A debate has erupted in Croatia over whether new President Zoran Milovanovic will return a bust of socialist Yugoslav leader Josef Broz Tito to his office.
This was reported by BalkanPlus, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
The bust of Tito and 100 other items related to Yugoslav history were removed from the presidential palace on Pantovčak Street in Zagreb by Milovanovic's predecessor, Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic, in 2015. This act was then strongly criticized and called a “concession to neo-fascists.”
The day before, Grabar Kitarovich lost the presidential election. Its winner Milovanovic, when asked by journalists about the fate of the Tito bust, avoided answering directly, but clearly did not support the idea.
“Pantovčak is not a museum. I do not think about it. There were four presidents before me, and before... we can reach King Tomislava this way,” Milovanovic said.
Tito's granddaughter, director Sasha Broz, is outraged by the actions of Croatian politicians.
“If I could decide, I would ban absolutely everyone involved in politics in Croatia from ever mentioning my grandfather’s name again! The state of affairs in the state is such that my grandfather would have issued a decree to eject him into space,” Broz wrote on her blog.
Tito, a former anti-fascist partisan, devoted his life to creating a multinational state in the Balkans. After his death, Yugoslavia disintegrated, and the peoples who inhabited it plunged into bloody wars, the consequences of which have not yet been overcome.
In Croatia in the 90s, streets bearing the name of Tito were massively renamed.