No time for equality
It’s been almost two months since long awaited Belgrade Pride march, named „Its time for equality“, was banned by Serbian authorities.
For me, being part of the organizing crew, it is still hard to believe that all the work, energy, media exposure, campaigning, meetings, our personal lives, safety and everything else that was invested in the previous six months, was erased only 24 hours before this historic event would take place.
Erased so cynically and illegally by the incompetent, cowardly group of those who speak so much, but hardly do anything in favour of those they are supposedly representing. They are called politicians.
But before we get into the ban and what happened afterwards, let me quickly guide you back to March 31st this year, when it all started.
Two major LGBT groups from Belgrade got together and signed a document, making it official that they will initiate and organize a Gay Pride march, first time after Belgrade Pride 2001 ended up in violence. It took eight long years to recover from that trauma and try again. Several other groups and individuals joined the process (including yours truly) and Pride was on! More than 60 local HR NGOs signed a declaration of support at the very beginning. Radical leftists were sure to come, too. A few shy statements from the government officials indicated that “human rights of all must be protected”. Pride immediately got loads of media attention which mostly included insisting on “misunderstandings” between LGBT organizations, public treats made by neo-nazi groups and football hooligans. The tension was slowly building up.
Exit, the most popular music festival in Serbia joined our process; the number of Serbian celebrities who supported Pride was growing and at the same time many Belgrade’s walls and buildings got covered with graffiti calling for “death to faggots” and “stop gay pride”. Those who wanted to violently break Pride got more and more media attention, explaining in details how, where and when would they attack us – while Serbian public prosecutor claimed that those death threats are only a “debate” and cannot be prosecuted. At the same time, few gay activists added to the heated atmosphere by constantly publicly accusing Pride organizers of being heterosexual (!), lead by women and only in the process for the money (even though we all worked for free). Those and similar pathetic attempts to discredit us as organizers went hand in hand perfectly with homophobic statements made by local politicians. The mayor of Belgrade, who have an unfortunate inability to recognize the importance of such basic freedoms and equality, called for “homosexuality to remain in four walls”, at the same time expressing more concern about possible damage that violent homophobes would cause to buildings and buses – than to human beings who happen to be sexual and gender minorities.
Pride was in the media every day for couple of months and everyone had their opinion about it. Within families people divided on those who would come and support LGBT’s and those who would try to beat us. And the very LGBT community was afraid, more than ever. We were all afraid, of course, but one of the major messages of Pride was that we cannot just sit and wait for our basic rights to be given to us – we have to stand up and fight for them because the state and society will always have “more important problems to deal with”. I’m not sure how many of “us” were ready to do just that. In fact, I’m afraid that the number is very small, because it’s so much easier to stand aside, watch others do it for you and see what happens.
Even though I find this attitude very disappointing, I can understand the fear. But at the same time it’s really sad to realize that basic solidarity is so rare. If one won’t stand up for them selves when they are suffering the injustice, it’s hard to believe they would be willing to help others in similar situations.
The week before Pride
Accepting and acknowledging the high risk was one of the first steps we as organizers made. The context was such that almost 90% of everything we did had something to do with security of the event, making sure that people come and go home safely. And from the very beginning we got firm and ongoing assurances from the police that Pride would be properly protected. We met them in a million meetings, discussing every little security detail, making almost military-like strategies together with experts from Serbian Ministry of defence. Naively, we believed coz we had no reason not to. Until one week before when Pride one of the police chefs said in a TV talk show that they still didn’t rule out the possibility of banning our gathering.
Wait, wait, what did he just say?!
And so in the week that followed, we, already completely exhausted from all the stress, 15 hour working days, threats, responsibilities, homophobia, constant public exposure and similar activist “commodities”, ended up in vertigo of manipulation, intimidation, pressures and trade attempts staged together by heads of state and police.
At the same time, they still claimed in the media that Pride would be protected. Even the president said so, not that anyone cares what he says.
One day they said we could have Pride at the announced location, but that we have to cancel the walking part because it’s “too risky”. Then the next, they said we can’t have it there either, we should move out of city centre and there “everything would be fine”. They didn’t bother to explain how. Should I mention that those trade attempts were done “orally” – non-officially? Then, when we refused, they started mocking and dismantling all our security plans, everything we have been going through with them for the past months – only few days before one of the riskiest events our city and country has ever seen! And then, it was time for the grand finale. Only 24 hours before Pride, Serbian Prime minister himself, acting as a police messenger, handed us the document that notifies us that “event has been moved to another location because it represents such a high risk that it cannot be protected”.
This meant that Pride, the way we planned it, and where we planned it - was banned. No time to make an official complaint, or to logistically move to a completely different area.
Oh, I forgot to mention before that Pride would have an estimated 500-1000 participants. An estimated group of a similar size was expected to try and attack us. And the Serbian state said it’s powerless. It cannot protect us from those who, on many occasions, publicly said who they were and how they planned to attack us.
It also turned out that police order to move Pride to another location was illegal. No law in Serbia allows them to move public gatherings, they are only allowed to protect or ban them. For this and refusing to protect a discriminated group from practicing basing constitutional rights, we have filed a constitutional complaint to Serbian court and will soon be suing Serbia with the European court for human rights.
Few leaders of neo-nazi groups were arrested for trying to stage an illegal protest on the Pride day. They were released 30 days afterwards and to this day they were not prosecuted for hate speech, threats and calls for lynch, murder and violence – all crimes by Serbian laws.
On the bright side, a group of antifascists organized a solidarity flash-mob action with LGBT. Rainbow and pink-black flags were waving in the centre of Belgrade. And the struggle continues....
