Serbia Letter: As a journalist I have covered the Balkans for many years, so recently, in Belgrade, a journalist from a Serbian magazine came to interview me. I thought we'd talk about Serbia's negotiations with the EU or the upcoming negotiations on the fate of Kosovo, Serbia's southern, Albanian-inhabited province. We did, but it soon became clear that she was more interested in the past than the future. Exactly who, she demanded to know was most responsible for the break-up of Yugoslavia? At what point did Milosevic go wrong? What did I think of the role of Serbian intellectuals during the Balkan wars?
Increasingly irritated (and bored), I broke off. "Why are you asking me about all this old stuff? It was all so long ago. Who cares about this any more? I can't really believe people are still interested in all this!"
I was quite wrong, she assured me. "People are interested in these things. They explain how we got from where we were to where we are."
I was amazed. What I really wanted to talk about was what I had just seen in Kragujevac, a town in central Serbia. I went there because I had read that its economy was in such a state of utter collapse that the local authorities were worried about the health risk posed by poverty- stricken former industrial workers keeping domestic animals in their gardens in town.
Well, that proved to be untrue - goes to show you shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers.
In fact Kragujevac, which lies at the heart of what became known as "hunger valley" during the 1990s, is showing strong signs of recovery. But it was here that I came to face to face with the oddest phenomenon now stalking the Serbian psyche: Tito's ghost.
Kragujevac used to be the company town par excellence. Of its 200,000 people 40,000 once worked directly for Zastava, a massive industrial conglomerate that made everything from cars to Kalashnikovs.
But, the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia destroyed Zastava.
In 1989, the last full year before the country's collapse, it made 230,000 vehicles. When the wars began, Zastava lost suppliers and markets. Sanctions were imposed and finally, during the Kosovo war in 1999, Nato bombers almost finished off the company. In that year only 4,500 cars dribbled off the production lines.
Today production is up (a little), and on the day that I visited the factory Zastava signed a deal to make Fiats. What was so odd though was that walking around the factory was like walking into a newsreel from the 1970s.
Gleaming new cars designed in 1970 trundled around the production line while workers in blue overalls sat hunched round tables sipping thick Turkish coffee, chomping through thick sandwiches. And dotted around the antiquated plant were pictures of Marshal Tito, the Yugoslav leader who died in 1980. You could almost imagine what it was like here during the glory days of Yugoslav socialism.
In fact, five years after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, more than six years after the end of the Kosovo war and a decade after the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, it is now clear that too much of this imagining is increasingly one of Serbia's problems. Ask any ordinary person and they will tell you that things have never been as bad as they are now.
But, all the statistics tell you precisely the opposite. Today, for example, an average monthly salary is €200, which is not great but a lot better than the €20 it might have been at the end of Milosevic's time.
Miroljub Labus is Serbia's deputy premier. The problem, he says, is that many Serbs think that the war years and Milosevic were some sort of odd blip.
Now that they are over, he explains, people think that things should just go back to how they were during the golden years of Yugoslav socialism in the 1970s.
Today, he says, people remember when "everyone was better off", but now "they are paying the price of our history . . . and people forgot the bad things".
In that sense Tito haunts the Serbs. During the golden age Yugoslavia was propped up by loans from the West, keen to buttress the communist odd-man-out. Then Tito died and the country began its slow descent, only to crumble in the wars of the 1990s. That means that communism in Yugoslavia was never discredited in the way that it was in other countries.
Serbia's fond memories are unhealthy though. No government can rebuild what has been destroyed in just a few years. But if they can't there are strong, nationalist, backward- looking political forces remaining which are just ready and waiting to mop up angry voters who cannot grasp that what is gone, is gone forever.