In Belgrade
Juliet Jacques
In September 2019, European Pride organisations voted overwhelmingly for Belgrade to host EuroPride, with its week-long conference and march, in 2022. Kristīne Garina, the president of the European Pride Organisers Association, said: ‘Pride has always been a protest and EuroPride will have a huge impact for LGBTI people in Belgrade, Serbia and the whole region.’
Garina referred to a history of violence around Belgrade Pride: the first parade, held in June 2001 at Republic Square, was attacked by conservative Christians and football hooligans. The next attempt to organise a Pride event, in 2004, collapsed. The parade of September 2009 was banned a few days before it was due to start by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The organisers wanted to proceed anyway but declined to move the march from Republic Square to Novi Beograd, across the River Sava, and the police refused to protect it. The state organised an event in October 2010: counter-protesters threw Molotov cocktails, bricks and bottles at the police, and set fire to the building of the ruling Democratic Party, which had recently applied for Serbia to join the EU.
Between 2011 and 2013 the state said it could not guarantee the safety of participants, so organisers held private events with flash mobs as it was prohibited for more than ten people to gather in public. Since 2014, Belgrade Pride has taken place without incident, but the larger scale and foreign origins of EuroPride stirred up Christians and Serbian nationalists, thousands of whom marched through Belgrade in protest against what they saw as Western interference into their lives. In response, President Aleksandar Vučić of the Progressive Party – formerly the ‘moderate’ wing of the far-right Radical Party, still conservative but more pro-EU and neoliberal – said EuroPride would be ‘cancelled or postponed’, but the organisers put out a statement of intent to proceed.
The programme of talks and exhibitions went ahead last week, with international speakers told to travel as planned. Religious groups picketed outside Belgrade Youth Centre, where most of the events were held: there was a heavy police presence there, and around the organisation’s Info Centre on Kralja Milana, one of the city’s main streets. For the packed Dragoslavia cabaret at KC Grad, cops were everywhere. Not all the protests were from religious or nationalist groups. The openly lesbian prime minister, Ana Brnabić, who was elected as a non-partisan in 2017 but joined the Progressive Party in 2019, was booed at the opening plenary by queer activists who tried to stop her entering. ‘Pride is a protest,’ they said, ‘we want our human rights!’
Brnabić told the audience, in hectoring English, that she was ‘probably the only person in this country who has been discriminated against by the LGBTI community’ as well as ‘those who are discriminating against you’. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go down well. The chorus of whistles crescendoed as she said: ‘I’ve pushed the boundaries for at least one metre. You do the same and we would be all just better off … but stop just criticising things that 70 per cent of you would not dare to do.’ She said it was thanks to her party that Belgrade was holding ‘the first EuroPride outside the European Economic Area’ but left Vučić’s remarks about cancelling it, and the frantic court battle taking place to reverse the ban, unaddressed.
Events at the International Human Rights Conference included discussions about whether the EU ensured equality, diversity and inclusion, a panel on LGBTI people in sport (at which I spoke), queer communities in Turkey and Ukraine, and what Pride means for equality in the Balkans. They all – along with fringe panels on subjects such as the rise of transphobic feminism in Serbia – took place without problems.
The march on Saturday, however, was expected to be a flashpoint. After the police agreed to protect the event, the organisers told attendees to avoid obvious symbols or public displays of affection. A military parade was scheduled outside the National Assembly on the same day, as well as Red Bull’s Formula 1 Show Run on Kralja Milana. Both Belgrade’s football clubs, Partizan and Red Star, were playing on Sunday. Right-wing protesters calling themselves ‘anti-globalists’ forced the EuroPride march to change its already reduced route at the last minute.
Amid scores of police, in pouring rain, a defiant crowd assembled outside the Constitutional Court, separated from a Christian counter-protest outside the nearby Serbian Orthodox Church of St Mark. Having tried to disrupt a lecture about sex work earlier in the week, a few transphobic feminists tried to disrupt the march, but without much success (I spotted only four of them). Most of the banners emphasised anti-fascism, solidarity within the LGBTI community, and with Pride events in Kharkiv and Tbilisi. Serbia’s interior minister, Aleksandar Vulin, insisted that the ban had been upheld. The marchers were ‘escorted’, he said, to a concert at the Tašmajdan Stadium. The organisers had apparently wanted to charge for it, but made it free after grassroots pressure. The performers were Balkan pop stars; sponsors included Coca-Cola, Grindr and Microsoft. But the stadium was far from full – it seemed that the activists whose work had kept Pride a possibility preferred to go elsewhere.