Do They Speak Arabic in Yugoslavia?
I always had a sneaking admiration for Josip Broz, better known as “Marshal Tito”, of Yugoslavia ― probably because, according to his biography, the man had learned to speak Esperanto while in prison. This does not, of course, mean that he was one of the world’s great paragons of democracy. Tito gave lip service to democracy ― lots of countries do; if election booths meant democracy, China, not India, would be known as the “world’s largest democracy” ― but he seems to have seen it, as many others do, as an opportunity for a nation to make errors, where “error” is defined as “taking some route with which I disagree”. Yugoslavia, the erstwhile “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes”, was an artificial construct, created out of the ruins of Austria-Hungary after World War I by the victorious Western powers, primarily, it seems, as a means of rewarding sometime ally Serbia, whose autocratic king became the king of this hodge-podge of ethnic groups ― which King Alexander more or less unilat
