Serbia's EuroPride ban condemned as 'pretext'

Stefan Radovic still recalls the day when, as a teenager on his way to school, he was accosted by a group of students outside the building screaming "Kill that ‘faggot'!" He remembers fearing for his life.

After the homophobic attack, he had to have a police escort on his way to the high school in the small Serbian town of Kursumlija, home to 13,000 people. "The experience was so traumatic for me that I'm still working through the psychological aftermath, " said Radovic, 13 years after the incident.

Today, Radovic is an activist who fights tirelessly to ensure that one day, LGBTQ people in Serbia won't have to face violent homophobia like he did when he was a teenager.

There's still much work to be done. According to a survey by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, more than half of the country's LGBTQ population feel they need to hide their sexuality. More than 90% of those surveyed said they don't feel safe holding the hand of a same-sex partner in public.

Setting this year's EuroPride in Belgrade was meant to take a stance against the homophobic climate in the country. The iconic event has been hosted by a different European country every year since 1992, and Belgrade was set to be the first Balkan metropolis to do so. Numerous activists and politicians from other countries had announced plans to take part. The symbolic climax of the event was to be the parade on Saturday through the center of the capital, Belgrade.

But at the end of August, President Aleksandar Vucic unexpectedly announced that the parade had been canceled. He claimed that due to the overlapping crises facing the country, he couldn't guarantee that the parade could take place safely. The decision sparked protests all over Europe, but the country's national security council, appointed by Vucic, upheld the decision earlier this week.

Nevertheless, just hours ahead of the march on Saturday, Prime Minister Ana Brnabic gave the go-ahead for the event to take place despite the earlier ban, organizers said. Large numbers of police were deployed in Belgrade to protect the marchers, and tensions remained high.

Other events going ahead

Dunja Mijatovic, the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, had said earlier that Serbian authorities should withdraw the ban. "I find it disconcerting that Serbian officials have prevented the EuroPride parade from taking place, even though other events and large gatherings are still occurring safely on the streets of Belgrade," she said.

Despite the official ban, the event's organizers said Friday that they intended to go ahead with the parade. "We won't let intolerance and hate win," they said in a public statement.

In 2001, Serbia's first Pride parade was interrupted after participants were brutally attacked by hooligans. At the next attempt in 2010, there were street battles between the police and anti-LGBTQ demonstrators. A homophobic crowd comprised of Serbian hooligans, nationalists and fundamentalist Christians threw flash grenades at the security team and set fire to the building that housed the governing political party and the state television broadcaster. Cars were also torched and shops looted. In the end, more than 100 people were injured. But since 2014, Pride parades have occurred without major incidents. 

For years, Aleksandra Gavrilovic of the LGBTQ organization Labris has worked tirelessly for more security and better treatment of Serbia's queer community. Gavrilovic and other activists think the president's statements about security concerns were disingenuous.

Diversion from Kosovo deal

Vucic's announcement that the Pride parade couldn't take place coincide with news about Serbia's conflict with Kosovo. Though Kosovo has been an independent nation since 2008, it still isn't recognized by Serbia. Nevertheless, both countries recently decided that each nation would accept the other's identification documents.

For Vucic's nationalist supporters, even the slightest concession to Kosovo is seen as a defeat. "EuroPride provided the perfect pretext to willfully shift the focus away from Kosovo so that the country's far right could have another topic to focus on," said Gavrilovic.

By canceling the EuroPride parade, Vucic seemed to have little regard for the fact that members of the LGBTQ community would face increased numbers of attacks.

Stefan Sparavalo, of the LGBTQ group Da se Zna ("So you know"), said that in August alone, there were as many attacks on members of the LGBTQ community as in the past seven months.

Nationalist and right-wing groups routinely incite hate against queer people in Serbia, with thousands of people taking part in an anti-LGBTQ march just last weekend. The Serbian Orthodox Church is also making the situation worse for many. After Patriarch Porfirije was appointed new head of the church in 2021, he made what many saw as bigoted remarks about the queer community. Last Sunday, he spoke of the importance of so-called "traditional families." 

"That inflammatory speech ostracized queer people from the rest of society, while simultaneously promoting intolerance and hate," said Sparavalo.

Same-sex rights restricted

The legal situation for LGBTQ people in Serbia hasn't improved much either, with same-sex couples prohibited from adopting children and denied the right to artificially inseminate. Activist Aleksandra Gavrilovic knows firsthand how difficult it is to start a family.

She and her partner have three children. Their triplets were born prematurely, and had to spend the first weeks after they were born in an intensive care unit. Since Gavrilovic gave birth to the children, she could visit the newborn babies — but her partner couldn't. Her partner also can't register the children for preschool or elementary school, and can't take them alone on a trip to another country. "It's like my partner is invisible. [Even though I have a partner] in this country, it's like I'm a single mother with three children," said Gavrilovic.

Gavrilovic believes that despite the election of Ana Brnabic as Serbia's first openly lesbian prime minister in 2017, there have been few improvements in the lives of the country's LGBTQ population. While Brnabic doesn't deny her sexuality, she hasn't openly supported the queer community either.

Activists like Stefan Radovic see Vucic's renewed nomination of Brnabic as prime minister as a calculated maneuver: It helps the country promote an LGBTQ-friendly image abroad, while the underlying inequities with respect to the country's own treatment of queer people will remain unchanged.

Though Radovic endured homophobic bullying at school, he did manage to graduate. But in his hometown of Kursumlija, he still can't find work. "I think I can't find a permanent job because I'm openly gay," he said. He believes everyone in his little town knows it too. "They let me know that I'm not welcome."

This article was updated on September 17, 2022, with the news that the parade would take place as planned.