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Criticism of titoism



Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) was a Croatian dictator and State's terrorist.  Broz (later nicknamed Tito) was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Croatia (a former republic of Yugoslavia) and was the Commander of all the Yugoslav Partisans and Communists during World War Two. He later became Yugoslavia's political leader (1945–1980) and was the main decision maker in military and political matters. He was President for Life of Yugoslavia and played a crucial, if not the main role, in historical events of that country. He was considered by many to be, one of the prominent Eastern European Balkan Dictators of the Cold War era. He also was a member of the infamous Soviet Police-NKVD.

He is a controversial historical figure in the Balkans.

Following are some of his many roles;
 * Prime Minister of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
 * Secretary-General of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (1939–80).
 * Marshal of Yugoslavia, serving as the supreme commander of the Yugoslav military, the Yugoslav People's Army.
 * One of the founders of Cominform. The Cominform was the beginning of the Soviet communist block (Yugoslavia was expelled by Stalin in 1948).
 * One of the main founders and promoters of the Non-Aligned Movement, and its first Secretary-General. (etc)

Post Berlin Wall and the collapse of Yugoslavia
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Yugoslavia, factual evidence has emerged that Josip Broz and the Yugoslav regime were actually responsible for executing mass murders, arrests and torture. The worst of these historical events are the;
 * Way of the Cross massacres (death marches)
 * Bleiburg massacres
 * Foibe massacres

The government of the Republic of Slovenia (a former republic of Yugoslavia) commissioned a study of communist crimes in the immediate post World War Two period. It was called the Commission on Concealed Mass Graves in Slovenia. Their work was completed in October 2009. The commission discovered and detected 581 mass graves in which the estimates detail about 100 000 victims in total. These were the victims of the Bleiburg and Way of the Cross massacres from 1945/46. The killings were executed by the Yugoslav Partisan Army. The Yugoslav Army and their supreme commander Josip Broz Tito executed, without trial, a huge number of POWs and civilians who were deemed guilty by association only.

Note: Reference information below from Encyclopaedia Britannica: Croatia

British commanders refused to accept their surrender and handed them over to the Partisans, who took a merciless revenge. Tens of thousands, including many civilians, were subsequently slaughtered on forced marches and in death camps.

Note: Reference information below: Milko Mikola- Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes. Chapter 3. Mass killings without court trials: The Main Headquarters of the Yugoslav Army had already called attention to respecting the Geneva Convention on 3rd of May in its order on the treatment of prisoners of war. However, despite this injunction, both prisoners of war and civilians were killed on mass at the end of May and in the first half of June 1945 in Slovenia. Tito’s telegram on respecting the Geneva Convention was later revoked; however, it could only be revoked by the person who issued it in the first place, i.e. Tito himself. It is estimated, mainly on the basis of graves discovered up to now, that around 100,000 captured members of different military formations and civilians from all parts of Yugoslavia were killed without a court trial in Slovenia.
 * (organised by the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union and the European Commission)

Barbarin Rov, Jazovka Pit and Tezno, a district of Slovenia's city Maribor are other execution sites. Kocevski Rog was another site of massacre as stated by Encyclopaedia Britannica: After the armistice the British repatriated more than 10,000 Slovene collaborators who had attempted to retreat with the Germans, and Tito had most of them massacred at the infamous Pits of Kocevje.

Additionally there is the ethnic cleansing of Germans and Italians of the former Yugoslavia.

Native German and Hungarian communities, seen as complicit with wartime occupation, were brutally treated; tantamount in some cases to ethnic cleansing. The Volksdeutsch settlements of Vojvodina and Slavonia largely disappeared. Perhaps 100,000 people—half the ethnic German population in Yugoslavia—fled in 1945, and many who remained were compelled to do forced Labour, murdered, or later ransomed by West Germany. Some 20,000 Hungarians of Vojvodina were killed in reprisals. Albanian rebellions in Kosovo were suppressed with prisoners sent on death marches towards the coast. An estimated 170,000 ethnic Italians fled to Italy in the late 1940s and 1950s. (All of these figures are highly approximate.) Note: Vladimir Geiger of the Croatian Institute for History:The list of German victims includes 26,000 women and 5,800 children who died in Yugoslav Camps- Geiger said. The Goli Otok (Barren Island), a notorious prison on the Croatian coast, (former Yugoslavia’s Evil Island-Gulag) is where the regime imprisoned their enemies. They included mainly alleged enemies of the communist state, other Communist Party members, regular citizens accused of exhibiting any democratic and anti-communist behaviour. It is estimated over 100 000 people where arrested on false allegations and imprisoned. Family members were told that they went on a business trip. Other camps that were used by the regime are KPH Zenica, Stare Gradiska and Sveti Grgur.
 * Information from the Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity: Yugoslavia by Ed. Dinah L. Shelton. Gale Cengage, 2005:

Second Yugoslavia
Tito's greatest strength was acquiring financial and economic support from the West. This made it possible for the creation of the "second Yugoslavia", a socialist, communist federation that lasted from 1945 until 1991. The West wanted to give support to Yugoslavia in opposition to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. More money was given to Yugoslavia during the Cold war years than to Africa. After World War Two, the United States considered Yugoslavia to be a loyal Soviet satellite, but Tito surprised the West in 1948 by breaking with Stalin. Seizing this opportunity, the Truman administration sought to "keep Tito afloat" by giving him military and economic aid. Josip Broz was a backer of independent roads to socialism. In 1950, the National Assembly supported a bill written by Milovan Dilas and Tito about "self-management", an independent socialism that experimented with profit sharing with workers in state-run enterprises. He supported the policy of non-alignment between the two hostile blocs in the Cold War. Such successful diplomacy allowed Tito to preside over the Yugoslav economic boom and the expansion of the 1960s and 70s however, it was all a short-term solution. His presidency and leadership were authoritarian and totalitarian while his internal policies included the suppression of nationalist sentiment. He and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia promoted the "brotherhood and unity" of the six Yugoslav nations which was achieved by Communist Dictatorship policies (and propaganda).
 * Information from 'Keeping Tito Afloat' by Lorraine M. Lees:


 * (a) Information on some of Tito's government policies from the European Public Hearing on “Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes", page 197:
 * (organised by the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union and the European Commission)

Totalitarian machines:

Let us mention briefly Fascism, National Socialism and Titoism in Italy, Austria and Slovenia (a former republic of Yugoslavia). Three Christian nations, with nationalist tendencies, were infected with totalitarianism. The descent into barbarism has comparable structural elements:

Note: Titoism represented political ideologies and government policies that dominated the history of the former Yugoslavia. Titoism as an ideology emerged after the Tito and Stalin split and was named after Josip Broz Tito.
 * Abuse of national sentiment to carry out racial and class revolutionary projects;
 * Cult of a great leader, who permits his fanatics to murder, steal and lie;
 * Dictatorship of one party;
 * Militarisation of society, police state – almighty secret political police;
 * Collectivism, subjection of the citizen to the totalitarian state;
 * State terrorism with systematic abuses of basic human rights;
 * Aggressive assumption of power and struggle for territory.
 * (b) Information on some of Tito's government policies from the European Public Hearing on “Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes", pages 161 & 201:
 * (organised by the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union and the European Commission)


 * Property was confiscated, inhabitants were expelled from Slovenia/Yugoslavia and their residences, political and show trials were carried out, religion was repressed and the Catholic Church and its clergy were persecuted. At the beginning of the 1950s, Communist rule in Slovenia abandoned these forms of repression but was ready to reapply them if it felt threatened.
 * Thus the regime set up political show trials against certain more visible opponents. In the case of an “emergency situation”, even the establishment of concentration camps was planned in Slovenia in 1968, where around 1,000 persons, of whom 10 % were women, would be interned for political reasons.
 * Mystifying the crimes of the occupiers, Titoism covered its own crimes. The taboo to hide the crimes of Titoism was meant to conceal the War-time and post-War murders of civilians and prisoners of war without trials. Their graves were levelled and in Slovenia it was forbidden to talk about their fate. Repressive organs controlled the burials sites and the living were strictly forbidden to mention the victims or the graves. The so-called system of preserving and developing revolutionary heritage was used by the Communist Party to implement a monopoly on the truth
 * (c) Information on some of Tito's government policies from the Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity: Yugoslavia by Ed. Dinah L. Shelton. Gale Cengage, 2005
 * Tito's regime created an official celebratory myth about the "People's Liberation War," denying partisan atrocities and negotiations with Germans and exaggerating their role in defeating the Axis.


 *  Harry Truman (the President of USA) on the 23rd of April in 1948, in a speech stated:

I am told that Tito murdered more than 400 000 of the opposition in Yugoslavia before he got himself established there as a dictator.

Foreign communists were far from immune to the purges and most leading Yugoslav communists perished in these years. However, the purges gave Tito his break and catapulted him to the top of the Yugoslav Communist Party in 1937. Only the most committed Stalinist could have prospered in the 1930’s in the way Tito did.
 * Christopher Bennett on Tito's activities in the 1930's:

The Slovenia Times Article
Below is taken from The Slovenia Times article "Naming Street After Tito Unconstitutional":

The name Tito does not only symbolise the liberation of the territory of present-day Slovenia from fascist occupation in WWII as claimed by the other party in the case, but also grave violations of human rights and basic freedoms, especially in the decade following WWII.

The Constitutional Court has ruled unanimously that the 2009 decision of the Ljubljana City Council to name a street in the capital after former communist leader Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980) is unconstitutional.

Tito & the West
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it has become evident that the Western allies Cold War relationship with Yugoslavia is much more complex than it first appeared. We are looking at the fact that the West turned a blind eye to Yugoslavia’s Communist Stalinist policies. The Western allies were complicit in joining in the glorification of Tito. Tito’s cult of personality  was of staggering proportions and it is apparent that it was modelled on Joseph Stalin’s. This casting a blind eye on the situation that was occurring in Yugoslavia was very interesting.

The fact that the British sent (Operation Keelhaul) over 100 000 people to their deaths by returning Axis Forces POWs and civilians (including women and children) to Yugoslavia after World War Two is just amazing. This action resulted in one of the greatest massacres in European history of recent times (Bleiburg and Way of the Cross).

Lifestyle
As the leader of Yugoslavia, Tito maintained a lavish playboy lifestyle and kept several mansions.  In Belgrade he resided in the official palace, (Beli Dvor), and maintained a separate private residence. He spent much time at his private island of Brijuni (link), an official residence from 1949 on, and at his palace at the Bled Lake. By 1974 Tito had 32 official residences.

Josip Broz worked for the Benz auto mobile factory in Austria and worked as a test driver for Daimler. In 2004 Josip Broz was voted to be The Greatest Croatian. The poll was conducted by the Croatian weekly magazine the "Nacional".

The Croatians love Josip Broz Tito so much that they have a City Square named after him, Marshal Tito Square-Zagreb (the capital city of Croatia).


 * Here is a historic quote from Aleksandar Rankovic, the Interior Minister and the head of the military and secret police of Tito's Yugoslavia at a Belgrade meeting stated: Through our prisons has passed between 1945 and 1951, 3 777 776 prisoners, while we killed 586 000 enemies of the people. Taken from Politika, Belgrade/1 February 1951 (p.1)

Interviews
Mitja Ribicic: If I read the reports, that I made from 1945, I would be embarrassed.
 * Ivan Supek - Croatian Physicist, Philosopher, Writer, Playwright, Peace Activist Humanist & former Yugoslav Partizan. (Interview BBC 4/Tito's Ghosts)
 * Mitja Ribicic -  Internal Security of the Former Yugoslavia. (Interview BBC 4/Tito's Ghosts)


 *  Info on the interviews: Directed by Mira Erdevicki. Combining stunning archive with inclusive interviews, this documentary charts how every stage of Tito's life which has left its mark on the former Yugoslavia. BBC 4:Tito's Ghosts
 * Ian Cuthbertson review (below) of Tito's Ghosts on The Australian Newspaper: Balkans Hero with a Bloodthirsty Streak

(a) Josip Broz Tito, the hard man who managed to unite Yugoslavia after World War II, has long been regarded as somehow less awful than his fellow communist leaders. This French documentary makes it clear that even now, after Yugoslavia has disintegrated (mostly chaotically), Tito is still adored by some in the Balkans, with festivals commemorating his birthday and enthusiasts kissing his statue and declaring their love for him.

(b) Turned back from Austria by the Allies and handed over to Tito's forces, they were executed in the woods without trial. Investigations in Slovenia have found evidence to suggest the dead were naked, or partly naked, and tied with wire when they were killed.The graves' existence was an open secret for decades, yet they were not documented and not commonly discussed.

(c) Yet Tito, internationally feted unifier of Yugoslavia, wrought violence on many fronts. His purges were merciless, and his forces rounded up thousands of suspected opponents and sent them to a prison on Goli Otok (Barren Island) where they were beaten, tortured and killed.

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