Yugoslavs queue to Pay last respects to Tito

Press, 7 May 1980, Page 8

Yugoslavs queue to P a y last respects to Tito

NZPA-Reuter Belgrade Yugoslavs queued up through the night to file past the body of President Tito yesterday in a mass tribute to the man who ruled them for 35 years. Queues more than a kilometre long built up along pavements leading to the illuminated Federal Parliament building in the city centre where the tough wartime guerrilla' leader lay in state. Men and women, young and old, some in formal mourning black, most in every-day garb, walked silently and solemnly ' on either side of his flag-draped coffin in a high, marble, redcarpeted hall. The mourning procession began yesterday, three hours after a special train brought President Tito’s body to Belgrade, from Ljubljana where he died at the age of 87. Officials estimated that most of Belgrade’s 1.3 million citizens would have paid their personal homage

i[to Tito before his funeral on Thursday. >1 He will be buried in the . grounds of his Belgrade resiIdence in a leafy suburb on a Ihill overlooking the city. Many of the mourners had i(earlier clustered round television screens or radios to . follow Tito’s last return to r the capital. ’ They satv his widow, Jovanka, aged 56, in her first public appears.—e in nearly . three years, tearfully lay a wreath at the foot of a reddraped catafalque where the coffin rested. Afterwards she stood beside Tito’s sons by earlier marriages, Zarko and Misha, to receive condolences from Government leaders and-dig-nitaries. Mrs Tito, a former partisan fighter in World War II who married him in. 1952, disappeared from the public eye in June, 1977, without! any official explanation. There were persistent reports at the time that Tito had been angered by what he regarded as her meddling in politics. ■ i

11 While ordinary Yugoslavs sombrely paid their last re- : spects, the nation’s political leaders reaffirmed pledges to follow Tito’s independent policies and to resist any attempts to draw the country back into the Soviet bloc with which he broke in 1948. , Flags flew at half-mast in many countries as the world : joined Yugoslavs in their mourning, and Presidents, Prime Ministers and Kings prepared to travel to Belgrade for the funeral. V i c e-President Walter Mondale of the United States will attend the funeral along with many world leaders including Chairman ■Hua Guofeng of China and. the Indian Prime Minister (Mrs Indira Gandhi). The Soviet President (Mr Leonid Brezhnev) will head his country’s ..delegation to the funeral. The Duke of Edinburgh, will attend, together with the . Prime Minister (Mrs iMargaret Thatcher).-