The Importance of Being Serbian

Belgrade’s Gay Pride parade has been an opportunity for the its nationalistic and regressive right-wing youth to rebel against European values for as long as Serbia has been trying to rehabilitate itself after the Milosevic regime, i.e., the last decade.   Although the mobs of the right succeeding in actually stopping it last year, this year they didn’t quite get so far, and the parade was successfully run, for the first time.  The hooligans put on such a performance that they made the media nonetheless. This should serve as a reminder, as the riots after Kosovo’s independence over two and a half years ago did, that the same elements that fed the gangsteristic nihilism of the Milosevic years are still hard at work.

The implications of these sentiments reach far beyond Belgrade and deep into the region, particularly in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska.  There’s more — much more — to be said on this, but for now, let me point you to this excellent piece by Marko Hoare.