Postscript : ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Threatens to Wipe Away Memory of Tito : Like the Yugoslavia he forged, his image has been distorted and demoted. Livestock graze in the yard of his Croatian birthplace.

Slipped in between a blurb about the ancient art of mead-making and a mention of the 19th-Century schoolhouse in this humble village is the only reference in local tourist literature to the most famous figure ever to emerge from Croatia.

“Josip Broz Tito’s Birth House,” a state-produced brochure dutifully reports toward the end of an exaggerated list of sights not to be missed on a visit to Kumrovec.

It tells nothing of the life and works of the man who built Yugoslavia up from World War II ruins and held its many ethnic groups together for four peaceful decades with a careful balance of reward and repression.

In fact, Marshal Tito’s memory has suffered the same fate as his federation. Here in his native Croatia and in the rival republic of Serbia, the image of the man who preached a doctrine of ethnic tolerance and Balkan unity has been defiled, distorted and demoted to the fringes of history, a posthumous victim of “ethnic cleansing.”

The birthplace of Josip Broz, the seventh child of Kumrovec peasants, was a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren and devoted citizens each year until the federation he built was destroyed by an explosion of nationalist passions he fought all his life to quell.

Today, the whitewashed house is an ignored backdrop for the games of village children, and peasant women use the yard to graze their livestock.

“He was just the president of former Yugoslavia, which was a political and historical occurrence that is over now,” says Branka Spremlovric, director of the Kumrovec historical society that seems devoted to finding something--anything--other than Tito’s memory to preserve.

Most of the memorial, which is the only one in Croatia offering any account of the late leader, consists of an ethnographic exhibit of wooden farm implements and cottage furniture that no one is sure ever belonged to the Broz family. A single room is dedicated to Tito, noting his birth here in 1892, his apprenticeship as a locksmith, his early association with Communist activists and his wartime role as leader of the partisan campaign that eventually ousted the Nazis.

The late president-for-life likewise gets no more than passing reference in museums in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, where government-sponsored historical displays focus on the Croatian people’s long struggle for nationhood.

Although Tito was born in what is now Croatia, the son of a Croatian father and Slovene mother, he presents an awkward legacy for his compatriots, as he firmly rejected the kind of nationalist sentiments that led to Croatia’s secession from the former Yugoslav federation in 1991. The break with Belgrade is now the defining event in the political consciousness of contemporary Croats, most of whom look back on Yugoslavia as a tragic experiment that deprived them of their own state.

His image has hardly fared better in the Serbian and Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, where Tito is buried. Serbian zealots like Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj accuse Tito of having denigrated Serbs by elevating other national groups to equal status. Some have campaigned for his exhumation and reburial in Croatia.

Tito died in 1980 and was buried with great ceremony at the House of Flowers mausoleum, which in the first years after his death drew tearful and reverent crowds. His widow, Jovanka, still lives in the Serbian capital, shunning the public spotlight as she did throughout the 35 years he ruled the country.

Milovan Djilas, the erstwhile dissident and gray eminence of the former Yugoslav federation, says Tito’s biggest failing was that he made no viable plans for his own succession.

“I think Tito thought he would live forever,” says a bemused Djilas, who was one of the Yugoslav leader’s most trusted lieutenants until he began in the 1950s to criticize the Communist Party’s descent into privilege and corruption.

Tito left behind a massive foreign debt, accumulated during years of borrowing to finance consumption. He bought his people’s tranquillity with material comforts while effectively mortgaging their future and setting them on a collision course with economic disaster.

He also bequeathed, in place of his own cultlike leadership, a complex, multilayered government and an eight-member collective presidency, with representatives from the six federal republics and two autonomous provinces of Serbia defined by the 1974 constitution.

Clumsy and fractious because it sought consensus among rivals, the federal leadership accomplished little in the decade after Tito’s death other than to oversee the federation’s decline into political chaos.

That leadership vacuum allowed a savvy Communist by the name of Slobodan Milosevic to rally Serbs, claiming Tito had committed grave offenses against their proud nation by ceding hallowed ground they had fought for over centuries to their ethnic enemies.

It was Tito, Djilas and a handful of other Communist leaders who drew Yugoslavia’s republic boundaries after World War II, defining the borders of what have since become independent states.

After Milosevic gained the title of president in what was accepted by international monitors as a free and fair election in December, 1990, the Serbian strongman armed and instigated Serbian minorities in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and stripped the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina of the autonomy Tito had given them.

Those actions set in motion the conflicts that have broken Tito’s federation into ethnic pieces over the past two years and left the millions who considered themselves Yugoslavs virtually stateless.

Only Bosnia’s Muslim Slavs and the majority ethnic group in the southern republic of Macedonia continue to remember Tito as a positive force in Balkan history. Through strength of personality and conviction, they say, he forged a prosperous federation that enjoyed the highest living standards and the most personal freedom of any Communist state.

Portraits of the wartime partisan leader still adorn the offices of Sarajevo’s multiethnic government, as well as many homes and factories in those parts of Bosnia that have not yet been vanquished by nationalist zealots.

Bosnia has the highest proportion of mixed marriages in the Balkan region, testimony to the republic’s embrace of the Titoist ideal of a multicultural society and the greatest impediment to the current nationalist quest for ethnic division.

The Serbian rebellion has been bloodiest in Bosnia because much of the population either cannot or does not want to be separated into ethnic states.

“When Tito was in power, if you were a nationalist, you were through,” remembers Adem Ibrahimpasic, a brewery manager in the northwestern Bosnian city of Bihac. “He thought he could extinguish nationalism, but he didn’t do it well enough. Perhaps if he had survived to rule a third generation he would have succeeded. Now we will have to go through three generations to forget this war.”

The Slavs who account for at least 60% of the 2 million residents of Macedonia also revere Tito for giving them an identity separate from the Serbs and Croats, who speak a different Slavic language, and for providing them with a republic of their own that they have since proclaimed an independent state.

Albanians in Serbia’s restive Kosovo province and the large Hungarian minority in Vojvodina remember Tito as the man who gave them political autonomy. But that special status fell short of their aspirations for nationhood and has, in any case, been revoked by his successors.

While Serbs and Croats mostly accept their nationalist leaders’ revisions of the Tito era, there is occasional nostalgia in both republics for the peace and relative affluence he created, which contrasts sharply with today’s widespread deprivations caused by division and war.

“It’s not right, what has happened to his memory,” says Bozica Kamenski, a 30-year-old waitress in the cafe across from Tito’s birth house.

“There used to be traffic jams here, with all the buses and tourists. Now there’s nothing,” she says, gesturing toward the empty cobblestone street and grass-tufted parking lot. “There was more money then and everyone had a job, not like today.”

Others remember, though, that Tito dealt harshly with challenges to his rigid system.

“It is not fair to say that he was all bad, but we have more freedom now,” says Jozo Primorec, a retired engineer in the provincial town of Nova Gradiska who spent six months in jail in the early 1970s for advocating Croatian independence and a relaxation of Communist rule. “Today I can say that (Croatian President Franjo) Tudjman is crazy, and nothing will happen to me. That wasn’t the case with Tito.”

In the volatile Serbian countryside, Tito is widely despised, thanks to a persistent campaign by Milosevic-controlled media to make the late leader a scapegoat for the poverty and insecurity that have resulted from more than two years of waging war.

But even in the nationalist stronghold of Belgrade, where Tito’s image has been thoroughly besmirched, there are occasional hints of remorse over the late leader’s fall from grace and his shattered dream of a Balkan federation.

Beside a poster of Milosevic, someone has scrawled: “The locksmith was better.”