Djilas is still a thorn in Tito’s side

Press, 4 May 1978, Page 16

Djilas is still a thorn in Tito’s side

The hottest reading matter among top Yugoslav Communists is a banned book by P esident Tito’s former com-rade-in-arms and purged Vice-President, Mr Milovan Djilas. President Tito himself may have set the craze, going. He is said to have ordered his own Serbo-Croat underground copy, chanting “lies, lies, lies” about the contents. The book, “Wartime,” is Mr Djilas’s account of the Yugoslav revolution and deals with Mr Tito’s care in avoiding risks during the pariisan war and other similarly sensitive subjects. Mr Tito’s public reaction to what he read was certainly stormy, and Mr Djilas came under an orchestrated attack in the Yugoslav press. Twice imprisoned for his books and writings, Mr Djilas is quietly weathering the storm in his modest apartment in central Belgrade, just a stone’s throw from the Federal Assembly which he last entered in 1954, the year he broke with the Communists and Mr Tito. Tackle Mr Djilas on the

reason for Mr Tito’s anger and he gives the impression of wanting to soothe troubled waters, without actually giving ground. Mr Tito should not be upset, he told me quietly. The book treats him more mercifully than it does Mr Djilas himself, portraying him as the strongest man in the Communist revolution and the best leader. He admits Mr Tito’s vanity has been hurt. But that “is because he has been living so long in idolatory. He likes people to behold him as a demi-god,” he says quietly, his silver hair swept back and his sharp round brown eyes darting at you. It is hard to .believe that this still vital man, who keeps to a rigorous writing regime every day, has for almost a quarter of a century been a politicial nonperson in Yugoslavia. Banished from politics, he is still in touch, offering scathing comment on the recent amnesty which he says passed over many political prisoners and the 5800 who are denied passports for political reasons. Woven into the Djilas

story of wartime bravery and revolutionary idealism are many details that must have hurt Mr Tito. Mr Djilas describes a world of sometimes relative luxury amid appalling hardship, a picture that runs counter to the official story. It accuses Mr Tito of being oVef-con-cerned for his own safety — to the risk of others. “Tito did not like to take risks,” Mr Djilas says, “But this does not mean that he was a coward. He was careful, he felt danger strongly and this is a political quality: a political man must be courageous but not adventurous.” He accuses Mr Tito of weakness in handling the hysterics of his wartime mistress, but immediately proffers the excuse that her moods may have been heightened by her tuberculosis which no-one then knew she was suffering from. The disease killed her a year after the war. Could there be any relationship between the story of the mistress and Mr Tito’s trouble with the other woman in his life, his wife Jovanka, now beleaguered

by rumours behind the walls of her Belgrade house? Mr Djilas jumps sharply to the defence of Mr Tito’s wife, whom he remembers well from the time before he was purged. “Jovanka is quite different. She is a very amiable person, sympathetic, rational and not hysterical,” he says. Perhaps the most sensitive subject in the book is Mr Tito’s attempt at negotiations with the Germans during the War — negotiations which, when reported first in England in 1951, Mr Tito described as slanderous lies. No-one is ever allowed to mention the topic in Yugoslavia. Mr Djilas has done so because he has a message for the young: Look at the revolution more critically and strip it of the mythology with which it is daily invested. “The revolution cannot find all routes to the future,” he says. “The undemocratic and authoritarian system today is a product of the revolution. Where there is democracy there is no need for revolution.” — O.F.N.S. Copyright.

By

PETER RISTIC

In Belgrade