of the Partisans: 'Tito is ours, and we are Tito's ('Tito je nas i mi smo Titovi'). The slogan that forty years ago I had found repulsive and totalitarian now charmed and moved me. In all the years I had known Yugoslavia under the rule or influence of Josip Broz Tito, I never dreamed I should live to see him leading a children's crusade. Watching that pitiful, doomed procession, I felt overwhelmed by dread of the coming disaster." Pg. 392*

(*Mostar was almost completely leveled by the Bosnian war. That central bridge was blown up.)