SABA leader Franjo Habulin said that this year, due to the coronavirus epidemic, people gathered in Kumrovec spontaneously to remember Youth Day as it had been and to agree on how it should be marked in the future.
“Youth Day is inextricably linked with Josip Broz Tito because it is marked on the day when Tito’s birthday was officially celebrated and because Tito had a special relationship with young people, who had borne the brunt of the national liberation struggle in World War II as well as the burden of the post-war reconstruction of the country,” Habulin said.
He added that the attitude to young people today was not as it should be, which was why they were looking for a future outside of Croatia, stressing that the current as well as future governments had the responsibility to create conditions for young people to stay in the country.
Jovan Vejnović, president of the alliance of associations honouring the Yugoslav communist revolutionary and statesman, said that it was frequently forgotten that in Tito’s time the then Yugoslavia had changed from a backward country with a large share of illiterate people to “a serious European state.”
“Before WWII 80% of Yugoslavia’s population was illiterate and over a period of 25 years they were all made literate, we educated a cultural and technical intelligentsia that was on a par with intellectuals in the rest of Europe. That is something that made not only Tito’s status as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement important for this region, it made the country he represented important as well,” said Vejnović.
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