Some weeks ago, I got an invitation to join the "Queer Sarajevo Festivalu" on Facebook. On the page of the group, it said that the festival had the aim to make the festival symbolizing a free space based on principles of self-defining, self-identity, individuality, and freedom of choice. It should expose the connection between various forms of violence and discrimination, as well as the necessity and potential for a queer movement to prompt change and achieve respect of human rights for all. I immediately joined the group but sadly declined an invitation to the festival.
I first got in touch with the NGO "Q" when I lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2005. Already my first evening in Bosnia, I was watching a talk show with my host family where the people were discussing how sick homosexuality was. After that, I found Q, the only group working for HBT rights in the country at that time. I started to exchange emails with Svetlana Djurkovic, the founder of the NGO. She was often updating me on discriminating statements that politicians had made against HBT-persons.
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| When I returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the summer of 2006, I found a group of young people who have started to promote HBT rights in Tuzla. The group always did it secretly, putting up rainbow-coloured stripes in the town during the nights and held secret queer parties in a club where one of their friends was working. I enjoyed witnessing how the movement was spreading.
When I found out about the queer festival in Sarajevo, I thought that things really have moved forward. Starting on Sept. 24 and continuing for five days, the festival was to be the first queer festival in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The donors to the festival, the Dutch, Canadian and Swiss Embassies, Global Found for Women, and Heart and Hand Found, also showed that the festival had a big support.
But then, worrying reports started to show up. On Sept. 5, OSCE, published a press release about how religious and political leaders had expressed intolerance in media, particularly on Q. The release also told about how posters had been appearing in and around Sarajevo intended to use violence, reading "death to homos."
On Sept. 18, Amnesty International wrote that media outlets and other religious leaders in Sarajevo had called for the organizers of the festival to be "lynched, stoned doused with petrol or expelled from the country."
Then, finally on Sept. 24, the festival was to open. But the threats of violence became reality. Anti-gay protesters attacked participants as they were leaving the opening ceremony held at the Academy of Fine Arts. According to BBC, eight participants were injured. The violence led the organizers to halt the festival, afraid of not being able to assure the security of the participants.
The violence is not yet over. AFP has reported that three radio stations and an independent weekly magazine have received threat letters for reports on the festival. One of the leading Bosnian daily newspapers, Dnevni Avaz, published the full name and date of birth of all the participants who were injured and taken to hospital.
When chatting to a Bosnian friend about the event the other day, I tried to access the forum on Q's Web site. My friend kept on telling me what horrible comments where on the almost 50 pages long discussion on the festival. I wanted to read by myself, but for some reason I couldn't access the page. The next morning, I got an email from my friend. She had been continuing reading on the forum when she was suddenly logged out. When she logged on again, she discovered that some topics were missing. And then, suddenly, the whole discussion was gone. The forum was hacked and only threatening message against homosexuals was left.
My friend tried to write a new comment, saying how outrageous what they were doing was. But it got automatically changed, and her comment ended up being "Bosnia is the mother of Bosniacs, not gays!"
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