In a move akin to kicking Lenin out of Moscow's Red Square, the mayor of Belgrade wants to rid the Serbian capital of the tomb of Tito, the socialist leader who held Yugoslavia together for decades. Nationalist Aleksandar Sapic wants to send Tito -- the wartime resistance leader who liberated the country from the Nazis -- back to his native Croatia despite his tomb in the Museum of Yugoslavia attracting 120,000 visitors a year. Sapic insists Tito has to go if Serbia is to "move away from communism", and wants to turn his mausoleum into a museum of Serbian history.
"The communist regime has literally brought nothing good to the Serbian people," said the mayor, who instead wants to put up a statue to a controversial Chetnik leader who fought against Tito during World War II. The call has reopened bitter disputes over the bloody German occupation when two rival resistance groups fought the Nazis, though many Chetnik groups ended up cooperating with the Axis forces. Tito's communist Partisans finally prevailed over the royalist and nationalist Chetniks, whose leader Dragoljub Mihailovic was executed in 1946 for war crimes and collaboration with the Nazis.
Serbia's nationalist government later rehabilitated the Chetniks with a 2003 law giving the two movements equal status. Mihailovic's convictions were overturned in 2015, with judges dismissing his original trial as "political". The mayor has so far only floated the idea of removing the tomb, with the Croatian village of Kumrovec.
