Gay pride shows Serbia's progress

Though imperfect, Belgrade's recent pride march goes some way towards atoning for the attacks on gay Serbians of 2001

Rob Miller
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 October 2010 12.00 BST


The Belgrade air was choked with smoke and teargas. Armed police, locked tight in formation, spanned one end of the street; at the other a throng of young men, overwhelmingly masked and hooded, swarmed across the road, hurling at the police lines whatever came to hand. They were trying to reach the gay pride parade, the first attempt to hold such a parade in the city for almost 10 years. Chanting "death to homosexuals" and "homosexuals go to Kosovo", they were targeting the marchers.
Stones, bottles and petrol bombs rained down on the police, but the line held steady, even when the crowd hijacked a trolley-bus, driving it at speed through the rubble towards the ranks that blocked their way. Police reinforcements arrived and whole columns of mounted officers galloped up and down the avenue and its side streets.
Throughout Sunday, this scene was repeated around the city. An estimated 5,000 police were deployed to contain the rioters. When the tension finally abated on Sunday evening, the city centre was a mess. An estimated 140 people, 124 of them police officers, had been injured, 207 had been arrested and the offices of political parties that had supported the parade had been attacked and set on fire.
It might seem a stretch – as Belgrade's shopkeepers and municipal workers clear the broken glass from the streets – to claim the parade was a success, but it surely was. To see why, one has to look back nine years to the July day in 2001 when the last attempt to hold a pride parade was made.
Two thousand football hooligans, ultra-nationalists and religious extremists attacked the parade, beating the marchers and chanting homophobic slogans. The 50 police officers present, there ostensibly to protect the parade, looked on in callous impassivity, spurred into action only when they themselves were attacked.
"As a society we are not mature enough to accept such demonstrations of perversity," Belgrade's chief of police said the following day, blaming the parade's organisers for provoking the violence. No effort was made to protect the parade or its participants and no significant opposition to the attackers was raised in public. But the Serbia of June 2001 was very different to the Serbia of today.
Slobodan Milosevic had been deposed just months before and was on his way to the Hague. Zoran Djindjic was beginning his first term as prime minister, which was to end with his assassination in 2003. The country was still reeling from the wars of the 1990s. It was barely two years since the Kosovo war had seen Serbia's infrastructure reduced to rubble by Nato bombs and crippling economic sanctions. It is perhaps little wonder that the state was unable or unwilling to protect its minorities.
The 2010 parade, though imperfect, provides an illustration of the progress Serbia has made. The police were out in force and prominent political figures, high-ranking police officers and foreign embassies had announced their support for the parade. One thousand people attended the parade. Police tactics were successful, sealing the parade from its attackers and ensuring that, while the show of pride hardly had the audience of ordinary Serbians that its organisers wanted, its participants were protected.
These might seem trivial matters, the sort of actions one would expect any metropolitan police force to undertake. But until now, Serbia's LGBT population has not been able to rely upon this basic protection from violent attack. For its resolve in facing this problem, Serbia must be congratulated; it has gone some way towards atoning for the tragedy of 2001.

guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/11/gay-pride-serbia-progress