Tito's granddaughter tries to find hope

The lobby of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, a refurbished landmark of the Bosnian capital's bloody siege, is filled with an unappetising crowd of men wearing lapel badges with the initials "HDZ". Their flashy suits and crewcuts hint at what they are - profiteers and former paramilitaries who have done well out of carved-up Yugoslavia. Their badges remove any doubt. The HDZ is a Croat political party which makes the rulers of the Serb half of Bosnia look like liberals.

The lobby of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, a refurbished landmark of the Bosnian capital's bloody siege, is filled with an unappetising crowd of men wearing lapel badges with the initials "HDZ". Their flashy suits and crewcuts hint at what they are - profiteers and former paramilitaries who have done well out of carved-up Yugoslavia. Their badges remove any doubt. The HDZ is a Croat political party which makes the rulers of the Serb half of Bosnia look like liberals.

Into this throng comes a tall, middle-aged woman whose elegance makes the party delegates look even more disreputable. If these men knew who she was, they would understand her faintly disdainful look at finding herself in their company. For her grandfather was the founder of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito. Half Croat himself, he spent his life resisting the kind of chauvinism embodied by the HDZ, and she is seeking to carry on the fight.

Svetlana Broz, 45, is Tito's youngest grandchild. She qualified as a cardiologist in 1980, the year of his death, but has stopped practising medicine to become a writer. Her first book, Dobri Ljudi U Vremenu Zla (Good People in Evil Times), sought out unheralded acts of individual bravery and mercy among communities in the midst of the Bosnian war, the most vicious conflict in Europe for half a century, when Serbs, Croats and Muslims were all encouraged to think of anyone but their own as being less than human.

Among the accounts Dr Broz recorded were those of a Muslim family in Sarajevo who protected their elderly Serb neighbour, a Croat doctor who tried to shield Muslim villagers from his own community's paramilitaries, and a Serb taxi driver who took wounded civilians to hospital free of charge.

"In 1993 I put down my medical instruments and picked up a tape recorder to collect the material, because I wanted to show that people had a choice, that they didn't have to accept the brutal behaviour of their own nation," said the doctor.

She is now working on a book about mixed marriages, another defeat for tribalism. "Before the war a third of the marriages in Sarajevo were mixed, and the proportion remained much the same during the fighting. It is additional proof that people here didn't want war; it was forced on them," she said.

Although as a cardiologist she must know the damaging effects better than most, Dr Broz chain-smokes Drina cigarettes as she talks. Her own history demonstrates the absurdity of the thuggish nationalism which tore Yugoslavia apart. She is the product of her father Zarko's third marriage, to a Czech doctor whose family lived in Bosnia during the Austro-Hungarian empire. Zarko's mother was Russian - Tito met her in Siberia during the First World War. After serving in the Red Army in the Second World War, and losing his right arm in the battle for Moscow, Zarko joined his victorious father in Belgrade the day after the city was liberated.

What was it like growing up as Tito's granddaughter? "I don't like to speak about my grandfather's private life, but we were very close. We spent as much time together as he could spare from his very busy life. The surname is extremely rare, so my name did make a difference, but I don't think it brought me any advantages. On the contrary, I had to study twice as hard to prove myself."

She agreed "partly" with Tito's beliefs, though she never joined the Communist Party or any other party. "I believe in what I think was fundamental in his policies - that we can all live together. His 35 years were magical. Today, people throughout what was Yugoslavia, no matter what their ethnic origin, are very nostalgic for those times. They had decent lives."

As a democrat by inclination, she says, she did not support the political trials of dissidents. She agreed that the Communist suppression of debate made it easier for nationalists to subvert Yugoslav institutions for their own ends, but in the next breath she added: "The people who caused the war here were political prisoners in the Communist time. I have often been told that they should never have been released."

When her grandfather's legacy began to crumble, a decade after his death, she was based at the military medical academy in Belgrade.

The collapse into war impelled her to go to Bosnia and offer her services, but the research for her book was seen as subversive by the Serb mayor of the town where she worked. He told her the only good Muslims and Croats were dead ones. She called him a fascist. He tried to have her arrested.

This mayor, like Radovan Karadzic, the indicted wartime leader of Bosnia's Serbs, was a doctor too, which has saddened her. "Doctors who become involved in politics usually haven't studied medicine for the right reason - a love for humanity. No real, honest doctors could allow themselves to be exploited by politicians, let alone become some of the worst war criminals."

Since the end of the war, she has spent most of her time in Bosnia, the place she believes best expresses Tito's ideals. She has a house belonging to her mother's family in Hadzici, 15 miles from Sarajevo, which was in the Serb-run entity "Republika Srpska" during the war but which now sits in the other half of Bosnia, the Muslim-Croat Federation. ("I consider both names idiotic," she said.)

Her book was published in Banja Luka, the Republika Srpska "capital", which, ironically, is a haven of free speech compared to Belgrade, where it is not available. Dr Broz is trying to establish a "peace park" in Sarajevo, modelled on Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, dedicated to "righteous people", such as those featured in her book who defended members of other ethnic communities during the fighting.

"They refused to go along with the nationalistic fury of the times," she said. "For me they are heroes, but they are anonymous. This would preserve their names." For someone who clings to the old Yugoslav ideal, it is difficult to call anywhere home. "In some ways I am without a country. I have the blood of six nations in my veins, from Siberia to western Europe. Since the disappearance of Yugoslavia I always say that I am a cosmopolitan and a European. I can't feel that what they now call Yugoslavia is my country."

Pulling on yet another cigarette, she pondered further, and said: "Emotionally and psychologically, the whole of the former Yugoslavia is my country. No matter how many borders they create, they cannot take that from me."