A journalist from a Serbian magazine recently came to interview me. (I have been writing about and commenting on the Balkans for many years.) I thought she might want to talk about the negotiations on Kosovo's future or Serbia's dealings with the EU. But it soon became clear that for her the future was far less interesting than the past.
"Who was most responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia?" she asked in an accusatory tone, as if it might have been me. "At what point did Milosevic go wrong? What do you think about the role of Serbian intellectuals in the war?" She then asked me if I had interviewed Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the wartime leaders of the Bosnian Serbs. When I said that I had, she asked, somewhat awed: "What were they like?"
Eventually I broke off. "Why are you asking me about all this old stuff?" I asked. "It was so long ago, I can't believe people are still interested in all this." But, she assured me, I was quite wrong. "People are interested in these things. They explain how we got from where we were to where we are." I was amazed, but now I think she was right.
A few days earlier I had been in Kragujevac, a town in central Serbia where I had read that the local economy was in such trouble that the authorities were worried about the health risk posed by poverty-stricken former industrial workers keeping domestic animals in their gardens in town.
Well, you should not believe everything you read. In fact, Kragujevac, which lies in the heart of what became known as "hunger valley" during the 1990s, is showing strong signs of recovery. And it was here that I encountered the oddest phenomenon now stalking the Serbian psyche: Tito's ghost.
Kragujevac used to be a company town. Of its 200,000 people, at least 40,000 once worked directly for Zastava, a massive industrial conglomerate that made everything from cars to Kalashnikovs. But the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia came close to destroying Zastava. In 1989, the last full year before the collapse of the country, it made 230,000 vehicles, most of them in Kragujevac. When the wars began, Zastava lost suppliers and markets and Serbs had no money to buy its cars. The company struggled, and during the Kosovo conflict in 1999, Nato bombers virtually finished off the company. In that year only 4,500 cars dribbled off the production lines.
Today, production is up (a little) and on the day I visited the factory, Zastava signed a deal to make Fiats, reviving a link that dates back to 1953. But this wasn't the only link with the past at play. Walking around the factory was like watching a 1970s newsreel. Gleaming new cars, designed in 1970 (really) trundled around the production line, while workers in blue overalls sat hunched around tables, sipping thick Turkish coffee and chomping through thick sandwiches. And strangest of all, dotted around the antiquated plant were pictures of Tito, the Yugoslav leader who died in 1980. For a moment you could almost imagine what it must have been like here during the glory days of Yugoslav socialism.
Five years after the fall of Milosevic, more than six years after the end of the Kosovo conflict and a decade after the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, it is now clear that nostalgia is one of Serbia's problems. People tell you that things have never been as bad as they are now. Yet statistics suggest the opposite. Today an average monthly salary is e200; not great, but a lot better than the e20 it might have been at the end of Milosevic's time. Pensioners too are forever complaining, even though their pensions have shot up (as have prices, admittedly) and at least they get them every month, which they did not before.
Miroljub Labus is Serbia's deputy premier and one of the architects of its painful economic recovery. The problem, he says, is that many Serbs see the Milosevic and war years as some sort of odd blip. Now that they are over, he explains, people expect to return to the living standards of the golden years of Yugoslav socialism in the 1970s, or even the 1980s. Today, he says, people remember when "everyone was better off," but now "they are paying the price of our history… and people forgot the bad things."
In this sense, Tito still haunts the Serbs. During the golden age, Yugoslavia was propped up by loans from the west, which was keen to buttress the communist odd man out. Then, in 1980, Tito died and the country began its slow descent, eventually crumbling in the wars of the 1990s. Thus communism here was never discredited in the way it was in other countries. But these fond memories are unhealthy. So much was destroyed in the wars of the 1990s, and no government can restore in just a few years a standard of living that took a generation to build. The fear is that disgruntled Serbs might opt to elect a government that tries to bring back the past, including one in which all Serbs lived in one state.
Such nostalgia is understandable but it is time for Zastava and Serbia to take those pictures down, stop reading about "How we got from where we were to where we are," and to think more about "where we are going next." What choice is there? Sorry, Tito ain't coming back.
