Comrade Tito and king Boudewijn (2)

A man who is suspected of planning to kill Belgium queen Fabiola has been arrested. John B., a Belgian of Scottish descent, claimed to have images of Tito and Boudewijn having sex in a cellar in Belgrade. Click here for more details.
Update: John B. is a free man again. He was interrogated but denied to have anything to do with the Tito-Boudewijn case. The police are still investigating his typewriter, with which he might have written the threat letter.

Comrade Tito and king Boudewijn

A short post in the "weird stories" category. Belgium queen Fabiola received a threatening letter, written in bad French, that accuses her of having poisened her (late) husband king Boudewijn (Baudouin for Francophones). Her motive was her husband's sexual affair with Tito in the marshal's basement in Belgrade. The author of the letter claims to have pictures of Tito and Boudewijn doing what they did and predicts that Fabiola will be shot dead on 21 June with a crossbow. The story sounds too crazy to be true, although monarchs are capable of doing incredible things.
On Brijuni, a group of beautiful islands off the Istrian coast, not far from Pula, I saw many images of Tito meeting with world leaders, kings and queens. There is, among many other things, a museum dedicated to Tito and a zoo where gifts (elephants, zebra's) from foreign guests have long outlived their masters. I took a photo of Tito prudishly shaking hands with Dutch queen Juliana, the two being watched by Juliana's husband Bernard, himself a notorious womanizer.

Tito: what's left and what's right?

Josip Broz Tito
born May 7, 1892, Kumrovec, near Zagreb, Croatia, Austria-Hungary [now in Croatia]
died May 4, 1980, Ljubljana, Yugos. [now in Slovenia]
Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman

That is how the Encyclopedia Britannica starts its entry on Tito, who died today 29 years ago. Today's TV Kalendar featured a short item about Tito, otherwise I would have completely forgotten about it. Except for older generations (35+), no one in Croatia seems to pay much attention to the 4th of May, which does not mean that Tito and his legacy are forgotten all together. He, his partisan army, and their ustaše opponents regularly dominate the news. Last week's commemoration at the site of concentration camp Jasenovac led to the usual bickering between Croatian president Mesić, the catholic church, Croats with (too much) love for the homeland and historians. Mesić, referring to mass graves filled with bodies of victims of the partisans, said that Tito was no criminal and that his rule was not criminal.
What followed was the usual outcry. If murdering people is a crime, then those responsible for it are criminals, said the head of the Helsinki Committee. I can see the logic of that, but I would first like to know who the "victims" of the partisans are. Are these innocent, homeland-loving Croats who wanted to save their country from communism, or are these "victims" the very same people who tried to purify Croatia from Serbs, Jews and gypsies in the Second World War and set up Jasenovac?
Back to Tito. I accidentally visited Kumrovec last week, Tito's birthplace. Kumrovec has been turned into an ethno-village, with the humble dwellings of blacksmiths, farmers, craftsmen and so on. I was surprised to see that Tito's house was rather big.
And popular with tourists, who can also buy appropriate souvenirs.

Marshal Tito was a great friend of younger generations, so don't hesitate to bring you teenage boys and girls.
If you are in the region anyway, you could also visit the birthplace of Antun Augustinčić, the sculptor best known for his statue of Tito. Augustinčić was born on 4 May 1900 in Klanjec, at a stone's throw from Kumrovec. Guess who's the mayor of Klanjec? Žarko Broz.
Drive another twenty kilometers through the charming landscape of Zagorje and you will pass by Veliko Trgovišće, the birthplace of Franjo Tuđman, who was once proud to be a partisan but who also rounded down the number of victims of Jasenovac.

Tito's friends and foes

Former mayor of Karlovac, Josip Boljkovac, has taken the initiative to establish the Josip Broz Tito Society of Karlovac. "If there had not been unity of the Serbian and Croatian peoples and the Communist Party, Croatia as we have it today would not exist", he explained.
Most people agree with that, although many would add that Croatia today could have been a better country had it not been ruled by a brutal communist dictator. Around 2000 people who hold that opinion gathered last Saturday on Zagreb's Trg maršala Tita (Marshall Tito Square). Their protest was aimed at the very name of the square, as it honours the man they call a "war criminal". Instead, they want to change the name of the square around the Croatian National Theatre into Kazališni trg (Theatre Square). Theatre Square sounds logical, but it was only during the fascist Independent State of Croatia that the square went by that name. Before World War Two it honoured Petar Karađorđević and, before 1918, Franz Joseph, the Austrian emperor.
A counter-demonstration of antifascists drew a few hundred people. Their message was that Tito had defeated fascism in Croatia and given Yugoslavia a respectable position in world politics. The Alliance of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists (communists love lengthy names) said that it is time to "stop expressing hatred and spreading lies about the antifascist struggle and Marshall Tito".
There is, of course, nothing wrong with antifascism. That is why Croatian communists present themselves as antifascists, because everything else that has to do with communism has been discredited. I don't have much faith in Croatian anticommunists either. There is, again, nothing wrong with anticommunism. But the anticommunist community here is too often made up of an unholy alliance of the catholic church and people with an excess of love for the homeland.
That is, in short, the trouble with Croatian history and society. This country has no history of civil liberalism that said "no" to any kind of totalitarianism.
The Alliance of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists boasted that seventeen cities around the world named a square or street after Tito, among them London, New Delhi and Washington. If you have a picture of a Tito Square or Street, wherever you live, please send it me so I can make a Tito gallery on this blog.