Zagreb---Around 6,000 admirers of former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito gathered Saturday at his birthplace in northern Croatia to mark the 123th anniversary of his birth, the state-run radio reported.
The supporters of the late communist leader, coming from all across the former Yugoslavia, braved the pouring rain to gather in front of the house where he was born in 1892 in the village of Kumrovec. The house has been turned into a museum.
Croatia's ex-president Stipe Mesic, who led the country for a decade from 2000, also attended the event, traditionally held every year. He stressed the need to "fight any attempt to revise history ... and teach young generations the real truth."
Tito remains a controversial figure in Croatia and throughout the Balkans region..
He is admired notably for 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 ruled the former Yugoslav federation from the end of World War II until his death in 1980 and made it one of the most prosperous communist countries.
But critics argue that under his regime political dissidents were regularly jailed.
Prisoners' associations estimate that more than 100,000 Croatians were jailed on political grounds by the Yugoslav communist regime.
A decade after his death Yugoslavia collapsed in a series of independence wars which claimed more than 100,000 lives.
The former federation consisted of six republics -- Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. All of them are now separate countries.
AFP
