Lessons from Bosnia; part 3

Democracy

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

The only president I remember in my childhood was a guy called Josip Broz, also known as Tito. He died few months after I was born, and we must have had a president during the first ten years of my life, however, I do not remember ever hearing about him, and I am certain that his picture did not hang in every classroom in my school right above the large green board. That’s where we had Tito’s picture. We also had Tito’s head sculpted in the large entrance hall. My first school picture, with the whole class, has Tito in it. It was all about Tito, a guy who was dead.

At the time, I didn’t know that mattered. I was a child told that Tito was an amazing man who led our beloved Yugoslavia from one victory to the next. It was all thanks to Tito. He deserved so much of our respect, that every year on the anniversary of his death the sirens would sound for a minute of silence and we were all expected to stop whatever we were doing and stand still and completely quiet in honour of the dead president. And we did. I remember one year I was outside, playing with other kids (I am one of those generations) and we all stopped and stood still when the sirens went off.

The stories of Tito that I heard at home were somewhat different to what I was told in school. Apparently, my grandparents owned a house before I was born. But the house was located in…