Tito's Travels

On Bali, "island of the gods," 100 barefoot maidens in sarongs swiveled up and offered silver bowls filled with flowers to Yugoslavia's President Tito, 66, and Indonesia's President Sukarno, 57. Then host and guest retired to the new palace at Tampaksiring, where at sunset maidens splash naked in Roman-style baths beneath Sukarno's windows. With food and music furnished by Sukarno, champagne and slivovitz brought in off Tito's ocean-going yacht Caleb (Seagull), the two Presidents and their wives rang in the New Year in memorable fashion. Dancers trampled the palace lawn with polkas and Partisan Kolo. At midnight Tito and Sukarno embraced and kissed. At dawn the revelers were dancing in their shirtsleeves. A rainstorm broke; they moved inside. Not until 7 a.m. did the party break up.

Stop the Movie. Sailing away on New Year's morning, after ten days of such treatment in Indonesia, Tito might have been looking ahead to more of the same at the next port of call. But Burma unexpectedly asked him to delay his arrival two days, until its national independence celebration was over. On his last visit to Burma in 1955, when his neutralist friend U Nu was Premier, crowds thronged the streets of Rangoon beneath banners that proclaimed "Long Life to Great Tito!" When he arrived in Rangoon last week, after seven days at sea, the atmosphere had changed. There were no banners, and it was obvious that the new military regime of Premier General Ne Win had not asked the crowds to turn out.

Tito's visit has caused rumblings in Communist circles all over Asia, and General Ne Win was in no mood to borrow trouble with his Red Chinese neighbors on the north. Red China and Burma dispute their common border, and Ne Win's army is trying to rout out Communist guerrillas. Red China's Ambassador Li I-mang has lately complained to the Burmese for permitting the showing of the Nat "King" Cole film China Gate, and even protested when a soccer team from Hong Kong played in Rangoon. And so in Burma Tito got a formal 21-gun salute and the usual round of dinners and conferences, but he cut short his two-day visit by five hours.

"Evil Tendency." In Indonesia, left-wing groups that usually support the Reds had been ecstatic in their welcome of Tito, but Indonesia's local Communists, mindful of Tito's heretical brand of Marxism, alternately tried to ignore Tito's presence, belittle it, or by indirection attack it. Peking's press and radio denounced him as a "running dog of imperialism," and headlined the claim: DRUNKENNESS IN YUGOSLAVIA RANKS SECOND IN WORLD. After Tito had left Bali, the Red-lining Indonesian newspaper Bintang Timur accused him of "carrying out a Western mission."

After Rangoon, Tito's next stop was India, the home of his fellow neutralist

Jawaharlal Nehru, who used to be careful to say little to offend Moscow or Peking. But in a memo to his ruling Congress Party last August, Nehru had criticized the "growing contradictions" in Communism, charged that Communism's "unfortunate association with violence encourages a certain evil tendency in human beings," and likened the Reds' reliance on violence to that of the fascists. Lately, Nehru has found himself under attack from no less a Red than Pavel Yudin, Soviet Ambassador to Red China and one of the Soviet Communist Party's leading theoreticians. In the December issue of the World Marxist Review (published in Prague), Yudin accuses Nehru of distorting Communism's meaning and discrediting "the real and living socialism" that the Reds are building in China and Europe. Nehru's police, he said, had committed "collective murders" in putting down mob violence.

But when they get to comparing notes, Tito might solace Nehru by reciting the more abusive things Moscow and Peking find to say about Tito.

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