It was a very unpleasant weekend for LGBT people in the city of Belgrade, who were “warned” it was too dangerous to participate in the second Belgrade Gay Pride march in less than a decade.  Last Thursday, a French man had his head bashed in by football club hooligans.  Four days later, they went after an Australian man, who allegedly  “looked gay.”

The government was so intimidated by these Serbian skinheads and ultra-nationalists, who have for months have warned on Neo-Nazi websites (like Storm Front — see its Serbian thread) and in Serbian media (according to a Women in Black listserv that was provided to me) that they would do everything possible to prevent the march from happening.

Despite earlier statements to the contrary, Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic pulled the plug on the march early Saturday morning — twenty-four hours before it was supposed to take place — during a meeting with the Belgrade Gay Pride’s organizing committee.

(Translation:  “It is Time for Equality”)

So much for it being time for equality.

It didn’t have to be this way.  President Boris Tadic, who is hell bent on entering the European Union via the Stabilization and Association Process (not withstanding that little problem of outstanding ICTY warrants for fugitives Ratko Mladić and Goran Hadžić) had announced his support for the march last Friday:

The state will do everything to protect people, whatever their national, religious, sexual or political orientation, and no group must resort to threats and violence, or take justice into its own hands and jeopardize the lives of those who think or are different.

And yet ultimately in the end, the state did not do everything it could to support the march. Nice words by Tadic, yet empty and completely unfulfilled.

In the end, a combination of poor planning (by Minister of Interior and Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dacic, who had promised adequate police protection for the Pride parade as early as August 24) and political spinelessness were enough to doom the event.  Dacic went so far as to suggest that it would be better not to hold the pride parade altogether so as to prevent people from being hurt and property destroyed.  He said the parade had not been banned, but simply postponed.

So much for human rights for all.

But Dadic did not reveal the full story, which is much more unsettling.  The organizers, who had hired security expert Zoran Dragisic to prepare their own security plan in order to maintain order and assist the police in doing their job, were told that if they went ahead with the march without the government’s backing, they would be held responsible for any and all damage done to private and public property.

Comments from another list serve communication by “Ana” tells the full story:

The organisers commissioned a security risk study and worked intensively with the police and other state institutions in order to obtain their support for the purpose of guaranteeing the safety of the Pride participants. The importance of the safety issue cannot be overstated given that in the last month before Pride would have taken place. . .an aggressive hate-speech campaign was launched by. . .the neo-fascist groups Obraz [Honor] and Srpski narodni pokret 1389 [Serb Popular Movement 1389, a reference to the 1389 Battle of Kosovo].

I saw with my own eyes Belgrade covered with graffiti calling for a ban of the Pride [march], the murder of gay people, and the their expulsion from Serbia. “We are waiting for you” and “The streets of Belgrade will be covered with blood, but the Pride will not take place” are two examples of the [graffiti] message,s which [also] called for lynch[ing] of the people taking part in the Pride. So, not only [were] the people who wrote these. . .examples of hate-speech. . .not ready to allow their LGBT fellow-citizens the freedom of love, but they were even actively inciting violence against the LGBT population.”

The Pride committee was right when it said that “The Republic of Serbia has capitulated.  We have not.”

This is the second time in the last eight years that a gay pride march was preempted by right-wing violence. In 2001, a march was disrupted by ultranationalists, many of them in Cetnik berets and beards, who attacked participants.

So much for safety for all.

This time around, ultra-nationalists openly celebrated their victory in stopping the march, gleefully pronouncing the cancellation of the march as “a great victory for normal Serbia.”  The Serbian Orthodox Church also condemned the march, calling it a “Sodom and Gomorrah parade” but did not openly embrace violence.  Nonetheless, march organizers believed that the church’s position could have helped incite violence.

The problem of violent ultranationalism, wrapped in the robes of an militantly reactionary Serbian Orthodox church, is a major problem for the Tadic government. Despite the government’s arrest of thirty-seven ultra-nationalists on Monday for assembling in the center of Belgrade in defiance of a recently passed law banning such gatherings (a law that is somewhat dubious from a civil libertarian standpoint), a much more pervasive problem remains that Serbian politicians and leaders must address head-on:  the deeply embedded criminal legacy that exists in Serbian society as a consequence of the Slobodan Milosevic years.

Milosevic permitted para-military groups to proliferate and act with impunity.  He supported — and often benefited politically from — ultra-nationalists like Vojislav Šešelj (who led the Serbian Radical Party and is now standing trial in the Hague for his alleged war crimes) and the notorious  Željko Ražnatovic, (a.k.a. “Arkan,” who led “Arkan’s Tigers,” known for raping and plundering entire Bosniak villages and who was assassinated by other criminal elements in January 2000).  The culture of hate Milosevic fomented and sustained continues to haunt Serbia to this day.

If Tadic really wants Serbia to join the EU on his watch, he will have to accomplish what no one else has before him has had the political will to do: clean up Serbia’s criminal and violent nationalistic elements once and for all.

Now is the time for Tadic to lead not by word but by deed.  Only genuine and concrete enforcement of human rights for all Serbians — regardless of their sexual orientation — can begin to scrub away the stain that so permeates Serbian society.

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