Yugoslavia goes into mourning for Tito

Press, 6 May 1980, Page 8

Yugoslavia goes into mourning for Tito

NZPA-Reuter Belgrade Yugoslavia was plunged into deep mourning yesterday as the body of President Tito, last of the great figures of World War 11, was ceremonially brought by train to Belgrade to lie in State. - President Tito died on Sunday, three days,short of this eighty-eighth birthday, after a four-month-long battle for life at a clinical centre in the northern city of Ljubljana. After his death was announced, Yugoslavia’s new leaders received a flood of condolence messages from political leaders ail over the world.

Marshal Tito, who was President for life of both the State and ruling Communist

Party, was succeeded by two collective leadership bodies — the nine-man collective State presidency and the 24rhember party presidency. During bis protracted illness, both'-leadership groups had the. chance’’;to come to grips with? 'their' responsibilities, apparently dealing confidently with their first tests. Party and State leaders, in a proclamation to the nation on his death, pledged to maintain his non-aligned foreign policy and unorthodox brand of self-management socialism for workers in the economy and politics. Tito, leader of World War II partisans fighting against German and Italian occupying forces, defied the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, and

took Yugoslavia out of the Soviet bloc in a traumatic break in 1948. Since then, relations with Moscow have always been marked by deep suspicion and differences which lasted until Tito’s final days. Yesterday the Yugoslav leaders promised to continue his opposition against any form of hegemony — a Yugoslav codeword for domination by the Soviet Union and attempts to draw the Balkan country of 22 million people back into the Soviet fold. After President Tito fell ill and developed numerous potentially fatal the nine-nation ; European Common Market moved quickly to achieve a new five-year agreement granting Yugoslavia far freer access to its markets and providing more substantial loans.

The economy is probably the most pressing problem facing the new leaders, with inflation running at about 30 per cent, unemployment at about 15 per cent, and a trade deficit of more than $6OOO million. Early yesterday the President’s body left Ljubljana for Belgrade after being carried through the streets and a brief ceremony at the Central Republic Square where the Mayor made a speech in front of the regional party headquarters and Slovenian Parliament. On its one-day journey

back to Belgrade aboard the presidential “Blue Train,” there was to be another brief ceremony at the railway station in Zagreb, capital of Croatia. It was duo to arrive in Belgrade about 4 a.m. today f (N.Z time) to a 48-guri salute. The body will then lie in State at the Federal Parliament until the funeral on Thursday when Tito will be buried in the grounds of his former Belgrade residence. Yugoslav officials expect heads of state, government and top officials from nearly all the countries of the world to attend the funeral. Foreign statesmen were sure to take the opportunity to have informal talks on world problems such as East-West detente, Iran, the Middle East, Sbuth-East Asia, and rifts within the Non-Aligned Movement, they said. The officials said they believed the American delegation would be headed by Vice-President Walter Mondale and the Soviet delegation would include the Foreign Minister (Mr Andrei Gromyko) and the First Vice-President Vasily Kuznetsov. The funeral will aslso be attended by the Chinese leader, Chairman Hua Guofeng, who visited Yugoslavia last year on the first trip west of Moscow by a ruling Chinese Communist leader.