From Posljednja Poruka (The Last Message) :

"I could be gone any day now,

yet nothing will change..."

During the long flight from San Francisco to Zagreb, I could not ward off thoughts of the Serbian aggression on Croatia in 1991 and the atrocities done by Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1991 to 1995. It always comes upon me as a bad dream because I was raised to believe in ‘Bratstvo i Jedinstvo’ (Brotherhood and Unity). Did my father, a ‘komesar’ (political commissary of Tito’s Partizan brigade), really believed, deeply in his mind and heart, after witnessing the Croatian Ustaša atrocities on Serbian population and Serbian Četnici equally bloody response from 1941 to 1945, did he believe in the reality of ‘Bratstvo i Jedinstvo’?

And, what a coincidence, the first book I stumbled upon in Zagreb was ‘Posljednja poruka’ (The Last Message; also called: Tito’s Testament), the book about Tito’s last public appearance, shortly before his death in 1980, when he said: "I could be gone any day now, yet nothing will change..." Did Tito believe, deeply in his mind and heart, in the reality of ‘Bratstvo i Jedinstvo’?

Although most of the Communists refused to admit the fact, the ‘nationalities problem’ was the cause of their rise to power. The Ustasha massacre of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, followed by Serb reprisals and ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Croats and, still more, Muslims, had caused a horrendous three-way civil war and then a revulsion in favour of Yugoslavia. This was the strength of the Partisans. However, they could not admit this even to themselves, for the ‘nationalities problem’ did not fit their Marxist theory. They thought of themselves instead as ‘anti-Fascists’ battling against the Axis occupation.

In one of his television monologues broadcast in the spring of 1972, Tito himself let slip that the liberation struggle "was well and truly a civil war, but we did not want to admit it at the time, because it would have been detrimental to our cause".

Richard West: Tito and the rise and fall of Yugoslavia, Carroll & Graf Publ., New York, 1994.