KUMROVEC (Croatia) Supporters of former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito paid tribute to the strongman on the 30th anniversary of his death, bemoaning the spectacular break-up of the country since his passing.

In Tito's Croatian birthplace Kumrovec, Vjekoslav Ovcar, a 58-year-old veteran of the 1991-1995 war in Croatia, said Tito was still popular 30 years after his death because he kept Yugoslavia together.

“Tito is a legend and an exceptional personality (...) He had to maintain discipline since he was ruling 22 million people belonging to different ethnicities,” he explained.

“The events that followed his death proved it was the only way to keep all of us together,” Ovcar said in reference to the series of bloody wars in the 1990s that accompanied the former Yugoslavia's break up.

Some 200 Tito sympathisers from Croatia and neighbouring Slovenia gathered at the house of the late leader, now a museum, for a brief commemoration.

They celebrated Tito's successes like driving out the Nazi German occupying forces in World War II with his partisan fighters, standing up to Russian leader Joseph Stalin and founding the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

“Tito's most important achievement is the partisan movement through which he created Yugoslavia. It is also key that he had the force and courage to say 'no' to Stalin”, Silvio Gorenc from a Slovenian anti-fascist association, said.

Despite his obvious love for the late leader, Gorenc admitted that his regime also had its darker sides. Political dissidents were regularly jailed and after the 1948 break with Stalin in 1948 thousands of suspected Stalin supporters were deported to Croatia's Goli Otok island.

“We have to cherish (Tito's) merits and successes and at the same time acknowledge that he had some human weaknesses,” Gorenc said.

In the leafy Belgrade suburb of Dedinje, busses ferrying die-hard supporters arrived every 15 minutes at the The Yugoslav Museum of History, where Tito's tomb is located.

Outside the so-called house of flowers which is Tito's final resting place, long queues of people were waiting to lay flowers on his grave.

A woman in her 60s, who would not give her name, started crying when explaining what Tito meant to her.

“I wish he could stand up from there and bring back the good old times,” she said.

“Everything that he had given to us has been destroyed by the people who inherited it. “After Tito's death in 1980 the Yugoslav state he came to symbolize quickly crumbled. A decade after his demise, a series of bloody wars which left over 100,000 people dead tore the federation apart leaving the constituent republics as small independent states.

The successor states that emerged were often fiercely nationalist and it is only recently that the region's entities have made tentative steps towards reconciliation and a possible future in the European Union together.

Historians link the continuing “Yugo-nostalgia” to the turmoil and the wars that came after and to the fact that none of Yugoslavia's successor states have the same international weight as Tito's state.

“The phenomenon of Tito still exists because of the failure of politics and the Yugoslav state after him,” historian Predrag Markovic said.

“Since his death everything seemed to the people to be in constant decline.””Tito's era is still synonymous for many with peace, order, justice (...) social security,” Bosnian newspaper Dnevi Avaz said on Monday.

Why is Tito still popular despite the also obvious problems of his sometimes repressive regime?

“The answer is simple it is because of those who got power after him,” the paper said.—AFP