Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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II. An explosion forestalled

The interview with Tito, which was more a prediction than an interview, appeared in the Sunday Times of 2 March 1980. Harry Evans, the newspaper's editor-in-chief at the time, decided to feature it on the front page of the weekly supplement.

In fact, the whole idea was originally Evans's; he believed that the interview would be "Tito's last word". We all knew, as did the entire world, that the legendary Yugoslavian leader was ill and that he was also deeply depressed following the loss of his wife and beloved comrade in arms.

Evans wagered that, if the Sunday Times requested an appointment for one of its reporters, Tito would most likely refuse. If, on the other hand, the appointment were for me, Tito might accept on the basis of our old acquaintance, dating back to Tito's friendship with Nasser. Evans won his bet.

I met Tito. But before beginning the interview, he voiced a mild reproach. He said he was surprised that the Sunday Times had asked for the appointment, when it would have been more fitting that I request it. I tried to explain the professional considerations international newspapers must adhere to when seeking to interview prominent world statesmen. Tito was charitable. At least, he changed the subject and began to recall the first time I met him, in the early '50s, during the celebration of the battle in which his forces broke through Hitler's blockade in the Croatian mountains. Tito and his fellow resistance fighters escaped from a formidable Nazi trap and were able to resume fighting.

The reminiscences ended abruptly, however. Perhaps President Tito sensed that concerns for the future had driven the Sunday Times to ask for an interview. Thus, the conversation turned to its intended course: the future. In fact, it appears to me now, with a copy of the interview in hand, that the future was actually history, giving credence to Lord David Owen's assessment nearly 20 years after Tito's death.

For a reason which I cannot recall now, Harry Evans chose the title of the interview with Tito. That would have been his right, since he had chosen the feature that would fill the entire front page of his newspaper. Next to a large picture of Tito's face, three columns wide and 30 centimetres high, was written: "The Evening Thoughts of an Embattled Nightingale." The headline seemed strange, but it was inspired by one of Tito's speeches, in which he cited a popular Yugoslavian saying: "The song of one nightingale is not sufficient to summon spring."

The headline may have been lyrical, but the interview was not. In fact, perhaps the only touch of poetry was the setting -- the island of Vanga. Tito, particularly in his later years, always preferred to live far from Belgrade. He had chosen as his home the Brioni Isles, one of the most picturesque spots in the northern Adriatic. The area is stunning, nestled along the Dalmatian coast. It was the favourite summer resort of all the Austro-Hungarian emperors, the playground of beauty, power and splendour.

Tito, however, found that Brioni was getting more crowded by the day, whether because his presence there had made it Yugoslavia's unofficial capital or because it was located near the busy port of Pula. Therefore, he silently moved to Vanga, which virtually touches it. Tito transformed Vanga into a garden paradise and built himself a small house there. Its most attractive feature was the cellar, which housed a wine press. Tito personally supervised the making of the wine, which he aged for years in ancient casks. He labeled the bottles with his own hand, using special symbols to indicate the years in which the grapes had produced the finest flavour and body.

The wine cellar led out to a balcony built upon a cliff overlooking the sea, yet protected from the strong winds. The view over the changing colours of the water was breathtaking, particularly as the sun set; the lights of Brioni cast arrows upon the waves and the lights of Pula glittered in the breeze from afar. So much for the lyricism of that evening. The rest of the interview cast a shadow over all the lights.

That evening on the balcony built into the rocks, he somehow sensed that I wanted to ask him about the future after Tito. The thought must have frightened him, as a human being and as a politician. Tito hated death. He never attended a funeral, and therefore never went to bid farewell to his closest friends in the world, Nehru and Nasser. His excuse was simple and straightforward: he was superstitious. In addition to the ordinary human fear, he was taunted by the fate of his country after he died. He wanted to be optimistic, but pessimism prevailed.

That evening, President Tito drove straight to the core of the issue as soon as I asked him about the future of Yugoslavia. (I did not add "after him", but he accepted the implication without comment, and I did not press further so as not to arouse his misgivings.) Speaking in English, which he took great pains to learn and to use as much as possible in the last years of his life, he chose his words very carefully. It was as though he wanted to lay solid, logical foundations for what he was going to say.

He said: "I want first to tell you seven important facts about Yugoslavia. These facts are a chain of numbers that progress with the number of each fact:

"Fact number 1: Yugoslavia is one nation.

"Fact number 2: Yugoslavia uses two alphabets, the Latin and the Cyrillic.

"Fact number 3: Yugoslavia speaks three languages -- Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian.

"Fact number 4: Yugoslavia embraces four religions -- Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Islam and Judaism.

"Fact number 5: Yugoslavia is the homeland of five national identities: Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian and Montenegran.

"Fact number 6: Yugoslavia comprises six republics: the Serbian Republic, the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Republic of Croatia, the Republic of Slovenia, the Republic of Macedonia and the Republic of Montenegro.

"Fact number 7: Yugoslavia has seven neighbours: Italy, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece."

Tito continued, "This progression of facts and figures describes Yugoslavia. At the same time, it outlines Yugoslavia's problems when the numbers are translated from the world of statistics to the world of politics."

He smiled and said, "Some people say that I am the first Yugoslav in history." His smile faded when he added, "Others say that I might be the last."

THE AGE OF UNITY? Top, De Gaulle; centre, left to right, Truman, Russel and Sartre; bottom, Kennedy, Khrushchev and Mao Tse Tung

What Tito was referring to here, although we did not dwell on it at the time, was that Yugoslavia was artificially created following World War I from an amalgamation of Slavic peoples that migrated southwards between the sixth and eighth centuries. In fact, the word Yugoslavia means 'Slavs of the south.' These Slavs settled in the midst of the mountains, between Europe and Asia. This location made their homeland an area of major historical confrontations between migrating peoples, religions, cultures, empires and great powers that fought for dominance in the Balkans, Europe or the world. The area in which the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was founded, after a resolution issued at the Versailles peace conference, was the site for the collision between two streams of migrating peoples: the Slavs, from the steppes of the Ukraine, and the Mongolians, from the steppes of China. It then witnessed the clash between Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine church, and between Islam and Christianity (represented by both Roman and Byzantine churches). It was always a locus of strife between cultures shaped by national, ethnic, religious and other affiliations. The Russian Czarist Empire (under the Eastern Orthodox Romanovs), the Austro-Hungarian Empire (under the Catholic Hapsburgs) and the Ottoman Empire (under the Muslim Ottoman Caliphate) also locked horns in this region. Finally, as these conflicts tightened their stranglehold, other empires in western Europe (notably Great Britain and France) developed interests in the southeastern corner of the continent and beyond (particularly with regard to the legacy of the Ottoman Caliphate).

Thus, Yugoslavia was hastily patched together following World War I. Then it was recast, with some improvements, after World War II. What mainly inspired hope in the precision manufacture of Yugoslavia the second time around was the heroic leadership of Josip Broz Tito himself in the resistance to the Nazi encroachment on the Balkans, and then in Hitler's defeat. It was hoped that the spirit of the resistance signified a rebirth that, with this hero at the helm, could reaffirm the unity of the Slavs of the south in their crowded homeland, and that this unity could come to peace with the old realities and contradictory forces, thus preserving the nascent state from disintegration.

This is what Tito probably meant when he mentioned that, according to some, he was the first and could be the last Yugoslav in history. Already there had been premonitions that the country known as Yugoslavia would not live long after he died.

Tito (who was 80 at the time of the interview for the Sunday Times) resumed: "I have given much thought to the future of Yugoslavia (he did not say 'after me', choosing instead to speak in the abstract). Were it not for my concern for the future, I would not have remained at the head of government until now. I would have retired and come to live here (again, he did not add 'for the rest of my life')."

He continued: "On occasion I toyed with the idea of relinquishing responsibility to one man, but the choice was too difficult. I had to find a man who had the wisdom to lead the country and the charisma to be accepted by the country. Sometimes I would come across a man who had the wisdom but not the charisma and sometimes I would find the charisma without the wisdom. Finally, I had the idea -- based on the principle of collective leadership -- to create a presidential council representing all the republics, with the chairmanship rotating regularly between them."

In retrospect, Tito's idea did more harm than good. Instead of alleviating the problem, it compounded it, for the existence of a presidential council comprising a representative from each republic enhanced the sense of difference, and then of distinction, independence and separatism. I said to Tito: "You were personally instrumental in giving Yugoslavia extraordinary status."

He responded: "We have a saying in Yugoslavia: 'The song of one nightingale is not sufficient to summon spring'." He continued: "There are also objective reasons for Yugoslavia's status, which enhance the possibility of its perpetuity. First, we have a good world image and a record that summons respect. We resisted the Nazis in a vicious war in which we lost 11 per cent of our population. We not only resisted, we held up 20 divisions of the German army which could otherwise have helped to block the landing of the Allied armies on the shores of Europe. Second, Yugoslavia stood up against Stalin. Our differences with Stalin began during World War II. He could not understand that we wanted to be communist and independent at the same time, because we believed that Marxism was one thing and Soviet hegemony was another. Third, despite Stalin's blockade, and despite the boycott our neighbours had imposed, we managed to build an advanced industrial base. Fourth, together with Egypt and India we founded a front for non-aligned nations which furnished considerable protection to the forces of liberation in the world."

According to the Sunday Times text, Tito then began to talk about the West, and the US in particular. I asked him if there were other "nightingales" in Yugoslavia's future. He laughed and replied: "When I told you about the song of the nightingale, I did not mean to underestimate my part. I know it and I have no doubt that my effort was good for Yugoslavia. I assume that in the future some people will say we did not open the doors to democracy far enough. But let me tell you that the preservation of the unity of Yugoslavia was my overriding consideration. Yugoslavia is divided between east and west, culturally, historically and politically. One day, as you recall, the allies in Yalta agreed to divide Europe into spheres of influence following Germany's defeat. According to the plan, 60 per cent of a country such as Hungary was placed under Western influence and 40 per cent under Eastern influence. The reverse ratio applied to Greece. When it came our turn, they agreed that the fairest ratio [Tito laughed at this point] would be fifty-fifty. It astounded me that Churchill, when I met him in Trieste following the war, tried to win me over to this curious calculation."

Tito continued: "I want to speak less and hear more. I do not want to find myself, after my long life, a prisoner of old thoughts. I imagine [he emphasised the point]... I imagine that Yugoslavia will not be in grave danger, because the US will not let the Soviet Union overstep its bounds with us. Then, too, the Soviet Union will not let the US overstep its bounds. And, above all, there is our readiness to defend ourselves. The Soviet Union, at one point, had high hopes for the Yugoslavian army. It imagined that arming us with Soviet weaponry would give Moscow an inroad into our army. Their calculations proved wrong. The US imagined -- and perhaps it still does -- that it could depend on our youth. Certainly our young admire the American experience and the American way of life. But there is the Slavic identity. I think that Yugoslavia will preserve its independence and it will preserve its unity."

According to my notes on the interview I conducted with Tito, elements of which did not appear in the Sunday Times article, he expressed his fears regarding the material discrepancies between the republics. Slovenia, in his opinion, was a problem because it was the wealthiest (it is also the closest to the basin of Germanic civilisation and influence). His second fear was Croatia (also vulnerable to German-Austrian influences).

He said: "The wealth of certain republics in any federation is a temptation to the rich to wash their hands of the problems of the poor (such as Montenegro), at which point they begin to look for another future for themselves together with other rich people."

Indeed, that is exactly what occurred. The crisis in Yugoslavia began in 1991. Almost without drawing attention to itself, Slovenia withdrew from the federation. Croatia followed. Germany (and it was as though Tito's prognosis echoed prophetically down the years), against the unanimous opinion of the EU, gave its recognition to an independent Slovenia and then Croatia.

Tito, on the occasion of our interview in 1980, could never have imagined what would happen to the Soviet Union only 10 years later. The Soviet Union disintegrated and perhaps lost its independence. The same thing happened to Yugoslavia, only in a bloodier and more tragic way. The dormant embers of the cultural, religious and ethnic compound reignited, spewing forth molten lava into its ancient course, symbolised by the Drina, the river that marks the dividing line between east and west in the life of the southern Slavs.

It was at the Drina that the Slavic tribes coming from the east and the Germanic tribes and Roman legions coming from the West converged. It was the Drina that marked the boundary between the influence of the Eastern Orthodox Church after its split from Rome, and the march of the apostles bearing the standards of the Roman pope. It was at the Drina that the Ottoman incursion and the message of the Islamic Caliphate came to a halt, and it was the Drina that checked the advance of the Austro-Hungarian armies marching in the name of the Hapsburgs, the heirs to the Holy Roman Empire. The Drina is no ordinary geological fissure through which the melted Alpine snows course. It is a fissure far deeper and more sinister.

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