The death this week in Belgrade of Jovanka Broz, the widow of Yugoslavia’s former communist ruler, Josip Broz Tito, stirred surprising emotions in me, as in many others. Jovanka, a teenaged partisan during the Second World War before becoming Yugoslavia’s First Lady, had been abominably treated after the death of her husband, expelled from her home without most of her belongings, and placed under house arrest in a shabby dwelling. She had been left in poverty on a miserable pension. She had often been the butt of jokes, denigrated by many as a simple peasant girl. Elizabeth Taylor had reportedly felt peeved when, visiting Tito on the island of Brioni with Richard Burton, who had played the dictator in a World War II partisan movie, she was left in the company of Jovanka, while Burton enjoyed the company of the famously charming Tito. But for others, Jovanka was glamorous. A Kosovo Albanian lady told me how women going to the hairdressers had asked for the Jovanka style.
For years, Jovanka had been largely forgotten. Journalists occasionally wrote of how poorly she had been treated. Some in Croatia argued that she should be brought home to her Croatian motherland (she was in origin a Croatian Serb), given a decent pension and treated with the respect she was due.
But in death she was granted a state funeral, and her passing was reported in international media. Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dačić spoke movingly of her: ‘She was an important part of history, a history we gave up on, a history we forgot… This is the departure of Yugoslavia’s last icon.’ Thousands attended her funeral, many travelling to Belgrade from other parts of former Yugoslavia.
For many who can remember what Yugoslavia was, a serious, if ultimately failed attempt to build a multi-national community with a common identity transcending its peoples’ diversity, Jovanka was perhaps the last link with a past for which some still feel nostalgia. For all its obvious faults and contradictions, Yugoslavia had something. In its cultural diversity there was a richness, a vibrancy that at times produced brilliance. While the successor states may feel unburdened in their independence, and while they are certainly freer, it is hard to argue that the sum of the parts adds up to what Yugoslavia once was. Above all, Yugoslavia represented a dream of a common life for peoples who had once been at each others’ throats. It was surely better than the squalid nationalism and reversion to mutual destruction that followed the state’s demise. For those that mourned her, the death of Jovanka perhaps rekindled a memory of that dream, of hopes for something better.
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