Balkan Pride Parades Highlight Growing Support for LGBT Rights (And Politicians Are Taking Note) · Global Voices

Three pride parades have taken place in the Balkans in recent months, and hate speech is more often met with legal action. Support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights is slowly growing increasing in many countries of the former Yugoslavia. However, progress has not been made uniformly across the region and, in some cases, political reasons rather than concerns for human rights appear to be driving change.

Pride of Zagreb takes place every June in the Croatian capital. After the first such pride suffered a violent attack in 2002, during which 32 participants were seriously injured, the event became a traditional event in the Croatian capital, with thousands of participants. 2017 was no exception, and the #ZagrebPride The June 10 march was organized as part of LGBT Pride Month celebrated around the world.

In the Serbian capital, Pride of Belgrade took place on September 17 and included the participation of openly gay Prime Minister Ana Brnabić as “the first head of government to attend a Balkan Pride event”.

Brnabić was appointed in June 2017. Many local analysts viewed Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s choice of a female, gay prime minister as a sneaky political move aimed at impressing the European Union. Brnabić is often described as a figurehead This fits with Vučić, who dominates politics, business and media in the country, instead of advocating reform on his own.

For years, Belgrade’s pride parades have been met with violence, sometimes leading to postponements or cancellations. But since 2015 they have proceeded without incident, prompting some cynics to argue that when the powerful Vučić wishes, he can reign in hooligans who have enjoyed complete impunity for their violent behavior in the past.

The last of three pride parades took place in Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo, on October 10 (#PristinaPride). It also had government support and was passed without reported incident.

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Today was the first Pristina Pride Parade #In the name of love #NëEmërTëDashnisë #uImeLjubavi ?️‍?no incidents and approx. 500 people. #PristinaPride #LGBTI pic.twitter.com/KPrK77DT6F

– Agim Margilaj (@AgimMargilaj) October 10, 2017

Pride parade bashing fails to attract voters in Macedonian local elections

However, two Balkan countries have never held an official pride parade: Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. And in Macedonia, homophobic hate speech was openly used by right-wing populist politicians and parties during the campaign for local elections on October 15, 2017.

THE Helsinki Committee for Human Rights of the Republic of Macedoniathe LGBT Support Center and the Coalition for Sexual and Health Rights of Marginalized Communities strongly condemned the statements of Stevco Jakimovski, candidate for mayor of the Karposh municipality in Skopje. Hate speech is a criminal offense in Macedonia and the three NGOs filed a complaint against the outgoing mayor after he accused his opponent Stefan Bogoev to be gay (Bogoev is heterosexual) and claimed that homosexuality is “the most dangerous mafia” determined to infiltrate the municipality.

Two weeks ago, unknown persons also distributed black propaganda leaflets against Bogoev, highlighting his friendship with a local celebrity who they claimed was gay. At the same time, a jeep belonging to the friend’s father was set on fire within the limits of the municipality. The fliers, using language similar to that used by the mayor in his public speeches, warned of the “danger” of holding a Pride parade in the area.

But in the end, most citizens of Karposh municipality voted for the liberal candidate. Bogoev received 58% of the vote, compared to 37% for Jakimovski.

Varied attitudes towards the LGBT community in the former Yugoslavia

Could all this indicate a return to the more liberal values ​​that characterized the former Yugoslavia (which today included Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia)? Although Yugoslavia was not exactly a leader in LGBT rights, contrary to popular belief, it was also not a leader in the repression of sexual and gender minorities, especially when compared to Western countries. .

Croatian historian and activist Franko Dota recently defended a Ph.D. thesis on homosexuality in Yugoslavia (1945-1990), with a focus on Croatia. His work shows that socialist society approached the issue in different ways at different times. Immediately after World War II, there were several show trials of homosexual men seen as examples of “bourgeois decadence”, but this stopped in the 1950s. A trend towards gradual liberalization resulted in the formal decriminalization of homosexuality in Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Vojvodina in the 1980s.

Dota’s research also compared institutional homophobia with that of other European countries at the time, finding that the East was sometimes “softer” than the West. It revealed that between 1945 and 1977 there were around 1,500 trials against homosexuals in Yugoslavia, resulting in penalties ranging from fines to suspended prison terms. During the same period, there were 70,000 comparable actions in Western Germany, 20,000 in Italy (for “undermining public morals”) and 50,000 in the UK (including the IT pioneer) . Alan Turing).

In a interview with Croatian online magazine Telegram, published October 12, Dota explained that in the 1980s, leading medical professionals in Yugoslavia took an informal position that homosexuality was not an illness, long before the World Health Organization came to the conclusion. same conclusion. And a 1986 book by influential sexologist Marijan Košiček opposed negative attitudes towards homosexuality within politics, law, religion and communist ideology, viewing it as a normal and healthy.

Dota said:

Yugoslavia has not yet taken steps to move forward in the economy, but it has done nothing. Don’t worry, I don’t have any listing information. A nekim se stvarima zemlja pokazala daleko ispred svog vremena i zapadnoeuropskih Trendova. For doctors, for 80-ih liberal people of the United States or for homosexuals, for zdravstvenog sustava people, there is an epidemic of HIV and AIDS, a professional pristupio, a ne moralizatorski kako se uglavnom događalo u Francuskoj i Americaci.

At first, Yugoslavia was not at the forefront of progressive initiatives, but it was not far away either. We can’t put it on the list of worst, nor on the list of best examples. In some ways, the country was far ahead of its time and Western European trends. For example, in the 1980s, the media spoke about homosexuality in a much more liberal manner than in the United States. A significant part of the health system responded to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in a professional manner, without the moralizing that took place in France or America.

But in the region as a whole, the situation changed after the breakup of Yugoslavia. “The 1990s were a period of strong retraditionalization and revival of some extreme patriarchal, traditionalist and homophobic tendencies in society, due to the war(s) and other factors,” Dota said in his interview.